Peak cars – is our addiction ending?

In the 1980’s it was dubbed “automobile dependency” – a term coined by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy to describe the largely Western phenomenon of building cities around cars and thus cultivating a kind of addiction to them. But according to a new paper by Professors Newman and Kenworthy – part of the team at WA’s […]

Rocky Mountain Institute: A Buildings Success Story

RMI has identified whole system retrofits as a critical component to reducing the U.S. building stock’s energy use and moving to an energy era of efficiency and renewables. In order to achieve widespread adoption of deep building retrofits, energy modeling of buildings is necessary to accurately identify potential energy savings. And while the number of energy […]

A Long Way From Reaching Our Peak

Inspired, among others, by the typically apocalyptic, ecological maunderings of Jeremy Grantham (the renowned investor here providing us with classic evidence of the general non-transferability of specific expertise from one metier to another), the recent overwrought oil market has brought the Exhaustionists out in full force, each plaintively wailing of the dangers of Peak Oil […]

Might peak oil and climate change outlive their usefulness as framings for Transition?

Here’s a kind of half-formed thought that might possibly go somewhere if I start writing about it. This September sees the fifth anniversary of the Unleashing of Transition Town Totnes. We were deeply flattered the other day to receive a somewhat premature but very welcome plaque from the Town Council bearing the inscription “Transition Town […]

IEA: Urgent Need for More Oil

The IEA Governing Board, at its regular quarterly meeting on May 18-19, examined oil market developments and their impact on the global economy. Despite a near-10% correction since May 5, oil prices remain at elevated levels driven by market fundamentals, geopolitical uncertainty and future expectations. The IEA Governing Board expressed serious concern that there are […]

Saudi Oil Output could Reach 8.9 Million Barrels in May

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter, may pump about 8.9 million barrels a day in May as demand from refiners globally picks up and Japan raises imports of the nation’s oil, a local economist said. “May’s output should show an increase of 100,000 to 200,000 barrels a day from April as markets are well […]

When the oil runs out…

The most pessimistic analysts say peak oil production from all possible sources will be in 2015 and will reach 90 million barrels per day (bpd). Scientists predict the level of 90m bpd will last 30 years, so that major changes will come soon after 2030. And they are serious, for the 90 per cent of […]

US quietly expanding defense ties with Saudis

Despite their deepening political divide, the United States and Saudi Arabia are quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale, led by a little-known project to develop an elite force to protect the kingdom’s oil riches and future nuclear sites. The U.S. also is in discussions with Saudi Arabia to create an air and missile […]

The Tyranny of the Temporary

For just short of a year now, my posts here have focused on exploring one extensive set of options for dealing with the crisis of industrial civilization – the toolkit that came to maturity in the organic gardening and appropriate technology movements of the Seventies, and has been more or less sitting on a shelf […]

Peak Oil’s Impact: Dining Out

While rising gasoline prices at our local stations are the most immediate and obvious consequences of oil supply and demand problems, Peak Oil is about much more than how big a hit our wallets can take. It’s easy to get caught up with the financial impact in our own households, which may explain why there’s […]

Gasoline Gangsters 20: The Illusion Of Oil

Oil provides us things we take for granted. Air travel, national parks, skyscrapers, just in time food delivery and cities in the desert are just some of the things oil provides us. After peak oil we will lose our ability to sustain these living arrangements and it will be a shock to our system. youtube.com

Fukushima Reactors a Raging Nuclear Inferno

Professor Christopher Busby, who sits on the European Committee on Radiation Risks, told RT yesterday that the reactors at Fukushima are a raging nuclear inferno and he believes at least one of the reactors is now outside its containment structure and emitting vast amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. The Japanese newspaper Asahi reports today […]

Forest fires, floods affect Canadian oil production

More Canadian operators are reporting temporary shut ins of their production and suspension of drilling and completion activity as a result of forest fires near Slave Lake in northern Alberta and spring floods in southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Penn West Exploration said it has temporarily shut in 35,000-40,000 boe/d of production because of the fires […]

How to break the news

No one wants to break the bad news. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one or the end of the era of cheap oil, it’s mind-boggling to even think about how you tell someone something so vastly unpleasant. How does one talk about such a tough topic? Over the past few months, I’ve thought […]

A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization

There are two common reactions to news about our species’ present-day crisis. One is confusion and bewilderment arising from the fact that even the experts can’t seem to agree on which threats are real or what to do about them. The other is despair at the sheer number of crises and the dire implications of […]

A routine OPEC meeting in June suddenly is full of intrigue

It appears that OPEC will have a real president chairing its June meeting: none other than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, as his country currently holds the oil cartel’s rotating presidency.Ahmadinejad fired his oil minister, Masoud Mirkazemi, last weekend and has taken over the running of the oil ministry on a caretaker basis. The president wants to […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: The Summer Ahead

Despite the recent drop in oil prices, the outlook for the remainder of the year is not good. If the IEA numbers are correct the world is probably burning more oil each day than is coming out of the ground, with the difference being made up from the 2.6 billion barrel stockpiles held by the […]

Apocalypse now: Why people are attracted to doomsday scenarios

Whether religious or secular, doomers see the end of the world as a solution to overwhelming problems. Most people go through their daily lives assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like today. No pits of fire will open up, society won’t collapse, and the world, most likely, won’t end. But for others, doom has […]

Denmark preparing to stake claim to North Pol

Denmark plans to lay claim to the North Pole and other areas in the Arctic, where melting ice is uncovering new shipping routes, fishing grounds and drilling opportunities for oil and gas, a leaked government document showed Tuesday. The draft document titled “Strategy for the Arctic” said Denmark’s Science Ministry has started collecting data to […]

Peak Oil Has Shattered The North American Housing Sector

Of the many asset classes to be victimized by the end of cheap energy, residential real estate is perhaps the most vulnerable. A call option on future wage growth, and, leveraged to our liquid-fuel based transport system, housing in North America is currently making its way back to the stable, but barely appreciating asset it […]

Exposing the human side of BP’s oil spill

Many of the chemicals present in BP oil and dispersants are known to cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, kidney damage, altered renal function, and irritation of the digestive tract. Dispersants were used after BP’s oil disaster that began on April 20, 2010, when an explosion killed 11 workers, spilling at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into […]

Get juiced: Power your home with whiskey

The prospect of “peak oil” means the likelihood of less and less oil at higher and higher prices going forward. “Fracking” for shale gas to power our homes – something the gas companies would love to do in New York State – may be in trouble, now that methane explosions and contaminated water have been […]

Blessings of a dying paradigm

When people tell me the dire messages about which I write don’t resonate with other people, I struggle with a coherent response. Would you prefer continued overshoot on an overshot planet? Would you prefer we keep heating our overheated home? Would you prefer we ignore the most important issues in the history of our species? […]

US Vehicle Miles Travelled

With global oil supply on a rough plateau, and developing oil countries’ usage increasing, oil usage in developed countries must decline.  This has to be accomplished through some combination of using oil more efficiently and just doing less.  The above are the data for US vehicle miles traveled, and indicate that US VMT has not […]

Looking in the Rear View Mirror

It has often been said that we would only be able to see peak oil by looking in the rear view mirror. It’s well past time for a head-check, so this post provides a quick look back at production over the last five years and at some of the predictions I and others have made. […]

Heinberg: Shrinking Pie Competition and Relative Growth in a Finite World

. . [C]ommerce is but a means to an end, the diffusion of civilization and wealth. To allow commerce to proceed until the source of civilization is weakened and overturned is like killing the goose to get the golden egg. Is the immediate creation of material wealth to be our only object? Have we not […]

TEPCO admits nuclear meltdown occurred at Fukushima reactor 16 hours after quake

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) admitted for the first time on May 15 that most of the fuel in one of its nuclear reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant had melted only about 16 hours after the March 11 earthquake struck a wide swath of northeastern Japan and triggered a devastating tsunami. […]

WikiLeaks cables show that it was all about the oil

In 2006, three years after the Russian government had charged Mikhail Khodorkovsky — then the country’s wealthiest businessman — with fraud and moved to break up his Yukos oil company, U.S. diplomats had had enough. Gazprom, which grew out of the former Soviet Union’s state gas ministry, had been busy buying up Yukos’ far-flung empire, […]

Humanity Can and Must Do More With Less

By 2050, humanity could consume an estimated 140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year — three times its current appetite — unless the economic growth rate is “decoupled” from the rate of natural resource consumption, warns a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme. Citizens of developed countries consume […]

Joys of community

This past weekend I finally got to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I joined a community garden. Ever since I moved to Staunton, Virginia, I’ve unfortunately had very little garden space. First I was in an apartment with no yard access, and then my boyfriend Erik (now my husband) bought […]

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