Stuart Staniford: WTI-Brent Spread Persisting

For background on this issue, see here (also see some good links commenters added).  This post is just an update that the situation continues, though it’s not quite as pronounced as it was in February.  The graph above shows daily spot prices through March 22nd (last Tuesday). One interesting question is this: now that they’ve […]

Can Electric Vehicles Take Off? A Roadmap to Find the Answer

Yale Environment 360 has an article on how to ensure the success of electric vehicles – Can Electric Vehicles Take Off? A Roadmap to Find the Answer. As instability in the Middle East pushes oil prices past $100 per barrel and gasoline prices toward $4 a gallon in the U.S., the need to find better […]

Nuclear era’s third option

The Fukushima disaster has inevitably prompted concern in many countries about nuclear power. But are the correct questions being asked? A danger in the debate is that nuclear is often portrayed as a single, undifferentiated energy source. This is not only wrong, but also risks losing the opportunity we have to debate the role that […]

How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Argument About Peak Oil, Climate Change, or Economic Troubles

Anyone can simply act badly, by pouting, sulking, or stomping out of the room when they begin to lose an argument, but here are some additional ideas to vary the strategy: 1.  Be completely disinterested in your partner’s perspective. You can indicate this disinterest in any number of ways: look away, sigh heavily, tap your […]

Tainter’s law: where is the physics?

Joseph Tainter’s interpretation of the cause of the collapse of civilisations is that social structures generate negative returns when they become too complex; as shown above (fromTainter’s 1996 paper at dieoff.com). We could call this relationship as “Tainter’s law”. But what is exactly that generates this behavior? In this post, I’ll try to make a […]

Rebels push Gaddafi back as NATO provides aircover

Forces loyal to Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi have been pushed back by Benghazi rebels after coalition airstrikes grounded both the Libyan airforce and tank columns. The rebels yesterday retook the oil export towns of Brega and Ajdabiya in the country’s east, the latter 30 miles from the refining station at Ras Lanouf. Spokesperson for the […]

All Workers evacuated as radiation now 10 million times the usual level

Radioactivity in water at reactor 2 at the quake-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant has reached 10 million times the usual level, company officials say. Workers trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown have been evacuated. Earlier, Japan’s nuclear agency said that levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant had risen […]

One Country’s Disaster, Another’s Boon

The Japanese earthquake, tsunami and resulting nuclear accident at the Fukushima power plant spawned a disaster that will be hard to remedy or forget. As usual the events have had a number of dimensions, mostly unfortunate for that country no matter how developed and prosperous it has been, no matter how stoic and expectant the […]

Whither population explosion?

Ever since the New Economic Implosion in this hapless world of ours, the economists have not tired of drawing a link between development and population. The theory they have been expounding ever since is that in order to ensure economic progress, it is imperative to check the growth of population. In simple language, what they […]

Japan Radioactive Iodine Releases May Exceed Three Mile Island By 100,000 Times

The damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan continue to release radioactivity into the atmosphere. So far, the accident has released far more radioactivity than the 1979 Three Mile Island (TMI) accident. While Chernobyl had one source of radioactivity, its reactor, there are seven leaking radiation sources at the Japanese site. Together, the three damaged reactors […]

Fukushima Dai-ichi status and slow burning issues

With no buildings blowing up at Fukushima for a couple of weeks now, global media attention has shifted back to Libya where there is lots of violence to watch. Does this mean that trouble at the 4 wrecked reactors on the East coast of Japan is over? With the restoration of mains power to the […]

US CBO: Taxing mileage a ‘practical option’ for revenue enhancement

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week released a report that said taxing people based on how many miles they drive is a possible option for raising new revenues and that these taxes could be used to offset the costs of highway maintenance at a time when federal funds are short. The report discussed the […]

How to protect cities from tsunamis and peak oil

Town on 35 feet of elevated fill. A tsunami would be split as by a ship’s bow, saving lives and protecting property. Image: Richard Register. Could better real-estate development have helped save lives in Japan? And could the same type of compact, landscape-friendly urban planning also help us prep for peak oil? Visionary urban designer […]

WSJ, Financial Times Raise Issue of Oil Prices Causing Recession

The idea that high oil prices cause recessions shouldn’t be any surprise to those who have been following my writings, or those of Dave Murphy, or those of Jeff Rubin. Last month, though, the Wall Street Journal finally decided to mention the idea to its readers, in an article called “Rising Oil Prices Raise the […]

Endgame: Divide, rule and get the oil

Without cutting through the fog of war it’s impossible to understand what’s really going on in Libya. Odyssey Dawn is only happening because the 22-member Arab League voted to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The Arab League – routinely dismissed in Western capitals as irrelevant before this decision – is little else than an […]

Top 5 Oil-Producing Countries In 2011

1. Russia Russia is the single largest oil producing country in the world, with a production of about 10,124,000 barrels per day, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This represents just under 12% of the world supply of oil. Russia has about 60 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, or about […]

Stuart Staniford: Long Term Crop Prices

The above shows prices for the three main grain crops in the US since 1920, adjusted for inflation (using the CPI).  A few basic points for future reference: Food crops have been getting gradually cheaper for many years.  With a couple of major excursions due to world events (price drops in the depression, and rises […]

Modes of Transportation

Because of my interest in energy, I have a long-standing interest in different modes of transportation. One of the reasons that I am not overly pessimistic about a future in which I foresee even higher long-term oil prices is that I believe we can make a shift from modes of transportation requiring a lot of […]

Thoughts on Oil & the Middle East

A book that I have read and highly recommend is Twilight in the Desert by Matthew Simmons, who was a Houston-based analyst and investment banker in the energy field for several decades. He died last year.  He is best known for championing the ‘Peak Oil’ thesis, which was first broached by M. King Hubbert, a […]

Australia New Zealand Ban Japanese Food Imports

AUSTRALIA has halted food imports from four Japanese prefectures because of concerns over radiation contamination from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. Food Standards Australia New Zealand has requested a holding order for all food originating from the Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi prefectures in Japan’s north. Australia, Canada and Singapore have joined a list of […]

Navigating The Coming Chaos Video Series

Carolyn Baker talks about her new book, “Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition”

Relating Per Capita GDP to Petroleum Consumption and Exports for the MENA Countries

In a previous article, I reproduced a plot relating per capita oil consumption to per capita GDP for selected countries, from a presentation, Energy and the Economy, by Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist for Deutsche Bank.   Sieminski’s plot showed a linear correlation between per capita oil consumption and per capita GDP for a selection of […]

Gasoline Gangsters Episode 9: The Economics Of Extinction

You’ve heard of peak oil, but have you heard of peak fish and peak bee? Mankind makes money exploiting animal and plant species that are endangered or near extinction. In this episode I discuss the Tasmanian Tiger, the Wolomi Pine and the passenger pigeon. youtube.com

Lester Brown: The Planet’s Scarcest Resource Is Time

In this eleventh video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, analyst, author and founder of the Earth Policy Institute Lester Brown discusses how unprepared the world really is for the growing effects of climate change. “Economists doing supply and demand projections are largely unaware” of […]

Belgian & EU Parliamentary Meetings on Peakoil & Energy Policy

The end of cheap oil poses the great challenge of diminishing dependence on oil in the economy. Topics of importance include coping with effects of high oil prices on the economy and investment, regional transport planning for diminished oil use, and an agriculture without fossil fuel use, To advance policy discussions on these and more […]

Fukushima Smoking Gun Emerges: Founding Engineer Says Reactor 4 Has Always Been A “Time Bomb”, Exposes Criminal Cover Up

It was only a matter of time before someone grew a conscience, and disclosed to the world that in addition to the massive cover up currently going on with respect to the true extent of the Fukushima catastrophe, the actual plant itself, in borrowing from the BP playbook, was built in a hurried way, using […]

Bottom Line, Libya Will Remain a Transnational Oil Fiefdom

George Galloway, the combative British MP, put Anna Walker of Sky News in her place when she tried to insist that Libya’s oil is negligible and hardly worth starting a war over. “BP has 15 billion pounds worth of investments in Libya,” Galloway instructed the corporate media teleprompter reader, “so don’t pretend it is not […]

How to avoid a global food price crisis

Recent news stories have stoked fears about rising global food prices. But today, only a few years after a devastating food crisis, we can avoid the mistakes of 2007 and 2008 and respond to this challenge as a country and a globe. To do so we must work with other governments to help those most […]

Four More Quakes Hit Fukushima

Early morning earthquakes rattled Japan’s crippled nuclear plant as engineers restored lighting at a control room and endeavored to connect power cables needed to cool the reactors. Four quakes of 5-magnitude or greater struck eastern Honshu, Japan, within an hour starting at 7:12 a.m. local time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey website. There was […]

Peak Water Has Already Come and Gone

Canadian Kevin Freedman is celebrating World Water Day Tuesday by living on 25 litres of water a day, instead of the North American average of 330 litres per day. And he has enlisted 31 others in his “Water Conservation Challenge” to go water- lean, using just 25 litres per day for cooking, drinking, cleaning, and […]

« Previous Page — Next Page »

LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Why the IEA is Wrong About Peak Oil Demand
• Did we inadvertently speed global warming?  
• Venezuela’s Oil Monopoly Eases
• Why Germany is Choosing Natural Gas Over Nuclear Power
• U.S. coal-fired electricity generation decreased in 2022 and 2023

• America Cracks Down on Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas Facilities
• Meet America’s Newest Oil Trader Extraordinaire: Joe Biden
• Is It Time To Refill America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
• Oil prices set to end year 10% lower as demand concerns snap winning streak
• What’s Driving America’s New Oil and Gas Boom?
• China’s peak oil demand bombshell eviscerates Danielle Smith’s energy strategy