Peak Silver: Impacts of a Global Depression, Declining Ore Grades …

The world is about to peak in global silver production.  This will not occur due to a lack of silver to mine, but rather as a result of the peaking of world energy resources, declining ore grades, and a falling Energy Returned On Invested – EROI.  The information below will describe a future world that very few […]

Still More Never-Ending Efforts To Skate Past The Facts Of Peak Oil (Pt 3)

For starters, I’ll offer some familiar and popular contrasting views on the topic of Peak Oil and oil supply (the misleading, incorrect claim made in the first sentence below was addressed in the first of my two prior posts): “The theory known as ‘peak oil’ has at its core the belief that we are rapidly […]

Kunstler: Occupy Everything

“Recession Officially Over,” The New York Times’ lead headline declared around 7 o’clock this morning. (Watch: they’ll change it.) That was Part A. Part B said, “US Incomes Kept Falling.” Welcome to What-The-Fuck Nation. I suppose if you include the cost of things like the number of auto accident victims transported by EMT squads as […]

Pipelines: US advances change rules of the game

Canada has long billed its oil and natural gas resources as a solution to its southern neighbour’s ravenous demand for energy. But the discovery of a way to extract natural gas from tightly packed shale rock has meant the US no longer needs to import as much natural gas. And an environmentalist movement against the […]

Nicole Foss – How I Prepared My Home for Peak Oil and Economic Uncertainty

Nicole Foss, senior editor of financial blog The Automatic Earth, where she writes as Stoneleigh, describes her personal preparation for peak oil and economic uncertainty. Foss returns to North America in November 2011 for the International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership organized by Local Future non-profit, and directed by Aaron […]

A Time Frame for Systemic Collapse

A time frame for systemic collapse can be extrapolated easily from the on-line document The Coming Chaos, an abridgement of a larger text (see link below). The most significant page is at the start of the text, the chart of estimated past and future oil production. Most of the other time frames will parallel that […]

Saudis See No Reason to Raise Oil Output Capacity

Saudi Arabia—A senior oil executive said Saudi Arabia is unlikely to proceed with plans to raise its oil output capacity to 15 million barrels a day, as expansion plans in other producing countries such as Iraq and Brazil should be enough to satisfy world markets. “There is no reason for Saudi Aramco to pursue 15 […]

Anatomy Of A Food Price Spike

        I have been posting updates on the most recent, global food price spike since February 2011 – most recently in June.  Yesterday, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) released its most recent data on the prices of food in international trade.  As seen in the graph above, the overall index and its various components […]

Al-Naimi Says World Oil Market Is Not Oversupplied as Demand Fluctuating

Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali Al- Naimi said there’s no excess supply in world oil markets and that the kingdom has been adjusting output to match fluctuating demand over recent months. “There is no oversupply in the market right now,” he told reporters in Dhahran today. The country, OPEC’s biggest producer, will keep pumping at […]

Dieoff Debunked: EROEI, October 2011

So I haven’t posted for a while, mainly because I’ve been quietly living my life and not as doomers would assume busily packing away guns and ammo and MREs and fortifying my basement for the eventual onslaught of oil-apocalypse zombie accountants. True there’s been a *financial-world-induced* recession and low growth continues but far as I […]

Podcast: Chris Martenson Interviews Carolyn Baker: Emotional Resilience

Carolyn Baker, therapist and prominent advocate for culturing emotional preparedness in times of transition, looks to the future and sees a great many people at risk of unprecedented loss. Loss of jobs, loss of lifestyle, loss of wealth, loss of relationships – and quite possibly loss of life – as society becomes increasingly traumatized by […]

Destroying dreams the peak oil way

It is with some trepidation that I prepare for a trip that includes an appearance before college students who generally find the idea of peak oil so disturbing that they do not want to even hear about it. And, I can’t blame them. They must think that I have come to destroy their dreams, dreams […]

Does Expensive Oil Inevitably Cause Recession?

There is a popular belief that once U.S. petroleum expenditures exceed some threshold, recession results. Writing at the Harvard Business Review blog, Chris Nelder and Gregor MacDonald present this position clearly:   “The connection between oil shocks and recessions has been understood for decades. We have ample historical evidence that when petroleum expenditures reach 5% of GDP, […]

A Counter Intuitive Look at Crude and Drilling

Before summarizing the offshore rig markets, we would like to take this opportunity to reframe crude oil prices and their predictive signal for future demand. The synopsis is simple: when monthly average oil prices fall over a three month period, historical data indicates a high probability that world demand for oil will be lower six […]

Pakistan’s energy shortage

ALTHOUGH Pakistan makes international news for terrorist attacks, anti-American demonstrations and its alleged support for insurgents in Afghanistan, it is the basic inability to switch on a light that is pushing this volatile country closer to the edge. Popular anger over Pakistan’s crippling electricity shortage boiled over on to the streets this week, with riots […]

Another bailout for the banks?

You might have thought things had changed in world financial markets since the U.S. subprime mortgage disaster. After all, we were told at the time that if taxpayers didn’t open their wallets and bail out the banks, we could face a complete meltdown of the global financial system and an economic fate rivaling the Great […]

Post oil: Glimpses of life after fossil fuel

Americans like to imagine the future. From the world’s fairs of the early 20th century to futuristic magazine features in the 1950s to the 1980s “Back to the Future” films, we love dreaming up what might come next. When we dream, it turns out, we dream without oil. The show-stealer at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 […]

How do you define peak oil?

The debate over peak oil can get pretty slippery at times. Geologists will point out the (obvious, banal) truth that there’s a finite amount of oil out there beneath the rocks and, at some point, we have to reach maximum production. Economists and other peak-oil skeptics, for their part, will say that markets can always adjust. If […]

Fukushima Nuclear Plant has 38-Hour Margin for Meltdown

Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Saturday released an estimate saying that if the water injections cooling its stricken Fukushima power plant are halted again, the fuel rods could start melting within 38 hours, unleashing another wave of cancerous radioactive fallout. If the plant is hit by another quake and tsunami as powerful as the March […]

John Michael Greer: The peak oil initiation

I sometimes wonder what historians of the far future will think as they pore over what’s left of the records of our own time. It’s unlikely that they’ll have a great deal more to go on than, say, Renaissance scholars had when they started to piece together the story of Rome’s decline and fall; our […]

The other side of peak oil: Coping locally with upcoming global changes

Transitioning to post-peak oil Our small city is attracting some rather big names in the sustainability world lately. On the heels of anti-GMO activist Jeffrey M. Smith’s Sept. 19 talk at the Chico Masonic Family Center, Boulder, Colo.-based “transition movement” speaker/writer Dr. Carolyn Baker will be in town to give an evening talk, from 7 to 9 p.m. […]

The Rise and Fall of the Middle Class

The industrial revolution introduced the world to a new prosperity never seen before. New sources of energy enabled mechanized and automated industrial processes to increase per capita output and free up labor to participate in value-added activities. Energy from coal and oil substituted manual labor many times over, leading to faster transportation, faster construction, greater […]

The Energy Glass Is More Than Half Full

A recent comment from a frequent reader got me thinking about the good news that has accumulated on the energy front, even as the rest of the economy has bogged down in pessimism. There’s actually quite a lot of it, though perhaps it has been easy to miss, because most of these developments look like bad […]

The Zeitgeist Movement Foresight | Occupy Everything | Peter Joseph – Michael Ruppert

The Zeitgeist Movement Foresight – Occupy Everything – End of The Financial Paradigm [ Featuring Peter Joseph – Michael C. Ruppert ] Zeitgeist is Right. The Revolution is Now

Peter Joseph [ The Zeitgeist Movement ] on LifeBoat Hour w/ Michael C Ruppert.

Peter Joseph [ The Zeitgeist Movement ] on LifeBoat Hour w/ Michael C Ruppert. Sept 4th 2011.

US cuts funding for UN population fund

A House committee voted Wednesday to eliminate some $50 million that President Barack Obama requested for the U.N. organization that helps women and children in developing countries with reproductive health and family planning, a reflection of growing Republican anger with both the world body and its work in China. The GOP-led Foreign Affairs Committee approved […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Turmoil Erupts

The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal have gone into full crisis mode with live blogs continuously reporting unfolding events. Equity markets are falling and London oil prices have been flirting with $100 a barrel for the first time since February. Talk of recessions, depressions, and even collapse of the euro zone is everywhere. There […]

A ‘SpOILed’ defense of fossil fuels

The good news is that, on the basis of its trailer (see below), I really want to see “SpOILed,” a just-released documentary about our fossil fuel future by a New Mexico-based filmmaker named Mark Mathis. The bad news is that I don’t expect it to be good — you know how people rubberneck at car wrecks? The […]

There Will Be Oil, But At What Price?

Daniel Yergin’s typically sunny outlook on oil in his recent Wall Street Journal piece, “There Will Be Oil,” suggested that technology and new energy discoveries would avert any of the economic disasters portended by peak oil. We found Mr. Yergin’s dismissal of these risks premature and repetitive. After all, he has asserted since 2004 that […]

Saudi police open fire on civilians as protests gain momentum

Pro-democracy protests which swept the Arab world earlier in the year have erupted in eastern Saudi Arabia over the past three days, with police opening fire with live rounds and many people injured, opposition activists say. Saudi Arabia last night confirmed there had been fighting in the region and that 11 security personnel and three […]

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