When NBN waded  into the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook of 2011 we got that anxious feeling you get when you first start thinking you might be lost in a very large forest. There are all kinds of cool things to see but none of them reassuring. The Energy Outlook report produces the same unsettling lack of global direction on the single most important global measure, energy. It’s full of eye-popping numbers like: “Energy consumption grows by 53 percent from 2008 to 2035,” and “Energy use in [developing] nations increases by 85 percent…as compared with an increase of 18 percent for the [developed] economies.” As NBN pin-ball between such startling statistics, one prediction in the study lent us something of a compass point on which to draw some conclusion: “Much of the growth in energy consumption occurs in [undeveloped countries] where demand is driven by strong long-term economic growth.”

Wrong! There are already signs that the economies in China and India, the ones cited in the study as undeveloped, are slowing down. There are also signs of citizen unrest in those countries over the environmental cost of the economic advances they enjoyed so far. And—you heard it here first, folks—protests in those countries are going to grow dramatically as the cancer, and other autoimmune disease rates, skyrocket in those countries from those same environmental costs. Add on the growing demand for energy and natural resources from the massive populations these countries support and it’s hard to see where the “long term economic growth” the Energy Outlook predicts for these countries will come from. Quite the opposite: Take the environmental damage these countries have their done to their air, water, and land; add the dwindling world demand for cheap labor these countries used to fuel their economies; multiply that by their huge populations yearning for the standard of living “developed” counties enjoy, and you start to think that these countries are screwed.