China Passes U.S. to Become World’s Biggest Trading Nation

China surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest trading nation last year as measured by the sum of exports and imports of goods, a milestone in the Asian nation’s challenge to the U.S. dominance in global commerce that emerged after the end of World War II. U.S. exports and imports of goods last year […]

Tech Talk – Future Bakken production and hydrofracking

Before there were refrigerators folks kept drinks cool by putting them into clay jars that had been soaked in water. The evaporation of the water from the clay cooled the container and its contents, which today includes wine bottles. On the other hand, for many years artisans have taken clay in a slightly different form, […]

Orlov: The Problem of Excessive Scale

This is an excerpt from The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit. Please order your copy for shipment in May. In his excellent book The Breakdown of Nations the maverick economist Leopold Kohr makes several stunning yet, upon reflection, commonsense observations. He points out that small states have tended to be far more culturally productive […]

Hurrah for the free market! (Can you leave now, please?)

The free market has served the world well. But its best time is over. Guest post by Graeme Maxton Free marketeers, please take a bow. It is time for those with other ideas to take centre stage. Let’s hear it for the free marketeers! The free market has been a wonder of our age. Its […]

Saudi-Japan oil accord on cards

Japan and Saudi Arabia will sign an agreement this weekend that will allow Tokyo to make emergency requests for additional supplies of crude oil, Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported in its yesterday’s edition. The agreement would set up a telephone hotline between the two governments to allow Japan to quickly seek additional oil supplies in the […]

Economy, Collapse, And The Interconnectedness Of All Things

There’s a lot of startling news coming out from a lot of different sources and we should be paying attention. Here’s what I’m reading and seeing, and, quite frankly, getting more concerned about almost on a daily basis. While most people are paying attention to Europe’s financial woes—and they are serious—there’s a lot of instability […]

Rationally Speaking, We Are All Apocalyptic Now

We are all apocalyptic now, or at least we should be, if we are rational. Because “apocalyptic” is typically associated with religious fanaticism and death cults – things that rational people tend not to take literally or seriously – this claim requires some explanation. First, a definition: The term is most commonly used in reference […]

Europe is Burning More American Coal

Natural gas production is booming in the United States. The resulting low natural gas prices are helping the fuel displace other energy sources, most particularly the use of coal to produce electric power. As U.S. demand for coal falls, so has its price and as a result. One big buyer: Europe. Ironies abound in this […]

Venezuela Launches First Nuke In Currency Wars, Devalues Currency By 46%

While the rest of the developed world is scrambling here and there, politely prodding its central bankers to destroy their relative currencies, all the while naming said devaluation assorted names, “quantitative easing” being the most popular, here comes Venezuela and shows the banana republics of the developed world what lobbing a nuclear bomb into a […]

Peak Oil: Ex-BP CEO Tony Hayward on high oil prices

Tony Hayward giving a very interesting interview January 2013

US Energy Growth in 2012

2012 was a remarkable year for energy in the US, with domestic output of oil, gas, wind and solar energy all advancing strongly.  This was the result of an unfolding revolution in unconventional oil and gas, along with federal, state and local incentives and regulations promoting renewable energy.  Yet despite extensive media coverage and vocal […]

Yemen’s main oil pipeline attacked, pumping halted

Attackers blew up Yemen’s main oil export pipeline on Friday, halting the flow of crude, an official working for the state-run Safer oil company said, the latest in a series of attacks. Yemen’s oil and gas pipelines have been repeatedly sabotaged by insurgents and tribesmen, especially since anti-government protests created a power vacuum in 2011, […]

Full Throttle Ahead: US Tips Global Power Scales with Fracking

The United States is sitting on massive natural gas and oil reserves that have the potential to shift the geopolitical balance in its favor. Worries are increasing in Russia and the Arab states of waning influence and falling market prices. Williston, North Dakota, is a bleak little city in the vast American prairie. It’s dusty […]

New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed Civilisations

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the […]

The Water-Food-Energy Nexus

SABMiller’s Andy Wales on how to manage the inevitable trade-offs between scarce resources. *** By 2050, demand for resources is set to increase significantly as the global population grows to nine billion and becomes more prosperous. Global economic growth is being driven largely by emerging markets. Over the medium term, the World Bank estimates economic […]

Our Investment Sinkhole Problem

We are used to expecting that more investment will yield more output, but in the real world, things don’t always work out that way. Figure 1. Comparison of 2005 to 2011 percent change in real GDP vs percent change in oil consumption, both on a per capita basis. (GDP per capita on a PPP basis […]

U.S. ‘Divestment’ Movement Gaining Momentum

A months-old national campaign to convince U.S. colleges, universities and city governments to withdraw investments from the world’s largest oil and gas companies has seen some notable initial successes. On Tuesday, a city supervisor in San Francisco introduced resolutions calling on the city’s retirement fund to “divest” all money it has in fossil fuel companies […]

Saudi Arabia Stabilizes Oil Output as OPEC Maintain Cap

Saudi Arabia kept production near 9 million barrels for a second month, according to a Gulf official with knowledge of the country’s oil policy, helping to maintain OPEC output at close to the group’s official ceiling. The world’s largest crude exporter produced 9.05 million barrels a day in January, little changed from last month when […]

Drop in Oil Consumption Signals Power of Free Market

Like many people, my faith in capitalism was badly shaken by the crash of 2008 and its aftermath. I sat by, appalled as some capitalists denied climate change and used the economy as an excuse to continue their planet-destroying practices. I rooted for regulation, until Obama, who once seemed to be the environmentalist’s last great […]

China sets timetable for cleaner fuel standards

China’s cabinet has issued a timetable for oil companies to deliver cleaner fuel nationwide beginning this year, the Xinhua news agency reported, but the new standards won’t become mandatory for four years despite rising public anger over choking air pollution. Thick smog has blanketed many Chinese cities in recent weeks and auto emissions are among […]

Draft Arctic Oil Spill Agreement “Inadequate”

Environmentalists are warning that a meeting of environment ministers that took place Monday in Sweden has agreed on a weak and inadequate response plan in case of an oil spill in the Arctic Ocean. According to Greenpeace, an environment watchdog, a leaked copy of the document suggests that the eight member states that make up […]

John Michael Greer: The Center Cannot Hold

When William Butler Yeats put the phrase I’ve used as the title for this week’s post into the powerful and prescient verses of “The Second Coming,” he had deeper issues in mind than the crisis of power in a declining American empire.  Still, the image is anything but irrelevant here; the political evolution of the […]

The Myth of “Saudi America”

Like swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, every December some 20,000 geoscientists flock to San Francisco for the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Slate readers have already heard about a presentation with a particularly eye-catching title, but for me some of the most thought-provoking news came in a prestigious all-Union session with the […]

Bloom Energy Fined For Underpaying Workers From Mexico

Bloom Energy Corp. has been ordered by a U.S. District Court Judge to pay $31,922 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages to employees from Mexico after the company was found to have willfully violated the minimum wage, overtime and record-keeping provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Bloom, a manufacturer of solid […]

Rising gas prices are hitting Americans in the wallet

With pump prices at their highest level on record for this time of year, the stage is set for a even greater climb in gasoline prices and expenditures than in 2012. Retail gasoline prices have surged 17 cents in a week to top $3.50 a gallon on average, posting the highest prices on record for […]

Oil Prices

A while since we’ve looked at oil prices around here.  The chart above shows the two main benchmarks – Brent and WTI – and the spread between them.  These days Brent is a better indicator of global oil market conditions, as well as gas prices on the US coasts, while the spread of WTI to […]

The Achilles’ Heel of Algal Biofuels – Peak Phosphate

The following is an update to a previous posting. If anything, the situation might be worse that I had concluded then, but the issue of phosphate rock reserves is more complex than I had deduced. So, this article is as written before, but with a few more numbers worked through, to account for “real” phosphate rock, […]

Peak Oil: Dambisa Moyo on China’s approach to securing resources.

Dambisa Moyo talking about the worlds needs for resources.CNN June 2012

New Book: A Child Free America

Despite doom and gloom predictions that never came to pass, overpopulation alarmists continue to make their case that society must restrict the procreation of human beings. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book Population Bomb said that hundreds of millions of people would perish as a result of an overpopulated earth. The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last’s […]

China at risk with Venezuela oil bet

Referring to the evolving political crisis in Venezuela, a Shanghai Academy of Social Science scholar, Zhang Jiazhe, recently remarked, if Hugo Chavez dies, “the diplomatic effect on China won’t be large because China-US competition is in Asia not Latin America. Economically, China-Venezuela relations are based on oil and weapons sales”. Back in 2006, Beijing University […]

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