How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population?

The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff-metals, oil, clean air, land-and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.

"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast-by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).

But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones.  So here's why all the ecologists' scaremongering is baloney.

Stall speed is the airspeed at which an aircraft stops producing lift. Unless immediate corrective action is taken, such as reducing the wing's angle of attack or the weight of the aircraft, the results are not likely to be good. An economy can hit "stall speed" when it becomes burdened with too much dead-weight loss.

The eurozone economies have hit stall speed, with France, Germany, Italy and Spain, as well as most of the smaller economies, having negative growth. In addition, the United Kingdom and Japan are barely above stall speed with an annual growth rate of less than 1 percent.

The United States, Canada, Russia and Brazil are in the danger zone, all with annual rates of less than 2 percent growth.

The basic questions are: Why has growth stalled, and what needs to be done to revive it? Good economists know the following:

The Pentagon takes the military and terrorist threat of Iran extremely seriously.  Yet the brass in Rummy's inner circle could not keep their faces straight with all the recent announcements from Tehran.

A week ago on April 7, the air force chief of Pasdaran, Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Hossein Salami, announced the successful firing of a stealth missile impossible to detect by radar, hailing the Fajr (Dawn) 3 as a "remarkable" achievement.

Turns out it was a primitive Shahab-2 copy of an unsophisticated Russian Scud-C.

Sunday April 9, the deputy naval commander of Pasdaran, Gen. Ali Fadavi announced the launching of "the world's fastest underwater missile," a torpedo so fast it was undetectable.

Turns out it's a poor copy of a Soviet-era rocket-powered torpedo, the Shkval.  It's range is less than four miles, has no target designation devices and is not self-homing.  It's huge wake makes it easy to spot and destroy.

[Note by JW:  Ambrose has written something which should provide lively debate on the TTP Forum.  Feel free to counter him with opposing facts and data.]

Americans are purging their excesses one by one. Spending by the US Federal government has seen the steepest drop as share of national income since demobilization after the Second World War.

Claims that President Barack Obama is bankrupting America with a lurch towards hard-left statism are for tabloid consumption only. Outlays have fallen from 24.4% to 20.6% of GDP in five years. Spending is roughly in line with its 40-year average. This fiscal squeeze has been achieved without driving the economy into recession or a Lost Decade, a remarkable feat.

The US Congressional Budget Office expects the budget deficit to drop to 2.8% of GDP this year, and 2.6% next year. This is about the same as the Eurozone but with a huge difference. The US economy is expanding fast enough to outgrow its debts.

The US energy revolution is of course at least half the story. It has stoked booms across the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Washington, Oregon, Utah and Texas.

Francisco Blanch, from Bank of America, estimates that shale gas and oil have given the US economy an extra tailwind worth 1.9% of GDP - what he calls the "energy carry" - with effects rippling through the chemical and plastics industries. New investments in ammonia plants are rising at an exponential rate, thanks to natural gas prices that are $4.40 (per BTU) in the US and $15 on Asia's spot market.

While Obama can in no way claim credit for this, the other half of the story is monetary stimulus a l'outrance (to the bitter end) - quantitative easing - to offset fiscal tightening and prevent a "pro-cyclical" downward spiral, which is what occurred when the European Central Bank jumped the gun and raised rates twice in 2011 before recovery was entrenched, setting off the cataclysmic crisis that nearly destroyed EMU in mid-2012.