The news of the fires was mesmerizing most of the week, I wrote about it for this week’s print edition, but there were other things, at first glance not related but, the longer you looked, the more you realized they were of a piece.

One such “thing” was this story, about how the epic drought now gripping the south may spread, and that the government itself is predicting that “at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.”

Another such story, far more disquieting, was this, from Rolling Stone, a profile of scientist James Lovelock, who among other things is widely known for developing the “Gaia” hypothesis, which suggests the earth acts as one giant organism. In the RS profile, Lovelock claims that Gaia, earth, is severely out of whack, probably past the point of no return:

By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions.

It was the first line of this graf that caught me: “By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace.”

Isn’t that exactly what the previous AP story - the government itself - is warning about?

It strikes me that the people running the show - and this includes now just the current regime, the Decider and Shotgun Dick Cheney and the rest, but also Hillary, also the establishment on the whole - realizes that, views it as either a possibility or a probability.

It strikes me that there’s a connection here to what has been done in Iraq, what may ultimately be done in Iran, and other measures ostensibly developed to fight the “war on terror,” measures that will ultimately prove to be extraordinarily useful if or when these sorts of changes begin to occur in the world, in this country.

Consider the upheaval of water shortage. Unlike the fires in California - which triggers flight - severe water shortages, restrictions, won’t cause immediate flight. What they will cause is fight. Fight if residents are asked, then told, to conserve water - and detect that larger, governmental or corporate users of water aren’t held to the same standards. Should drought worsen, such disputes will become more pointed. Violent? Who knows. It’s hard to conceive of that now. It might not be so hard to conceive of it in 2020 - when, it strikes me, my kids will be 19 and 14, respectively.

It is hard to think that far ahead, and you do run the risk of becoming Chicken Little. But in Kunstler’s “Long Emergency,” he writes that a crash, if it comes, is unlikely to be sudden. It is not as if tomorrow, suddenly, people in the south will be told they have to cut their water use in half; people in coastal cities won’t throw open the shades next week to see rising sea levels lapping at their doorsteps. It will be a gradual change - you will have a Katrina. A few years later you will have the fires like those we have seen in southern California or the droughts that we have seen in the south. You will see more of these events, they will become clustered closer together. They will become commonplace.

They will have economic effects - and perhaps political effects. So long as the events aren’t too clustered together, aren’t affecting large swaths of the country at a single instant, those political effects may be diffused. But they could become cumulative, especially if accompanied by, connected with, economic downturn. Then you’ve got the recipe for a brewing “perfect storm” - as the people turn to the government and demand it do something, when in fact, at that point, there might not be a whole lot that can be done.

Should such a thing happen, the government will obviously need a means by which to tamp down on the panic, and keep the citzenry in line.

I think things like warrantless wiretapping and getting rid of habeaus corpus for “terrorists” - and we may indeed see a real broadening of the term “terrorist” - would be perfect for such a task, don’t you?

Indeed, if our excellent Middle Eastern adventures are still ongoing at that point - and they will be - all of that will add fuel to the fire. Because these wars are obviously about controlling the energy reserves of the Middle East at a time when those reserves are peaking, at a time when even oil producing countries are using more and more of their own oil. At a time when ties between energy-hungry China and Iran have grown tighter.

But most importantly, at a time when the American economy is going to be taxed by the “fruits” of climate change, securing access to Mideast energy reserves, by making sure they make it to the market, is absolutely critical in keeping the economy on as sound of footing as possible.

And thus you get trapped in the endless feedback loop, whereby “doing something” about emissions and global warming becomes impossible because to do so would involve economic consequence at a time when global warming itself is extracting a rising economic toll. So we keep pushing forward, even as the road behind us, the road out, is closed off.

Kunstler was at The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas conference last week in Houston, where he heard some interesting things:

Among them were Robert Hirsch, co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the consternation of its sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain terms that it was heading for a catastrophic set of disruptions in “normal” American life if we heedlessly continued energy business-as-usual.  Hirsch went a little further now, two years on, than he had in his famous report, predicting a future of “oil export withholding,” panicked markets, and allocation disturbances that would make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age.

      Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, who has worked tirelessly to lift public awareness of Peak Oil, also raised the specter of shortages, telling the audience that market allocation problems in the near future would almost certainly induce “hoarding behavior” among the public that would cripple the economy, lead to enforced rationing, and shock the nation. Simmons compared the current public mood over energy issues to a “fog of war.”

Now add the nightmarish environmental possibilities. Shake well. And duck.

We invest our faith in technology that this will all be somehow headed off at the pass. And it’s all too big for the average person to get his arms around. My suspicion, though, is that the people running the show do indeed have their arms around it, know it’s coming. And that what has happened this decade all has been a prelude to it.