Taking Care of the Topsoil

Following my inclusion in the Top 10 list of ethanol enemies, I sought to Set the Ethanol Record Straight on my actual views on ethanol. I set out three broad tenets that shape my views. They are: Tenet One: We must transition from fossil fuels with a sense of urgency. Tenet Two: We need to […]

Imagine your life without oil

Dismantle the oil rigs and stack them in a pile. Radio the tankers and order them back to port. Pull out the drills and cement up the wells. (A year after the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, let’s hope we’ve learned how to do that, at least.) Tow the platforms back to shore. […]

Phanton Efficency, U.S. Energy Consumption Is Well Below Peak

The US economy is consuming 2.00% less energy than its five year average seen prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Some will be cheered by this data, and indeed there are small nuggets of good news here. First, US consumption of oil—which turned flattish after the 2004 repricing—is down significantly, by over 10% since 2007. […]

Seymour Hersh on Iran’s nuclear capability, the Arab uprisings and Obama’s isolation

UAN GONZALEZ: The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is back in the news this week with another explosive article that is ruffling some feathers at the White House. During the Bush administration years, Hersh was widely criticized by White House officials for his exposés on the torture at Abu Ghraib, secret U.S. operations overseas, […]

World Bank: CO2 levy on jet, shipping fuel

The World Bank will suggest a global levy on jet and shipping fuel in recommendations to G20 governments later this year on raising climate finance, a senior official said on Sunday. Developed countries have already written off chances of agreement on a new binding deal at a U.N. conference in Durban this year, placing a […]

OPEC has Most-Hostile Meeting Since 1990 Gulf War

OPEC ministers meeting in Vienna this week will find themselves supporting opposing camps of a military conflict for the first time in 21 years, with hostilities in Libya complicating an agreement on oil quotas. Not since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 has the producer group gathered with some nations giving financial and military support […]

How Fish Use Energy Teaches True Oil Economics

Charlie Hall, the outspoken ecologist who charges that neoclassical economists largely write fairy tales, is having a good day in Puerto Rico. The sun is shining and girls in bikinis are walking down the beach. But Hall, as usual, is thinking about how surplus energy makes the world go around and why the U.S. economy […]

China shops for Latin American oil, food, minerals

Latin America is blessed with a wealth of natural resources such as oil, copper and soy, and seeks investment and loans to capitalize on them. China needs the commodities to keep its economy growing and has about $3 trillion in reserves to burn. Those interests have come together in a burgeoning and unorthodox partnership, as […]

World’s Energy Poor See Receding Light at End of Tunnel

As the world continues to marvel at the widespread progress in modern technology and home electronics, there are still about 2.5 billion people – out of a global population of nearly 6.9 billion – who have little or no access to electricity. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), the future does not hold […]

Rob Hopkins: pre-oil age football

My thanks to Peter Cross for sending this in.  Here is a fascinating taste of how football worked before the age of cheap oil. Football today is hard to imagine without its huge carbon footprint and its dependence on dazzlingly sophisticated communications technology.  Man Utd’s climate change-aware defender Rio Ferdinand, recently said “we travel week […]

How to cope with 10 billion people

A United Nations report released a few weeks ago says the world’s population is expected to exceed 7 billion in October, just 12 years after reaching 6 billion, but another prediction is more pessimistic; instead of stabilizing at the projected 9 billion in 2050, the world’s population may hit 10.1 billion by the end of […]

The Coming Water Crisis

Nearly three-quarters of our earth is water of which only 2.5% is fresh water, and the remainder 97.5% is salt water. Of this fresh water nearly 70% (or 1.75% of total water) is frozen in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland. The remainder 0.75% of the total water is perhaps the world’s most important resource […]

UK Government to work with business on plans to tackle peak oil threat

Business leaders today welcomed a commitment by the Government to work with the private sector on contingency plans to protect the UK and its economy from the growing risk of rising oil prices. It follows a meeting between Chris Huhne, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and representatives from the UK Industry Taskforce […]

Of “Peakists”, “Doomers”, “Survivalists”, “Alarmists”, “Deniers”, and “Cornucopians”

Writing about the use (and misuse) of labels, James Michael Iddins (Valparaiso University Graduate Studies, Valparaiso, IN) commented: “It is my suspicion that these higher order abstractions [namely, labels], which we often hear used to describe combinations of views necessarily obscure our real thoughts and opinions on real issues.” Here he warns of dangers arising […]

Forget Peak Oil. Think Peak Renewables

The idea of “peak oil,” which has been around for some time, is a simple idea. The argument goes that, at some point, we will start to deplete oil reserves faster than new reserves can become available and, when this occurs, the peak of available oil has been reached and its all downhill from there. […]

Iraq sees oil output at 3 mln bpd by year-end

Additional 500,000-1 mln bpd forecast in 2012 * Shahristani satisfied with Rumaila field development * Iraq backs OPEC output increase if this to meet demand Iraq expects its oil output to rise to 3 million barrels per day by the end of this year and sees it growing an additional 500,000 to 1 million bpd […]

Kuwait protesters demand PM’s removal

Thousands of youth activists have rallied in Kuwait for the removal of the prime minister, pushing the oil-rich Gulf state closer to political turmoil. “The people want to topple the prime minister,” chanted more than 3,000 protesters late on Friday night for the third straight week, braving temperatures close to 40 degrees Celsius in the desert state. […]

Economic Collapse: Explaining it to Kids (and yourself)

Quick points covering this topic. Thanks for subscribing, comments and suggestions for more videos are welcomed! There’s also themodernsurvivalist.com blog for more info on this and other topics. There’s also the Forum there, so you can join there and start discussions, talk with other people, I’m usually around there every night. Take care!

Robert Rapier, Book Review: Power Trip

I tend to accumulate a lot of books – sent to me by publishers and publicists – and they pile up on my desk until I have to make a trip somewhere. Because it takes a long time to get from Hawaii to anywhere else, I always grab a book or two from my stack […]

What Determines Oil Prices?

With each passing year, oil seems to play an even greater role in the global economy. In the early days, finding oil during a drill was considered somewhat of a nuisance as the intended treasures were normally water or salt. It wasn’t until 1857 that the first commercial oil well was drilled in Romania. The […]

The battle for the South China Sea

Six countries are all scrambling for the South China Sea. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan and Malaysia are all making claims to it. But why now? China estimates there could be up to 213 billion barrels of oil beneath the sea. This would mean China would have the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, just falling behind […]

Fukushima: French research institute finds high radioactivity

A French independent radioactivity watchdog has found radiation in Fukushima Prefecture 60 times higher than the annual reference level for ordinary people recommended by an international commission. Bruno Chareyron, director of the research institute CRIIRAD, briefed reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday on the results of its survey of the air in Fukushima Prefecture. The measurements […]

Chris Martenson Interviews Arnie Gundersen : The Dangers of Fukushima Are Worse and Longer-lived Than We Think

“I have said it’s worse than Chernobyl and I’ll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind and blowing in-land. It could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees. I mean, there is […]

The Reality Detached American

The signs are everywhere for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. But precious few will heed the call. Now Liberty breathes its last gasp. All these are the beginning of sorrows.

Factor E Farm Production Run Update

We are farmer scientists – working to develop a world class research center for decentralization technologies using open source permaculture and technology to work together for providing basic needs and self replicating the entire operation at the cost of scrap metal. We seek societal transformation through interconnected self-sufficient villages and homes. This is a stepping […]

Space Solar Power – Recent Conceptual Progress

Power satellites are an idea that has been around since the late 1960s [1] but not developed commercially because we don’t know how to build an inexpensive space transport system.  That may have changed recently, at least in theory. We have known for decades that solar power satellites can send energy to the earth.  Communication […]

No soft option for investors

As the world population grows and large numbers – such as in China and Brazil – move out of poverty, demand for food increases. Since investment in production has been negligible for the past 30 years, as investors focused on urbanisation and technology growth, prices of agricultural commodities have gone up. According to the UN […]

No New Zealand ‘Oil shock response plan’

BY now everybody has heard of climate change and peak oil. It is unlikely that anyone interested can genuinely be undecided on whether these things are threats or not. Attempting to convince those resisting change is probably pointless, but here I go again. First, Alan Nicholl’s Thermodynamic Atmosphere Effect report by Joseph E. Postma. I […]

GE Sees Saudi Energy Sales Doubling as Gas Turbines Cut Oil Use

GE expects to double energy revenue from Saudi Arabia in the next five years by increasing sales of gas power turbines, curbing the amount of oil needed locally to produce electricity. With oil prices around $100 a barrel, Saudi Arabia and other oil producers in the Middle East will try to free more of their […]

Chevy had it right: See the USA (and its crudest places)

There’s a funny scene in the 1983 Chevy Chase movie Vacation, where the irrepressible ex-“Saturday Night Live” star, as the beleaguered Clark Griswold, is driving his family from Chicago to a prominent southern California amusement park while taking (willingly or unwillingly) the scenic route. Griswold, as the sentimental but clueless Dad who tries without success […]

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