Occupy is not dead, just resting

The desire for collective action remains strong What happens when you bring a group of young political activists together? You might be surprised. Over the last five days, in a sleepy part of Switzerland, we brought together members of the Occupy Movement, the Pirate Party and some of the biggest political NGOs for the first […]

ASPO-USA Meets with DOE Officials: Some Things We Learned

On Monday, December 17, representatives of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA (ASPO-USA) met with senior officials with the Energy Information Administration (EIA), including Administrator Adam Sieminski, and staff from other offices within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The meeting was arranged following a letter that ASPO-USA sent to […]

Done with Math

“The stark choice is between vasectomies and funerals. The sooner we get on with it, the better.” We complain about the slow progress of the climate talks, but what about the even slower progress on efforts to curb semen emissions? Consider this: each day the population of humans on the planet expands by more than […]

Tokyo Almost As Irradiated As Fukushima

We’ve documented the spread of radiation from Fukushima to Tokyo for a year and a half.  See this, this, this, this, this and this. Unfortunately, as the following recent headlines from Ene News show, things are only getting worse: Tokyo area turned out to be as contaminated as Fukushima -Kyoto Professor Tokyo Bay cesium even […]

UK uses more coal than natural gas

The United Kingdom continues to use more coal-fired power than natural gas, the Department of Energy and Climate Change recently reported. Coal-fired power increased by about 50 percent in the third quarter of 2012 to reach 28.66 terawatt-hours, while gas-fired generation fell 41 percent to 22.83 TWh. High natural gas prices deterred gas burning in […]

John Michael Greer: The Beginning of the World

Last Friday was, as I’m sure most of my readers noticed, an ordinary day. Here in the north central Appalachians, it was chilly but not unseasonably so, with high gray clouds overhead and a lively wind setting the dead leaves aswirl; wrens and sparrows hopped here and there in my garden, poking among the recently […]

Banana Republic v. Chevron

For nearly a decade, U.S. trial lawyers have been itching to capture their share of a multibillion case against Chevron. They teamed up with the government of Ecuador in finding a judge in the banana republic willing last year to slap a $19 billion judgment against the San Ramon, Calif.-based firm for alleged environmental damages. […]

Peak oil group presses EIA to temper optimistic crude outlook

In a first-ever meeting, peak oil proponents met with the US Energy Information Administration earlier this month to urge the nation’s top statistical agency to temper its rosy outlook on future US energy production. Representatives from The Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA (ASPO) met for two hours on December 17 […]

Saudi Arabia Must Review Its Oil Subsidies

Saudi Arabia will need to reduce fuel subsidies that are becoming an ever-greater fiscal burden as its population grows, a former adviser to the country’s oil minister said. The world’s biggest exporter of crude has a domestic fuel subsidy bill exceeding 162 billion riyals ($43 billion) a year, according to Mohammad Al-Sabban, an independent Saudi-based […]

Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?

Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”(1) Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2) Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture […]

Kuwait”s crude oil exports to China up 18.9 percent

Kuwait’s crude oil exports to China jumped 18.9 percent in November from a year earlier to 864,000 tons, equivalent to around 211,000 barrels per day (bpd), the latest government data showed. Kuwaiti share of Chinese crude oil imports reached 3.7 percent last month, compared to 3.2 percent the year before, according to the General Administration […]

Oil and gas price forecast for 2013

It’s the end of the year, which means it’s time to peer once again into my crystal ball and see what the future holds. It’s also the time when I like to look back at my previous forecasts and see how they held up. So without further ado, here are my forecasts for oil and […]

Iran Launches Week-Long Straits Of Hormuz Naval Drill On Friday, Next To US Aircraft Carrier

With the market still hopeful of some deus ex resolution to the Fiscal Cliff will take place in the last few trading sessions of the year (one where the market itself will not have to be the catalyst for such a resolution, because once the selling starts in earnest, who knows if and when it […]

Orlov: Escape from the Merry Christmas Zone

I am not in the US at the moment, but in Russia. This means several things. First, today is not Christmas. (Christmas is on January 7th, having something to do with the Julian calendar. It is 3/4 of a day per century fast, but since it is only used for religious holidays, nobody cares.) Second, […]

Iraq Kurds Halt Crude Exports

Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government stopped oil exports two days ago, according to an official of the central government. “Kurdish authorities halted completely crude shipments from fields in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq through the Turkish terminal of Ceyhan” on the Mediterranean, Abdel Ilah Qassem, adviser to Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Affairs Hussain […]

Post-Hyperinflationary Zimbabwe Welcomes The Holidays With 80% Unemployment, Empty ATMs And Paralyzed Transport

Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation, courtesy of one Gideon Gono – the brilliant man behind such grand monetary experiments as QE and its offshoots throughout the developed world – and numerous one hundred trillion dollar Zimbabwe dollar bills, may have come and gone, and the country may no longer have a functioning currency of its own, but it […]

Kunstler: In the Shadow of Christmas

Do you know why scenes or even just shots of freeways so seldom appear in the movies we watch? Because they are so depressing that nobody can stand to see them. The jolts of terror that you get in a horror movie at least inform you that you’re alive, but the sight of a freeway […]

Global crop production shows some signs of stagnating

After decades of rapidly growing global agricultural output, production of four of the world’s most important crops could be stagnating or even slowing in some regions, according to a new study published in Nature, a top scientific journal. The study, by the University of Minnesota’s Deepak Ray and four others, examined millions of census reports […]

Africa Cashes in on Mineral Wealth

Many of the fastest-growing countries in the world are in Africa, the poorest continent on the planet, but the potential for recently-discovered resources to generate broad-based inclusive development opportunities is massive and remains under-exploited. “I don’t believe that African nations are even close to understanding the enormous wealth that is their natural resource endowment,” David […]

The Outlook for Steady State Economics in 2013

The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) has been the leading organization in advancing the steady state economy as a policy goal for nearly ten years. Maybe that’s not saying much, because CASSE has been the only organization focused on advancing the steady state economy. But times, they are a-changin’. Others […]

UK government lifts hydraulic fracturing ban

The UK government lifted a temporary moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, opening the way for exploration and development of unconventional natural gas just days after UK Chancellor George Osborne announced a push for gas development in his Autumn Statement. The fracing mortarium was imposed last year while the UK government looked into events around a Cuadrilla […]

The 12 Charts Recapping The 12 Months Of 2012

From Gas Prices to Food Stamps; from ‘Bulk Ammo’ to Consumer Confidence; and from Earnings to Economic Data, these 12 charts of the 12 months of 2012 are definitely Not Jim Cramer’s.                             PDF available here. (h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer) ZeroHedge

EIA’s crappy forecasting

For instance, EIA, by its own admission, states that they had overestimated crude oil production 62% of the time; they had overestimated natural gas production 70.8% of the time; and they had overestimated natural gas consumption 69.6% of the time. Not the best track record by anyone’s estimation except perhaps EIA’s. It is also noteworthy […]

Energy in 2013: What’s next for oil, gas, renewables?

Last year saw a shift from a reliance on oil and coal to an exploration of untapped natural gas resources and renewable energy. Few will bet against this topsy-turvy, transitional energy state persisting through 2013 and beyond. For the coming year, fossil fuels will continue to dominate the energy market, but renewables will continue their […]

Iran claims it has worked around oil sanctions

Iran’s oil minister claims his country has successfully circumvented sanctions on the sale of its oil. State TV on Sunday broadcast comments by Rostam Ghasemi that the industry was in “bad shape” about two months ago due to the oil embargo by the West, “but we left the bottleneck behind, almost.” Ghasemi also said that […]

Pulling the Plug on Energy Waste: A Guide to Efficient Consumer Electronics

The typical American household owns about 25 gadgets–TVs, phones, video game consoles, cable boxes, computers, and other consumer electronics–many of which waste energy by continuing to draw power even when they’re off, or in stand-by mode. All those gadgets waste about several billion dollars worth of electricity each year, nationwide. According to the U.S Department […]

EU must drastically reduce its oil imports

The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet has now, 2012 December 23, published my article “EU must drastically reduce its oil imports”. In Swedish, “EU måste skära ner sin oljeimport drastiskt“. Michael Lardelli has made a great translation of the article and I have added some relevant photos and graphs. Every week you are around 1000 persons […]

Looking for a Post Peak Career? Forget Law, Consider Geology

In 2007, Byron King was chatting with Mr. Wang, a marine geologist from China, and what he learned knocked his socks off: “[T]here are about 40,000 or 50,000 students studying geology in China today at the university level. Maybe more, but I do not want to give you a number that is too high.” That’s […]

There’s no such thing as energy independence in our globalized, fossil-fueled world

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Anyone who tells you that energy independence can be achieved based on globally traded commodities such as oil, coal and natural gas is either trying to mislead you or doesn’t understand the structure of energy markets. As of 2011 fossil fuels produced 83 percent of the world’s energy according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration […]

Construction of World’s First High-Temperature Nuclear Reactor Begins in China

Last week, China’s National Nuclear Safety Administration granted a permit for the Shandong province modular nuclear power plant project to proceed to construction. This will be the world’s first commercial demonstration plant for a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) using pebble bed technology, which technology was developed in Germany. The German 300-MW demo plant at the […]

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