OIL PRICES GUSH. Oil prices rose more than 40% in 2007, nearing $100 a barrel. Dialing out inflation to get “real dollars,” prices rose to the same stratospheric level of the 1970s Arab oil embargo. Hawaii maritime shipping costs soared because of it and virtually all Hawaii-based businesses were affected by that and by the rising cost of fuel for their delivery vehicles. Oil prices also led to airline and cruise ship fuel surcharges. Gasoline finally got so expensive that sales of “light trucks” (SUVs, vans and pickup trucks) plummeted as consumers showed new interest in cars that aren’t so thirsty. In Hawaii there was renewed interest in renewable energy, with several companies planning biofuel operations.

MORTGAGE CRISIS. Aggressive selling of “subprimes” — home loans at extra-high interest rates — to people who couldn’t afford them led to record mortgage defaults. Since mortgages are bundled and sold as investments, the defaults led the mortgage investment market to dry up, creating a short of cash for lending — a credit crisis whose effects went far beyond the original subprimes to affect companies and people not otherwise connected to the original risky business. The dollar lost about a tenth of its value against the euro in 2007. The CEOs of several major investment firms unfurled their golden parachutes and the Fed injected billions into the banking system to keep the economy moving. Hundreds of Hawaii residents with subprime mortgages faced foreclosure, but this was actually one of the lowest per capita rates of any state.

THE CHINA SYNDROME. Millions of toys made in China were recalled over lead paint. Earlier, several toothpastes made in China were recalled for containing an ingredient in antifreeze. And pet food made in China, containing a chemical used in plastics, sickened hundreds of cats and dogs.

CAMPUS SLAUGHTER. The worst mass murder in American history took place in April when 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho shot students and professors at Virginia Tech before taking his own life, for a death toll of 32. In Hawaii, KGMB9 exposed lax security at UH. In December a teenager killed eight people and himself at a mall in Nebraska. There was also an infrastructure disaster in 2007 when the collapse of an Interstate bridge into the Mississippi River at Minneapolis killed 13 and hurt 100. An there was a mine disaster in Utah one year after one in West Virginia.

STEM CELLS. Scientists reprogrammed other cells to mimic stem cells, the kind you can use to grow any kind of tissue you need. Until now you needed embryonic tissue to do that. The breakthrough promises to advance disease treatment and prevention while disengaging from the abortion issue.

GLOBAL WARMING. After decades of political debate about whether there was such a thing as global warming, the United Nations finally declared flatly that it was a scientific fact, and the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by U.N. scientists and former vice president Al Gore, who had been trying to tell people this for years and finally made a documentary movie to lay out the case. The administration acted in December by requiring an increase in vehicle fuel economy for the first time in more than three decades.

+ HAWAII AIRLINES WAGE WAR. Hawaii interisland airlines waged war on each other in 2007, at the ticket counter and in the courtroom. Hawaiian Airlines wins a suit against Mesa Air, persuading a judge that go! was launched with the illegal use of inside information Mesa gained as a prospective buyer of both Hawaiian and Aloha Airlines. Mesa agreed not to keep the information or use it to found a competitor, and then did. The judge awarded damages in the tens of millions of dollars, several times Mesa’s 2006 profit. Mesa, falling into the red in 2007, failed to convince the same judge to rehear the case and at year’s end was filing an appeal with a higher court. In the meantime, a 2008 court date was set for a suit against Mesa by Aloha. In the meantime, Big Island-based Mokulele Air converted from a charter service to a scheduled carrier to rebrand itself as go!Express and fly to smaller markets in competition with Island Air and Pacific Wings. Island Air pulled in its horns and laid off some of its work force — and its CEO left the company — while Pacific Wings launched a new division in New Mexico, undercutting Mesa in a “turnabout is fair play” maneuver.

+ ROUGH SEAS FOR SUPERFERRY. Hawaii Superferry, the first-ever attempt to operate interisland marine passenger service with multihulled vessels, launched late in 2007 after court opposition on Maui and protestors in the water on Kauai. Superferry won its battles, but wound up launching in the winter, when seas are rougher, and was bedeviled by sick passengers and canceled voyages in ocean swells. What starts as a harbor use controversy expands into a larger discussion of quality-of-life issues on neighbor islands, and the governor bans Superferry passengers from carrying opihi.

+ COPS CATCH CONS COPPING COPPER. Copper thefts worsened in 2007, often leaving highway lights out for miles, but for the first time it seemed that police were making real progress in catching the people involved, arresting not only some thieves but also mounting a sting operation against a stolen copper buyer, a business that had portrayed itself as above such activity. The family-owned business was embarrassed and the son said his mother, who bought the copper from an undercover officer, didn’t know what she was doing.

+ SPORTS: UH football has an undefeated season. The triumph of June Jones, Colt Brennan and an unusually talented and cohesive team drew attention away from earlier controversies over UH athletic costs, schedules, and problems with aging Aloha Stadium. The Honolulu Marathon, previously held up as a remarkable example of a well-run annual event with no government financial support, ends the year with egg on its face after tracking technology fails to work — partly the runners’ fault — leaving thousands with no finishing time. Michelle Wie falls from grace while Tadd Fujikawa goes pro.

+ HUMAN INTEREST: Genshiro Kawamoto, the Japanese real estate tycoon notorious for buying hundreds of homes and then letting them become delapidated, burnished his image in some quarters while confirming his wackiness in others by installing Native Hawaiian families in ritzy Kahala homes — after first filling in the pools with rocks. Momi Akana gets her home rebuilt by “Extreme Makeover,” and is portrayed as a struggling do-gooder until someone notices she makes a very good salary and her husband is a bank executive. Bountyhunter Dog Chapman extracates himself from legal trouble in Mexico only to lose face when he leaves a racist voicemail criticizing his son’s black girlfriend that the son sells to a tabloid, and Honolulu has its own race controversy when slurs are yelled in a Waikele parking lot beating involving a local family with a history of using its fists. Hawaii and the world mourns Don Ho.

President Bush had been beating up Congress for weeks for not passing the defense spending bill when Congress finally did — and he vetoed it.

He issued a statement of disapproval, better known as a pocket veto, which means the bill dies Monday night because he won’t sign it.

Mr. Bush did it because a provision in the bill would expand the right of Americans to seek financial compensation from countries that support terrorism. He said damage suits against Iraq could destabilize the government. (It’s already unstable, but I assume he meant more so.)

The veto holds up, among other things, a pay raise for military personnel, including thousands in Hawaii, that was to have started Tuesday.

“Only George Bush could be for supporting the troops before he was against it,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who lost the last presidential election after the president said Kerry was for the Iraq war before he was against it. Turnabout is always amusing, but let’s press on.

Back to the reason for the veto. The bit in question would make it easier for Americans who lost family members to terrorism — not just in the Iraq war but in the Pan Am bombing or the Marine barracks bombing of 1983, to sue Iraq or Syria or Libya or whatever nation they felt was culpable in their loved one’s death.

That may theoretically be a concern for Syria or Libya, but the pressing concern for Mr. Bush is that for Iraq this is no theoretical issue — U.S. POWs in the 1990s Gulf War actually won a $959 million judgment against Iraq. The U.S. government has since said the new government of Iraq cannot be held responsible for claims against the Saddam Hussein regime — which the United State first propped up and then toppled as Saddam began to display more malice than malleability. (This shocked — shocked! — the U.S. government, despite the fact that Saddam was a professional assassin before he entered politics. I am not making this up.)

You may think, “So what? It’s not like the current government of Iraq would actually pay the money, so this is a moot point.”

The reason it is not a moot point is that Iraq keeps an ocean of oil profits, at least $20 billion but probably loads more, in banks that the U.S. courts can get to with orders to freeze assets. The Iraqi government will not willingly pay hundreds of millions of dollars to wronged individuals or their families, but the courts might simply take it. And Iraq needs its Gringott-sized coffers to build a power plant or make a payroll or something.

O.K., fine, but why didn’t President Bush bring this up about eight radio addresses ago?

THAT’S the non-partisan point I wanted to call your attention to.

According to the Sunday edition of the New York Times, the potential fallout from the measure never occurred to anybody on Capitol Hill or at the White House. It was someone in Baghdad who figured it out.

A couple of guys from the Iraqi government called in U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and apparently said something along the lines of, “What are you trying to do to us here? Do you guys even read your own bills?”

Of course not! They’re thousands of pages long and boring as hell.

But Crocker sent a rocket to Washington, D.C., suggesting that maybe some legal eagle might want to actually read the provision and look into this. Someone did, and told his betters at the White House something along the lines of, “We have a problem here.”

The Times described a conference call with reporters in which a White House spokesman said it was less than two weeks ago that the matter came into “acute focus.”

That is Washingtonspeak for, “We had no clue, but that was then, this is now.”

Don’t be surprised by this. And don’t attribute it to incompetency by the Bush administration — or, to put it more carefully, don’t attribute it to incompetency SOLELY by the Bush administration. This has been going on for years, in administrations of all political stripes, no matter which party controls Congress.

Legal and budgetary matters at the federal level have grown so unimaginably complex that nobody understands it all. There are unintended consequences all the time from stuff that gets done without the understanding of Congress or the president. Sometimes it’s something slipped in by a senator, sometimes it’s a line item in the president’s own budget submission, but either way chaos theory is in play, because of the sheer complexity of the legislation that gets passed.

It’s a situation that will make more trouble until it comes into acute focus.