Colleen Carroll Campbell: The real population bomb

In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul R. Erlich opened his bestselling book, “The Population Bomb,” with this declaration: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can […]

ConocoPhillips Gets Aussie Gas To Satisfy Chinese Demand

ConocoPhillips recently announced that it will be investing in a joint venture with Origin Energy and Sinopec by purchasing a 42.5% stake in the Australia Pacific LNG project. [1] The project is estimated to have a gross capital expense of $20 billion with a peak capacity of 115-120 million barrels of oil equivalent of natural […]

From the mouths of babes: when tiny tots talk recession

When my son was in kindergarten, at a parent-teacher meeting his teacher talked about how wide and varied his vocabulary was. At the age oof four he used words like client, news reporting, itinerary, etc., and as she told the other parents, they looked suitably impressed. Not me; I realized that he was only using […]

Tell Me Again, Please – What Business Are We In?

“The railroads collapsed because they thought they were in the railroad business, when really they were in the transportation business. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they were railroad-oriented […]

John Michael Greer: Salvaging Science

Last week’s post on the collapse of American education strayed a certain distance from the core theme of the present series of posts, the reinvention of a “green wizardry” based on methods and technologies tried and proven during the energy crises of the Seventies. There’s a purpose to the divagation, since what’s being discussed here […]

The Need for a Real Domestic Alternative Energy Policy in the USA

Alternative energy (or renewable energy) is a new manufacturing industry paradigm that is in its infancy. However, the discussion is not new, and it looks as if the United States has positioned itself to be behind history on what can be a very promising industry for a stumbling economy. After the oil shortages in the […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Parsing the GDP

Lost in the furor over the debt crisis last week came the news that the U.S. economy expanded at an annual rate of only 0.4 percent in the first quarter and 1.3 percent in the second. As these numbers were well below what economists were expecting, the revelation that the US was not coming out […]

Petrobras to Double Oil Output by 2015

Perhaps the biggest foreign-policy story of the past decade, thoroughly overlooked by the American media after 9/11 and its subsequent monomaniacal focus on terrorism, security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the fact that Latin America has essentially moved away from Washington’s influence. This quiet revolution from below, in rejecting the Monroe Doctrine, […]

Max Keiser Interviews James Kunstler

Peak Everything! Peak Resources means flat to negative growth year after year Max Keiser and James Kunstler discuss Peak Oil and Peak resources on the Kaeiser Report… Must watch episode… This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, report on haircuts on T-bills and rebounds in silver. In the second half of the show, Max […]

ICE CEO: WTI no longer reflects global oil price

The head of futures exchange IntercontinentalExchange Inc (ICE.N) said Wednesday the WTI crude contract no longer reflected global oil prices, adding that the price divergence from the Brent contract “may continue for some time.” “While WTI remains an important U.S. oil benchmark to us, it no longer reflects global prices,” ICE Chief Executive Jeffrey Sprecher […]

You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers

Yesterday’s post about recurring suggestion that we build giant water infrastructure was premised in part on this year’s extremely wet year on the Missouri-Mississippi system, the “Why not build a big pipe from there to the desert” argument. As I mention, I hear this idea a lot, but especially this year, when it seems like […]

The Rolling Urgency Paradox

We have only ten years to act on climate! Four years ago we only had ten years to act! Ten years ago we only had ten years to act! Twenty years ago, the same! This is very poor messaging, even though in a sense it is true. Let me try to explain how this could […]

Record Radiation Levels at Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Record levels of radiation have been recorded at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant reactor, just months after the nuclear accident resulting from the earthquake and tsunami in March. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reported that Geiger counters – a hand-held device used to measure radiation – registered their highest possible reading at the site […]

Who Killed Economic Growth?

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. Richard Heinberg propose a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits. Why have mainstream […]

We’re Not Facing A Shortage of Energy, But A Longage of Expectations

This week’s interview is one of the most important discussions we’ve had to-date on energy, its supply/demand dynamics, and the tremendous impact it has on our economic and social identity. It is clear now that we are staring at a future of declining output at a time the world is demanding an ever-increasing amount. Nate […]

The future of cheap energy: Underground Coal Gasification

Between 2000 and 2010 world energy use increased by 2.6 billion metric tons of oil equivalent per year. Of this increase, a little over half came from coal, and 72% of the coal increase came from China. The vast exploitation of Chinese coal, the cheapest source of electricity in the world, enabled western nations to […]

Probing the role of the sun in an era of global warming

Some skeptics have suggested the real culprit behind rising temperatures is increased solar activity. But a wide variety of data and experiments still provide no solid evidence to refute the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are the major reason the planet is heating up. Anyone who doubts that the Sun has a profound impact […]

The ITER construction site is in progress

Fusion for Energy (F4E) and COMSA EMTE, a Spanish company with a proven track record in the field of construction have signed a contract for building the ITER platform which aims to become one of Europe’s biggest engineering sites. The objective of the contract, which is expected to run for at least one year and […]

The Demise of the Consumer Economy

The consumer-debt-based economy is toast, but everyone’s too terrified by its demise to acknowledge this reality, never mind consider a new model. The entire creaking economy is based on a few ideas which no longer work: 1) Create “aggregate demand” (i.e. consumer demand, which then creates business demand) and the economy “grows,” people are hired […]

Oil facing a glut as manufacturing melts down

With the global manufacturing meltdown underway, the truth is the demand outlook for oil is getting grim and prices may face even more pressure as OPEC oil production increases. OPEC output hit the highest level since 2008, a fact that may give OPEC sheiks nightmares as economic data across the globe begins to falter. First […]

When oil and gas are depleted

A civilization built on fossil fuels In this year, 2011, we are enjoying a lifestyle beyond the most optimistic dreams of past generations. We are benefitting from the whirlwind of achievements in science and technology during the last hundred years. There has never been a century like the one just passed, and there will never be another […]

Big oil break-up signals Rockefeller legacy could unravel

When John D Rockefeller created the vertically integrated oil company in the late 19th century, he became probably history’s richest man, worth US$663 billion (Dh2.43 trillion) in today’s money. But last Thursday, the US oil giant ConocoPhillips, an offspring of his creation, decided to undo his work by splitting in two. Is this the beginning […]

Is our future our past?

If there’s one thing most post peak oil commentators have given too little consideration to it’s how goods will be moved and how farms will function in our scary and fast approaching future. Sure there’s the fraternity that talk about bicycles and walking and they’re on the right track, particularly if you’re lucky or wise […]

Jesters, Economics, and American Dollar Supremacy

The debt debate has been going on all summer, a 2 months and running theatrical experience of court jesters parading about while the United States economy teeters on the edge. On both sides of the aisle have been ridiculous solutions that are showing the world daily, America is willing to sacrifice its citizens for the […]

Richard Heinberg interviewed on The End of Growth

Richard Heinberg chats with Michael Ray Dresser about his new book The End of Growth. Richard and Michael discuss the causes of the economic crisis and meaningful responses to it. download

Israel ‘ready to negotiate borders with Palestinians’

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has bowed to US pressure by agreeing for the first time that a Palestinian state should roughly follow the contours of the 1967 ceasefire lines separating the West Bank from Israel. The offer, which emerged tonight appeared to represent a major climb-down by Mr Netanyahu, who has consistently refused […]

The Problem with a Carbon Tax

Fuel is a luxury, sometimes. And sometimes it is a necessity. If we rely entirely on a “price” on carbon, and carbon remains fungible, what happens? Well, in a sense we already know. We in the US have encouraged the use of farmland to produce corn to produce ethanol. This notoriously contributes to the rise […]

Kunstler: Weimar Meets Waterloo

The Sunday night news, scant as it is these days despite the grotesque exertions of over a thousand cable TV stations, showed the old familiar faces lit up with crocodile smiles. The Republic was saved, surprise, surprise, by a last-minute fugue of reasonableness, when all concerned decided that putting the business-end of a double-barreled 20-guage […]

Tidal Power Coming To Wales, Thanks To E.U.

EarthTechling has a report on tidal power developments in Wales – Tidal Power Coming To Wales, Thanks To E.U.. Scotland might be the leader, but other parts of the United Kingdom are jumping on the tidal-energy bandwagon. The latest entry from this sceptered isle: Wales, a country of just 3 million people, but with some […]

ASPO-USA: Peak Oil Teachers

Something truly remarkable is happening in a thousand places all over the world. It is happening in classrooms – university graduate classrooms and Montessori kindergartens, in formal learning sites at venerable institutions and in newer educational sites such as distance learning programs and in impromptu classrooms put together by churches, book clubs and after school […]

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