Except the thing under your first link hasn't been gmo'ed for the express purpose of withstanding significantly increased amounts of pesticides.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

I agree that some GMO-produced characteristics are not good ideas, e.g. the low-slung hips of German Shepherds.  However, that shouldn't lead to a blanket condemnation of GMO, just better regulation.

Here, here. I'm certainly not an advocate of banning research, just honest food labeling. But when a company genetically alters its seeds so that they and only they can withstanding massive increases in toxicity from a pesticide product offered only by the same company, some anti-trust investigations would also be nice.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae own only the good or "conforming" mortgages.  This means that they escaped the worst of the excesses of the mortgage meltdown.

Of course, even in the high quality sector, the effects are bad enough that their (poorly capitalized) equity will be entirely wiped out.  Nevertheless, the cost of a bailout will be at worst half an Iraq War, and most likely much less.  It's nothing the US government can't handle comfortably.

Property in inflated markets in the US reached a high of about twice what would have been reasonable, compared with about ten times what was reasonable before the bursting of the Japanese real-estate bubble.  It's just not nearly so big of a macro-economic issue as it is claimed to be in the press.

I see depression-level economic conditions as probable in the US, but this is due to our persistent refusal to believe that oil production will soon peak and to make alternative plans, and is mostly unrelated to the real-estate market.

I too fear depression like conditions in the US.  I think we face an almost perfect economic storm - a combination of peak oil, inexcusably poor energy planning/policy, the disappearance of manufacturing in the US, and massive indebtedness.  The various bubble markets are symptoms of idiots lending us too much money, because they assumed us bright Americans knew what we were doing.

I also fear much worse scenarios, related to peak oil.  Suppose there is a severe supply shortage either due to increasing demand, decreasing supply, or our currency inflating to the point of worthlessness.  What alternate plans do we have for getting food into our cities that don't rely on petroleum products?  American cities rely almost exclusively on trains, planes and trucks that all run on fossil fuels, for almost all of their supplies, and it's mostly trucked in on demand - there is very little storage capacity.  So it wouldn't take much of a disruption in the oil supply to result in some pretty severe living conditions in our major cities - especially a northern city in the winter, which won't have the luxury of being able to plunder the country farms located nearby.

You might think this sort of scenario to be extremely implausible, but few thought a tripling in the dollar price of oil in under a year to be possible.

You neglected to mention barges which carry a large fraction of transported food, but are not all that much more efficient than railroads.

The amount of energy used in food transportation is actually pretty negligible, so I don't really see that as being a special problem.  The real problem with agricultural energy usage is actually nitrogenous fertilizer made from natural gas, which people don't tend to think about.

Bilmps and other neutrally buoyant airships have no constraints on their shape, so their shape is roughly the 10:1 length to diameter ratio which leads to a minimum drag to volume ratio for any given volume.  A corollary of this is that at normal speeds, a train will have only about a 2:1 advantage in fuel efficiency over a truck traveling at the same speed.  But since the rolling resistance of trains is very, very low, they get the full benefit of a 4x fuel economy improvement for reducing speeds, while trucks with their higher rolling resistance do not.  This means that so long as you are willing to rely on slow trains for your goods transportation, it doesn't cause much of a fuel consumption problem.

The problems which seem to me to be really hard to get around are nitrogenous fertilizer production, heating of existing buildings, and daily commuter transportation.

A corollary of this is that at normal speeds, a train will have only about a 2:1 advantage in fuel efficiency over a truck traveling at the same speed.  But since the rolling resistance of trains is very, very low, they get the full benefit of a 4x fuel economy improvement for reducing speeds, while trucks with their higher rolling resistance do not.

Add to this the fact that we could always go back to coal / steam locomotives if need be.  The technology is all still there and well proven, and wouldn't take that long to get back into production if things were looking bad.  It certainly wouldn't be kind to the environment, but if it's that or mass starvation...

"The amount of energy used in food transportation is actually pretty negligible, so I don't really see that as being a special problem."

I don't know about that.  See here.  They list transport at 13.9% of the energy required for food production.  Not negligible.  And most importantly, it's the critical link.  If you can't get it to the consumer, it doesn't matter if you had the energy to produce it.

Not that we shouldn't worry about petroleum and natural gas inputs in the form of fertilizer and pesticides - but I don't think we'd much miss them, at least not in the overfed US.  Assume that we had to quit cold turkey, and agricultural production in the US fell 25%.  What would happen?  We'd actually start eating a normal amount of food.

So it's possible to produce food in the US without fossil fuel inputs (just with lower productivity), but it's impossible to distribute the food without fossil fuels.  That's a huge problem, and one that's not been given much thought.