Sharing Gardens – Giving and Receiving

Peak Moment 193: More than a community garden, this sharing garden provides fresh produce for all who’ve contributed to it, with surplus going to the local food bank. Coordinators Chris Burns and Llyn Peabody note that with one large plot rather than separate plots, Alpine Sharing Garden enables more efficient food production – from watering […]

Interview with Dmitry Orlov on Business Matters

Rest your eyeballs and prick up your ears: Thomas White of Business Matters gets right past the happy-shiny talk prevalent in the mass media with the help of his two guests: me and Catherine Austin Fitts. club Orlov

The Fukushima Disaster and Other Irreproducible Experiments

The situation at the Fukushima nuclear reactors has evolved to one of chronic catastrophe or, more optimistically, feed and bleed followed by dialysis. For the viewer at home, the long-awaited debut of picture-taking robots inside the reactor buildings nicely complements the airborne fleet of drones that have been providing grist for armchair forensics experts everywhere. […]

The Inflation-Deflation Debate

I am not the brightest bulb in the room nor an I connected up the ying yang via ‘expert networks’ as so many sabbaticalled parking lot valets (re: hedge funders like Rajaratnam) are on Wall St. One thing I am is aware of the obvious and as such have not minced words about stating what […]

Jeff Rubin: When will we see demand destruction for oil?

How high must oil prices go before they start killing the very demand that feeds them? Everybody from the International Monetary Fund to the International Energy Agency (IEA) is warning of dire economic consequences if today’s triple digit oil prices persist. Curiously though, the IEA, which is warning of a potential global recession due to […]

US oil and gas reserve rates soar as costs fall on new technologies

New technologies are having a dramatic impact on a couple of key measures for US E&P efficiency according to a recent report by Oppenheimer’s Fadel Gheit, who finds reserve replacement rates rising as finding costs are falling. His study analyzes the reserve profiles for a group of 14 key E&Ps through 2010, noting that their […]

Beautiful Photos of a Community Tackling Peak Oil

When Al Jazeera did a feature on Transition Town Totnes, they showed the world a town that was taking on peak oil and climate change through community action. But for a slightly more off beat, surreal view of this initiative, check out photojournalist Ed Thompson’s visual essay on Transition Town Totnes. From owls on railway […]

France, Italy and Britain sending military ‘advisors’ to Libya

France, Italy and Britain will send officers but do not agree to a rebel request for ground troops. France will intensify airstrikes and says NATO should consider the ground forces. In the wake of a plea for help from besieged rebels in the Libyan city of Misurata, three Western powers have announced that they will […]

Jeremy Leggett: The Comming Energ Crisis

Jeremy Leggett talks about Peak Oil and energy security at Greenlinks event 8 Feb 2011. He is part of the Industry Taskforce on Peak OIl and Energy Security and is advising the UK Government on the action needed to mitigate the impending energy crunch.

Solar SuperStorm Could Result in Worldwide Nuclear Meltdown

Dear Sir, You are one of the most serious voices out there…. Nobody has written about this connection… Solar SuperStorm => breakdown worldwide grid system => Worldwide Meltdown Nuclear Reactors…. Is it possible to let this go worldwide? Enclosed the basic articles… Coming Solar Storms Could Slam US into Third Depression http://www.opednews.com/articles/Coming-sun-storms-could-sl-by-Terrence-Aym-100630-446.html Cloud computing at […]

Hydrocarbons Deep Within Earth: New Computational Study Reveals How

A new computational study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how hydrocarbons may be formed from methane in deep Earth at extreme pressures and temperatures. The thermodynamic and kinetic properties of hydrocarbons at high pressures and temperatures are important for understanding carbon reservoirs and fluxes in Earth. The work provides […]

Gasoline Gangsters Episode 14: The Last Suburb Standing

Peak oil is here and suburbia will fail. But not all of suburbia will collapse at the same time. In this episode I try to predict the likely order of collapse for the American dream.

Organic Farmers Sue Monsanto In Battle For Future of Food

Another chapter in the ongoing David-and-Goliath-esque saga between organic farmers and the Monsanto Company kicked off recently with a lawsuit filed in federal court. The suit, titled Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, is an effort by a group of family farms, seed businesses and organic growers associations to both protect […]

Global Demography: Population Inflation

The global demographic landscape is a complex one, and not surprisingly very difficult for many to comprehend. The media is alive with projections that the global population will reach seven billion people by the end of 2011, and will exceed nine billion by 2050, with much of this growth occurring in the least-developed countries, where […]

Why Are Americans So Easily Conned?

The technologies that inflicted upon the world the ongoing tragedies in both the Gulf of Mexico and Japan serve a dangerous addiction, an addiction to blind optimism, a habituation of mind that allows us to dwell within provisional comfort zones but renders vast spaces of the world into death realms. After each catastrophe, there ensues […]

Japan, oil and the fragility of globalization

“No society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.” — Ivan Illich Sometimes it takes an earthquake followed by tsunami accompanied by a nuclear meltdown to catch people’s attention. Explosion at Fukishima nuclear plant in March. Addiction to oil paved way […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Killing Off the Recovery

Since the middle of February oil prices have increased by some $22 a barrel. As the U.S. currently consumes just over 19 million barrels of oil a day, that means collectively we are now spending about $420 million a day more filling up our fuel tanks than we were two months ago. Now some of […]

Why The Decline In World Oil Supply Will Be Faster Than Anyone Expects

The man who invented peak oil, M. King Hubbert, got a few things wrong. Indeed, he was too optimistic. The Oil Drum’s Gail Tverberg pointed out some problems with the Hubbert Curve in a presentation this week at the 3rd Biophysical Economics Conference. Hubbert expected nuclear power to take over before oil reached peak. He […]

Latest Iraq Oil Production

Above shows the latest public data from the main energy information agencies for Iraqi oil production.  As you can see, the sharp rise in January has been sustained, and even increased slightly in March.  That last data point is based on a single source (OPEC) so far, so it may shift.  Still, at any rate, […]

Economic Resilience #2. Expect Contraction

In our Oct 2010 session about the economy here in Los Angeles, we discussed “Conservation of cash.” In other words: in these times of economic contraction, make the most of the U.S. dollars you do have.  In that session we talked about budgets and getting by on less.  So often in American culture when money […]

A Look Back at North Sea Oil Production Projections

In 1999, I wrote a paper concerning the production decline of North Sea oil fields and made projections for the future of Norwegian and United Kingdom (U.K.) oil production (crude + condensate). For comparison purposes, I compared my projections with those by the U.S. Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration (US DOE/EIA). Table I is from […]

Can the Earth Feed a Population of 9 Billion People?

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, looks at past rates of food production to explain why it should eventually be possible to produce enough food to feed a global population of 9 billion people.

Fukushima Radiation Nightmare May Last Indefinitely

The Associated Press reports today that radiation has spiked in a water tank in Unit 2. Robots also report that radiation is so high elsewhere at the stricken plant that it is too dangerous for workers to be sent in. “Even I had expected high radioactivity in those areas. I’m sure (plant operator Tokyo Electric […]

Heinberg : The End of Growth – presentation in Totnes, UK

Richard Heinberg, author of “The Party’s Over” and leading peak oil educator, talk about the future of our ‘growth’ society.

“Saudi’s slash oil output” … or did physics?

“The market is overbalanced … Our production in February was 9.125 million barrels per day (bpd), in March it was 8.292 million bpd. In April we don’t know yet, probably a little higher than March. The reason I gave you these numbers is to show you that the market is oversupplied,” Naimi told reporters. Saudi […]

Kunstler: Gaming Our Own Asses

A wicked vibe rattles the mental furniture in men’s minds these days. Against the dreadful normality of American life – the morning traffic on I-495, the mayhem awaiting in some school cafeteria or motor vehicle office, the household awakenings to a new dawn of foreclosure here, there, and everywhere – all this ceremony of the […]

Oil shortages and environmental decline could create ‘global quagmire’: military report

The planet is running out of oil and heading toward a future that could trap Canada in a violent spiral of decline in the economy and the environment, a special research unit within the Canadian military is predicting. This “global quagmire” is one of four possible future scenarios advanced by the six members of the […]

International Day of Peasants’ Struggles

We should celebrate one of the largest but least recognised groups in the world, who grow most of the food we eat Peasants and small farmers make up half of the world population and grow at least 70% of the world’s food (pdf). This group includes small-scale farmers, pastoralists, landless people, peasant fishers and indigenous […]

TEPCO Expects to End Fukushima Nuclear Crisis as Early as October

Tokyo Electric Power Co. set out a plan to end the crisis at its tsunami-hit Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, within six months. The utility known as Tepco expects a sustained drop in radiation levels at the plant within three months, the company said in a statement released at a […]

Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?

Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank – this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal: I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a […]

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