Research Shows Peak Lithium Concerns Overhyped and Unfounded

When M. King Hubbert first presented his peak oil theory to the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, he faced a lot of criticism. However, his prediction that US petroleum production would peak in the late 1960s to early 1970s proved true in 1970, and foreshadowed the 1973 energy crisis. In 1974, riding the success of […]

What After Peak Oil: Oil, Lithium Batteries, Fuel Cells, Or All Of Them?

In a blog published more than four-and-a-half years ago, I argued that global oil production may have already peaked (or will do so in a couple of years). I then contended that peak oil, together with global warming, will force most countries to reduce both their demand for oil in response to an ever-diminishing supply […]

The One And Only Place Fracking Is Causing Water Contamination

Bloomberg has a report on an EPA investigation into fracking for shale gas – Fracking Is Safe—Except in Wyoming. Louis Meeks, a hay farmer in Pavillion, Wyo., holds a mason jar under a faucet in his house and turns on the water. It’s a demonstration he’s given to a slew of neighbors and government officials. […]

Complex Systems Theorists Predict We’re About One Year From Global Food Riots

“In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would […]

The Repricing of Oil

Now that oil’s price revolution – a process that took ten years to complete – is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin? Most of the structural changes that carried oil from the old equilibrium price of $25 to the new equilibrium price of […]

The Historic Demise Of The Ever-Shrinking Dollar

The almighty Dollar is looking less mighty these days. By almost every measure, the purchasing power of the US Dollar is in precipitous decline. The following infographic, whose contents should be well-known to our readers, visualizes the sad state of affairs that the average American seems to have ignored for far too long. And since […]

The Declining West: Tragedy or Comedy?

During the Vietnam War, Sweden was an independent country with a moral conscience, and Sweden gave sanctuary to US war protestors who refused the draft. Washington realized the cost to itself and purchased the Swedish government in order to prevent a reoccurrence of moral conscience on the part of any Western government. In the aftermath […]

Oil and Water Create an Uncertain Future in the Southern Wild

Cajun fishing and hunting guide Ryan Lambert has weathered his share of storms over the years. He rebuilt his house and lodge deep in the Louisiana bayou seven years ago after Katrina rampaged across the area like a wild boar through roseau cane. Two years later, he struggled to rebuild his fishing business decimated by […]

Ice prompts Shell to halt oil drilling in waters off Alaska

A day after it began, the first oil drilling off in the Arctic waters off Alaska was halted today because of an approaching mass of ice, Royal Dutch Shell tells the Associated Press. The drilling — a narrow 1,400-foot-deep “pilot hole” to check for natural gas or obstructions — began Sunday before dawn in the […]

Twenty more “Niles” needed to feed growing population

The world needs to find the equivalent of the flow of 20 Nile rivers by 2025 to grow enough food to feed a rising population and help avoid conflicts over water scarcity, a group of former leaders said on Monday. Factors such as climate change would strain freshwater supplies and nations including China and India […]

American consumption habits

It is well known that Americans consume far more natural resources and live much less sustainably than people from any other large country of the world. “A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil,” […]

To feed a growing population, ‘bet on the ocean’ and innovation

I once read an article in The Guardian that said this:  Over the next 50 years humans will need to produce more food than all the food ever produced over the past 10,000 years combined. There is no disputing that our global food supply is stretched to the limit. We already use most of the […]

Kunstler: Zeitgeist Failure

       In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction — when untruth, delusion, and deception rule – politics is mere advertising, which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. The trouble at this moment in history is that the American public’s wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality […]

Oman the comeback kid of oil

Oil was slipping from Oman’s grasp five years ago. Unlike its neighbours Saudi Arabia and the UAE with giant fields of the kind that make oil majors salivate, Oman’s reserves tend to be scattered in smaller deposits, ponds rather than lakes. Fields were reaching old age quickly, which translated into thick, sticky crude that needed […]

The perils of alarmism

  How does carbon dioxide, a compound essential to life, come to be treated as a dangerous pollutant? How does hydraulic fracturing, a well-completion method used safely for 60 years, become controversial enough to impede the most promising energy-supply advances in at least a generation? How does a strategically important pipeline that would cross an […]

Iran in Talks to Sell Oil to Egypt

Iran is in talks to sell oil to Egypt, officials on both sides say, part of a broader push to make up for lost European Union sales and a renewed engagement between the two countries. Tehran has approached Cairo to sell 2 million barrels of oil—worth over $200 million—that are part of a stock of […]

Matthew Stein Asks “How Prepared Are You?”

During the height of the ‘Goldilocks economy’ of the mid-1990s, Mat Stein wrote When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency, a master compendium of do-it-yourself preparation skills. Fast-forward to today’s Great Recession, drought-stricken, $100+ oil, post-Katrina, post-Fukushima world — many are realizing the prudence of taking basic precautionary steps […]

China’s implied oil demand falls to 22-mth low

China’s implied oil demand in August fell 0.8 percent from a year earlier to 8.92 million barrels per day (bpd), the lowest since Oct 2010, Reuters calculations based on preliminary government data showed on Monday. The daily rate was 3.7 percent, or 340,000 bpd, lower than the 9.26 million bpd in July, Reuters figures showed. […]

Wood Could be the Future of Wind Turbine Masts

© TimberTower In a bid to lower the costs of wind turbine masts, as well as enable taller installations, a German engineering firm is pursuing a novel method of building them – using wood instead of steel. The new design for wind turbine masts uses timber and laminated wood panels (all from sustainable and certified […]

Peak Oil: The GOP’s Eleven-Day Future

In fact, we will become more vulnerable over the long run, because the renewed embrace of fossil fuels will induce us to postpone the inevitable transition to a postcarbon economy. Sooner or later, the economic, environmental and climate consequences of intensive fossil fuel use will force everyone on the planet to abandon reliance on these […]

The Crisis Shell Game

In the past 18 months it has dawned on me that I have been caught in one of the oldest cons in history, the shell game. This shell game is of a different sort. Let’s call this one the Crisis shell game. In this game each shell is marked with an “E” standing for Energy, […]

Shell Starts Drilling off Alaska North Coast

Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) said its Noble Discoverer rig started drilling in the Chukchi Sea off the north coast of Alaska, beginning preparations to become the first company to drill for oil in the U.S. Arctic in decades. The company has been given permission by the U.S. Interior Department to perform preparatory work as […]

Bombs Kill 58 in Iraq, Including 14 in Oil-Producing Region

A series of bomb attacks killed 34 people in Iraq, including more than a dozen in the northern oil region of Kirkuk, Deputy Health Minister Khamees al-Saad said. Another 327 people were wounded in the blasts, al-Saad said in a phone interview from Baghdad. Seven recruits were slain in a suicide car bombing and 17 […]

Can Israel surprise Iran? Maybe not, but could still strike

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cancellation of a security cabinet session on Iran following a media leak last week laid bare a conundrum long troubling Israeli strategists: could they count on any element of surprise in a war on their arch-foe? Possibly not. Years of public speculation, much of it stoked by official statements in Israel […]

Finding Your Calling in a Transition World

So you’ve read plenty about The Great Turningour society is going through.  And you fully understand (perhaps unlike millions of others) that the old ways are fading away, and that your “job,” your career, your livelihood is going to look kind of different. You’ve kind of realized that your parents’ expectations as they raised you, […]

Our years of magical thinking: interview with James Kunstler

“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson “That’s a pithy way of saying where our country, perhaps the developed world, is at right now,” notes author James Howard Kunstler. We’ve blown past the mileposts for global peak oil, says Kunstler in his new book, Too Much Magic: Wishful […]

Ugo Bardi: The next ten billion years

It is not surprising that we found the future fascinating; after all, we are all going there. But the future is never what it used to be and it is said that predictions are always difficult, especially those dealing with the future. Nevertheless, it is possible to study the future, which is something different from […]

Tech Talk -Chinese gas shale development

On occasion, the British Government goes through an internal shake-up that leads to various pundits trying to explain to us lesser mortals what it all means. Thus, with changes in the Ministers who work in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, there is a suggestion that the UK is pulling back from their commitment […]

The next great oil crisis

Technology is making it possible to tap vast new oil supplies. But that could be the proverbial drop in the gas tank compared to rising demand overseas. After nearly a decade of warnings that the world’s oil supply was running out, Americans now are hearing about technology breakthroughs that can unlock vast U.S. deposits of […]

Fracking in California takes less water

In Pennsylvania, the controversial practice of fracking can consume 4.5 million gallons of water per well, the liquid pumped deep underground to crack rocks that contain natural gas. In parts of Texas, fracking a well often takes 6 million gallons. But in California, where fracking is starting to spread, the average amount of water involved is just […]

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