The End is Nigh - Good Night and Good Luck

All life on our planet is doomed to die-off within a handful of years. There is now no chance that any life will survive a cascade of deadly consequences that have taken a mere century of human activity to construct. The clock is ticking and a countdown to apocalypse is underway.

Blame can be apportioned across hundreds of generations of human endeavour as the economics of the past were enshrined and lauded by consecutive generations, right up until today.

The Great Flaw has always been a belief that growth would always be eternal, that no matter what boundary nature put before us our ingenuity and intellect would overcome it, however, limits to infinite expansion were always there.
As our understanding of the world, and the vast exclusionary universe it exists within, became clearer the outcome of our folly has become obvious.
We were always bound by the closed biosphere of our small planet, by its limited resources and by its limited ability to sustain life. We have now reached the natural limits to expansion and the effects of our failure to understand this will soon kill every living thing on our small world.

In the last two years we have seen two related incidents that have caused, and are continuing to cause, serious damage to our world - the barely contained Gulf oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear plant catastrophe, the last of which may far exceed the damage of Chernobyl.

Evidence of a sudden permanent decline in oil output is now impossible to refute - even oil-promoting bodies in the grip of U.S. control are now admitting there's a supply crunch coming. (The Pentagon has warned the White House to expect 2012 as the energy crunch year.)

Permanent oil supply decline will result in a permanent decline in all industry and agriculture as this fuel and fertiliser base is critical to everything, from transport and food production to economic theory and practice (which historically has relied on mythical eternal expansion). A mass human die-off can be expected.

In the beginning of the end, from nations that can't afford to feed their populations, there will be revolutions, mass migrations and mass starvation, resource wars for access to remaining reserves of oil will escalate. It should be noted that the financial system will collapse long before all the oil is taken from the ground, meaning the last of it will remain there, except for those deepwater wells that weren’t plugged; they will eventually become uncontrolled evacuations of entire fields into the world’s oceans.

There’s also an unavoidable nuclear time-bomb set to go off that cannot be diminished, and it was set to go off a long time ago.

Arguments for and against nuclear power are now immaterial - a wasted effort by either side of the debate. The building of so many reactors across the world, not power plants, of which there are 442, but reactors that number in the thousands, has made it impossible for them all to be decommissioned.
Each nuclear power plant takes many years to shut down and costs, in terms of energy used and money spent, are prohibitive. Each decommissioning of each plant costs between US$350 million to US$500 million; magnify that sum by hundreds, and factor in hyper-inflation from a collapsed monetary system, and then also spread the cost over three continents and scores of nations, and the inevitable is obvious.
The decline in available energy, expertise and finance to decommission all these reactors when peak-oil hits the front pages, and when industries and cities are abandoned, will see most of the world’s reactors ultimately go into meltdown. It won’t matter what kind of reactor it is or how much fail-safe thought has gone into its construction, left to themselves they will all go into meltdown.

It must be noted that the Chernobyl meltdown consisted of only one of four reactors at that power plant, the rest were decommissioned over the following decades, the last one was finally decommissioned in 2000, fifteen years after the original accident.
Magnify Chernobyl by several thousand, and scatter the effect across the globe, and you can be assured that all life on this planet will die. There’s also the nuclear weapon stockpile to consider, and nuclear reactors in various navies’ fleets – I suspect these will find their way into the atmosphere too, either in a last minute payback or as they rust into slag.