UN: Population growth must slow

The world population growth rate must slow down significantly to avoid reaching unsustainable levels, says a new UN report. To have a reasonable chance of stabilising world population, fertility must drop to below “replacement level”. It must then be maintained at that level for an extended period, says the report. This replacement level is the […]

Michael Ruppert: Systemic Failure

Video from Ruppert’s collapsenet

Industrial civilization at the cross roads

At this late juncture in the era of industry, it seems safe to assume we face one of two futures. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, we face imminent environmental collapse. If we cease burning fossil fuels, the industrial economy will collapse. Industrial society expresses these futures as a choice between your money or […]

Fossil Fuel Nostalgia and Post-Peak Sentimentality

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement, isn’t shy about sharing his views that our future will be radically different from our present. He recently declared, for example, that the idea of a global consumer society without oil is nonsense, and he has urged folks to embrace resilience over sustainability in order to weather coming […]

How is an oil shortage like a missing cup of flour?

If I bake a batch of cookies and the recipe calls for two cups of flour, but I have only one, it is pretty clear that I can’t bake a full batch of cookies. All I can make is half a batch. I will end up with half of the sugar, and half of the […]

OPEC´s Oil Reserve Revisionism

What’s with OPEC member’s recent oil reserve revisionism? First Venezuela, then Iraq, followed closely by Iran, and then again by Venezuela, in anticipation of further upgrades from Kuwait and Iraq. Does Saudi Arabia still hold the world’s biggest reserves? Not according to Venezuela. And is there more oil in Iraq than in Iran? Or will […]

Peak Oil & Poverty – More Background on the Egyptian Popular Uprising

Another turn in the back story of why the Egyptian people have taken to the streets to oust 30-year dictator Hosni Mubarak: Peak oil–well, nationally peak oil at least. A new article in Le Monde Diplomatique by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed sheds light on how, in addition to food insecurity and political repression, the decline of […]

Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union

Dmitry Orlov, engineer and author, warns that the US’s reliance on diminishing fuel supplies might be sending it down the same path the Soviet Union took before it collapsed. In this fifth video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Orlov, who was an eyewitness […]

Don’t panic: oil traders adapt to $100 a barrel

For oil market veterans, it has a familiar ring. Turmoil in the Middle East triggers a spike in crude prices. Cue panic in financial markets. This, time, though, even as oil moves above $101 a barrel to trade at its highest in more than two years, the message from analysts and traders is “stay calm”. […]

The (Sordid) Tale of Three Arab Countries

The recent regime change in Tunisia, but more to the point, the exploding unrest in Egypt has once again brought up the sordid past of Arab regimes. However, these two are certainly not isolated cases. The dysfunctionalities of three large North African countries, Egypt, Libya and Algeria are transparent. For decades they have been the […]

Transition and the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP)

The goal of Transition Initiatives (TI) is an Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) – The final step of a 12 step program. (The steps were later relabeled as ingredients.) No Transition EDAP has been completed in the U.S. (I do not count the U.S. peak oil and energy plans done outside the Transition Initiatives movement […]

Oil Shock Potential of OPEC Nations

While we are all having our minds focussed anew on the wisdom of deriving economically critical commodities from unpleasant autocratic regimes, it seems a good moment to review the potential impact on oil prices of revolutions in each of the various OPEC countries.  This is a rather uncertain exercise for at least these reasons: It […]

Peak Oil And The Canadian Tar-sands

About Peak Oil And The Canadian Tar-sands

Eygpt: Food shortages reported and businesses remain shuttered

Egypt’s week-long political protests have already had serious macroeconomic implications for the country: Banks are closed, stock markets are suspended, and hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign currency has already left the country. But the political crisis is also starting to take its toll on ordinary Egyptians. At the open-air fruit and vegetable market […]

Peak Not: Running Into Oil and Gas

“Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture.”[0] So said the institutional economist Erich Zimmermann, explaining why so-called fixed, depletable resources expand rather than deplete in free market settings. Julian Simon similarly stated: “Human beings create more than they destroy.”[2] […]

Exxon shifts more production to natural gas; Profit up 53%

Exxon shifted more of its production from oil to natural gas in the fourth quarter as executives predict the world will use more gas. The oil giant isn’t quite a natural gas company yet. In the fourth quarter, 51 percent of its production was oil. During the past few years, that percentage was around 60 […]

Peak chocolate? World’s supply of sustainable cocoa could run out by 2014

The world faces a chocolate ‘drought’ over the next few years, an expert warned yesterday. Political unrest in the Ivory Coast, where 40 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans are grown, has ‘significantly’ depleted the number of certified fair trade cocoa farmers. Many have fled the West ­African country, while fair trade training programmes […]

Peak Oil and Civil Unrest

As the demonstrations in Egypt continue for a seventh day what few are willing to admit is that the revolutionary demonstrations we are seeing around the world have little to do with politics, oppression or religion. They are instead the result of too many people, too few jobs and lack of affordable food. People who […]

Egypt, Oil and Democracy

Revolutions are, by their very nature, difficult to predict. The unrest that gripped Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1992, and led to the fall of Communist governments there, was anticipated by few policymakers and political scientists in advance. If a similar transition is now underway in Egypt, as well as in […]

Lies We Tell Ourselves, By Sharon Astyk

“He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Although the story that Franklin Roosevelt said this about a dictator (it is variously told about Central American, Caribbean and Middle Eastern leaders) America was supporting is almost certainly apocryphal, our very eagerness to claim these words so often reveals […]

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