NOTE: Stuff to Watch Out For does not necessarily have a negative connotation. Indeed, this merely means exactly what it says: stuff to watch out for, both positive and negative.  And now, this week in the news...

--China has now surpassed the US as the top consumer of energy in the world. The majority of Chinese energy comes from coal, the most polluting of the fossil fuels, but due to both the international pressures to be more energy-efficient and the fact that pound for pound, oil yields much more energy than does coal, we can certainly expect their oil consumption to rise at a speedy rate. What does this mean for us? I think it means that the race is on. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese have recently made inroads to acquiring permanent energy contracts throughout the world. Experts believe that US oil use may have peaked for the time being, but at 19 million barrels a day, that's not small change. And kids, the Chinese ain't about to slow down; most of their oil goes not to consumer needs, but for heavy industrial projects involving infrastructure expansion, and seeing as how the vast majority of the nation is still agrarian and undeveloped in nature, I doubt they are done with their infrastructure-related projects. Not that you or I can do shit about any of this...other than talk about it on the internet

--Portugal is now decriminalized ten years and counting. In 1999, Portugal decriminalized most drugs, including cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Trafficking was still a criminal offense, but courts and jail time and the like were done away with for people caught holding. The rest of Europe and, I hope, the world is now taking stock of their experiment and evaluating its consequences thus far. The bag would appear to be mixed, no pun intended. Rates of chronic use have fallen by half, but murder and violent crime rates have gone up. So here's what I think: it's too soon to tell what effect this decriminalization will ultimately have on Portugese society. Ten years simply is not enough time, and raw data will tell only half the story; Portugal is not a laboratory, and there are many variables at work besides the legality of drugs that effect statistics. I'd say check in in another fifteen years and see where they're at. The criminalization of consciousness altering drugs is a pretty unique feature of western society—as Terence McKenna has pointed out, the modern Euro-American civilizations are the only societies ever to exist on earth without the sanctioned use of plant based psychedelic drugs. So really, drug criminalization is a much more grandiose experiment than any decriminalization.

--Nike, Adidas, Levis, Target, and a host of other companies will soon debut something called the Eco Index. To be unveiled in August at the Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City, the Eco Index rates the overall “greenness” of a product based on a number of variables related to its manufacture and transport. These days, people like green products, whether because they are actually conscious and aware of how badly we've fucked up the planet (and ourselves in the process), or simply because it's fashionable. Whether global awareness of our ecological predicament is increasing or it's just haute couture, we should take this and run with it. The Eco Index, and other similar tools that aim to tie in the undying American virtue—consumerism—with awareness of sustainability, should be celebrated, and may signal a small but important shift in planet-wide consciousness of the fact that every single thing you buy has to be made out of something else and transported to you, and it all has an impact on the rest of the people living on this earth.

-Dr. Tim