The sky is falling, the popular press says. The Internet is browning out. You don't have to look far for proof of the Internet's imminent demise.

Pundits making dire predictions aren't always on intimate terms with the Internet's underlying architecture.

Having enough bandwidth obviously is a major issue in Internet growth. To keep up with customer demand, providers like Uunet started ordering lines farther in advance. This is competition at play, not a collapse.

The biggest Internet backbone providers have started exchanging traffic directly with each other to avoid the crowded peering points altogether. Rather than coming up with complex payment schemes to handle each other's traffic, they're working on a "if you'll take mine, I'll take yours" model.

"This really is a great approach for everybody."

If you're used to the telecommunications model where carriers pay each other to handle their traffic, the private peering arrangements seem shockingly unstructured. Some telecommunications companies would be more comfortable if someone was in charge of the Internet to bring it order and organization.

Prospects are dim for a full fledged recovery for telecom as long as the best effort paradigm remains as the only way of doing business.

The Internet became a capital repellant best-network paradox because it was assumed by the implementers that a best effort network would be good enough as a foundation on which to build the new digital foundations of telecom.

They were wrong.

There is little incentive to over-provision anything except to preserve one's market share. But preserving market share requires pouring more money in than one gets back. Eventually, the carrier runs out of money and declares bankruptcy.

The Internet peering model is fundamentally broken.

A key future question may well be whether the center can ever deliver a value proposition to the edge.

The board at Shell knew it needed to do something, and fast.

A shocking revelation in January -- that the world's third largest oil company had overstated its proven petroleum reserves by 20% -- was pummeling its stock price and angering shareholders. Regulators on two continents had started investigations.

So in early March the board acted, ousting Philip Watts, who had been managing director of the Anglo-Dutch company for almost seven years and chairman since 2001, and replacing him with Jeroen van der Veer, president of Shell's Dutch sister company, Royal Dutch Petroleum.

A quick cure for all those headaches?

Hardly.

... and so the company was forced to ask itself an unpleasant question: How many times can you fire your CEO in a year?

Now that General Electric owns five theme parks, what's it going to do with them?

GE spent $14 billion to buy Vivendi Universal's armory of entertainment properties. Universal's theme park division and its 15,000-plus employees around the world came along for the ride, which won't be smooth.

The Dead Sea is drying up, with severe negative consequences on the ecosystem, industry and wildlife in the area.

The Red-Dead Conveyance project is designed to move Red Sea water from the Gulf of Aqaba through a pipeline/canal conveyance approximately 180 kilometers to the Dead Sea. Since the Dead Sea is some 410 meters below sea level and the Gulf of Aqaba is at sea level, water dropping through that 410 meters of elevation can be used to generate hydropower, and the power can be used to desalinate a portion of the Red Sea water.

The project as currently envisioned would generate 850 million cubic meters of desalinated water a year for use by Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. In addition, a portion of the Red Sea water would flow directly into the Dead Sea, so that the level of the Dead Sea, which has been dropping almost 1 meter per year for the last thirty years or so, could be controlled.

Proponents of the project argue that this project would reverse the negative environmental impacts produced by the continual lowering of the level of the Dead Sea.

The scale of the Red-Dead project is large, to say the least. If the envisioned desalination capacity were realized, the resulting desalination facility would be 5-6 times larger than the world's largest desalination facility currently in operation.

There are many crucial questions about the project that remain unanswered, such as:

1) will the introduction of Red Sea water into the Dead Sea have a major negative impact on the chemistry of the Dead Sea water?

2) while introducing Red Sea water into the Dead Sea to control the level of the Dead Sea may alleviate some environment problems, will such introduction cause other negative environmental impacts?

3) what will be the environmental effects at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, where the Red Sea water will be siphoned into the project?

The people in Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank and Gaza live in a constant state of water scarcity.

A widely used rule of thumb is that a population is considered to be in a state of "water stress" if the average annual per capita availability of water is below 1,000 cubic meters.

Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian average annual per capita availabilities are all significantly below that level. Israel, which has the most advanced water infrastructure and water management capabilities in the region, has an average annual availability of only some 250-300 cubic meters per capita. Jordan, at some 170-200 cubic meters per capita, and the Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza, at some 70-90 cubic meters per capita, are under even greater water stress.

Water, or more specifically, irrigation, is an industry already going through what many signposts indicate the future holds for energy. Water is the backbone of life. We can live without power, but we can't without water.

The most important resource battles being waged today in the United States are not over energy. They're over water.

Wars have been fought over water. And, as demand for this precious resource increases, more wars will be fought -- mainly in court here in America, on the battlefield in other parts of the world.

Fresh water resources are scarce. More battles loom.

I believe we are entering a new energy era in the United States. And not just in our country, but around the industrial world.

I believe that this new era is forcing -- or will force -- end-users to become much more energy-minded, efficient and more aware of the true cost of energy. Not a future based on scarcity; mind you, but one that requires efficient use of energy.