NASA-funded fusion rocket could shoot humans to Mars in 30 days

A research group at the University of Washington, funded by NASA, is about to build a fusion-powered rocket. This rocket, if it can be successfully built, could propel a manned spacecraft to Mars in just 30 days — compared to NASA’s estimate of four years for a Martian round trip using current technology. The UW […]

Adding and removing complexity

An article on the difficulty of building truly green buildings and recent discussions about the healthcare system triggered thoughts about a major transition problem that is occurring over and over again—the problem of a complex hierarchy that demands feeding with extra energy. Previous posts about the added complexity that digitization brings are pertinent here, but […]

Kurds Sell First Oil Internationally, despite Baghdad Warning

The semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan has sold the first crude oil cargo on the international market despite a warning from the central government in Baghdad, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, party said on its website Saturday. The PUK, which is chaired by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who is currently receiving medical treatment in […]

Super-efficient laptop, high-speed electric car to be reality

A laptop that runs for eight hours without a recharge or a high-speed electric car covering around 300 km in one fill may appear a distant dream for many Indians. But, it would soon be a reality with India set to enter the highly competitive world of ‘super-energy efficient’ appliances. The government would be announcing […]

Japan’s Tepco may run out of space for radioactive water

apan’s Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Monday it does not have enough tank space should it need to move contaminated water from storage pits that started leaking over the weekend at its wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two years after the worst nuclear disaster in a quarter of a century, Tepco is struggling […]

Proposed expansion of energy agency looks a seismic shift

When the International Energy Agency was launched in 1974, the French foreign minister at the time, Michel Jobert, called it “an instrument of war”. The IEA was the industrialised countries’ counter to Opec and the first oil shock. Now, as the Financial Times reported on Thursday, the IEA is seeking a closer association with the […]

30,000 Greek Households Lose Electricity Each Month

Since the Greek government enacted the remarkable law that property taxes will be enforced via the electricity providers in the beleaguered country, an incredible 30,000 households per month have seen their power supply cut off. Ekathimerini reports that some 700,000 customers have now had their debts restructured (with payment plans) as part of the billing […]

Darwin Well Comes Up Dry

Repsol’s Darwin well in the Norwegian zone of the Barents Sea has come up dry, its co-partner in the well Faroe Petroleum reported Monday. The Darwin frontier exploration well (designated 7128/11-1) is located on the Veslemøy High in the frontier western part of the Barents Sea with 50 miles to the southwest of the recent […]

Hundreds of millions want to emigrate

The highly-respected Gallup Poll’s latest offering, a worldwide survey aimed at identifying potential migrant numbers, shows that a massive 13 per cent of the world population wants to emigrate. Over 640 million adults are desperate to change countries to better their lives and careers, with most based in Africa and Asia and wanting to move […]

Kunstler: That Dreadful Day

For the moment, the trend seems pretty clear. Money from far and wide rushes into the US stock markets because every other conceivable place to stash money produces no return, no interest, no increase, at a time when the value of central bank currencies is slip-slidin’ somewhere south of Palookaville. The rush into equities gooses […]

Fuel Consumption has Fallen more than 20% in the UK Due to High Oil Prices

Petrol stations in the UK have noticed the volume of fuel that they sell fall significantly over the past five years as high prices have forced people to buy more fuel efficient cars, and drive less, in order to reduce their fuel bill. Petrol sales have fallen by more than 20% as oil prices have […]

Decline And Fall Of The New Rome

Rampant inflation, caused by debasement of the currency, government corruption and nanny state corrective action that makes matters worse. Declining trade, caused by wars to control the empire, massive military over-reach and ever increasing spending on the military – funded by increases in taxation on the citizens, especially those least in a position to pay. […]

Peak Oil Not Dead: America’s Next Top Gamble

Apparently, we’ve been “dead wrong.” “Those behind the [peak oil] theory appear to have been dead wrong, at least in terms of when the peak would hit, having not anticipated the rapid shift in technology that led to exploding oil and natural gas production in new plays and areas long dismissed as dried up,” says […]

The Five Stages Of Collapse, By Dmitry Orlov, Reviewed By Carolyn Baker

Many of us who have been researching collapse for a decade or more repeatedly use the word in writing, speaking, and daily conversation, but few of us have the opportunity to define it with such precision or personal experience as one finds in Dmitry Orlov’s forthcoming book Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit (New […]

Aging giant oil fields, not new discoveries are the key to future oil supply

With all the talk about new oil discoveries around the world and new techniques for extracting oil in such places as North Dakota and Texas, it would be easy to miss the main action in the oil supply story: Aging giant fields produce more than half of global oil supply and are already declining as […]

The Death of Peak Oil

This is a guest post by James Hamilton, Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. This post originally appeared on the Econbrowser blog here. “Peak oil is dead,” Rob Wile declared last week. Colin Sullivan says it has “gone the way of the Flat Earth Society”, writing Those behind the theory appear […]

Trends In The Cost Of Energy

Introduction Energy is the largest component of the world’s Gross Domestic Product. It is a measure of our state of civilization. Its availability determines our standard of living, but also threatens to undermine it: the excessive use of stored energy through burning fossil fuels is a cause of Climate Change. Now, the depletion of these […]

Tepco has emergency press conference about new highly radioactive leak at Fukushima Daiichi

April 6, 2013: Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Friday that contaminated water may have leaked into soil from an underground reservoir tank at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. A radioactive substance has been detected in water accumulated between soil around the tank and the outer layer of a waterproof sheet covering the tank. The […]

Leak Found In Fukushima Tank Holding Radioactive Water

Tokyo Electric power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the plant said that it is moving 13,000 tons of highly radioactive water from a temporary storage tank to another after detecting signs of leakage. ‘The impact (from the leak) is not small, as the space is already tight,’ a company spokesman said. The operator of Japan’s […]

Climate Change, peak oil and economic collapse

Humanity faces serious challenges as climate change, resource depletion and overpopulation are changing the earth and its ecosystems. What if….there was a new way forward? This short promotional video is designed to get people thinking about a new way forward….that of one…. Thanks to archive.org and sockfootageforfree.com

Fukushima: Massive Leaks Continuing On a Daily Basis … For Years On End

You may have heard that Tepco – the operator of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plants – announced a large leak of radioactive water.   You may have heard that the cooling system in the spent fuel pools at Fukushima has failed for a second time in a month. This is newsworthy stuff … but […]

Uncharted Territory: A Modern Peak Oil Theory

Peak oil theories have been around for decades. Marion King Hubbert accurately predicted a peak in U.S. oil production in 1956, in the first widely published peak oil theory. Since then, people have been predicting when demand would exceed supply and the dire economic consequences that will come along with it. But what if the […]

Third major oil spill in a week: Shell pipeline breaks in Texas

Thousands of gallons of oil have spilled from a pipeline in Texas, the third accident of its kind in only a week. Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, shut down their West Columbia, Texas, pipeline last Friday after electronic calculations conducted by the US National Response Center showed that upwards of 700 […]

The 21 Key Statistics About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America

If the economy is getting better, then why does poverty in America continue to grow so rapidly?  Yes, the stock market has been hitting all-time highs recently, but also the number of Americans living in poverty has now reached a level not seen since the 1960s.  Yes, corporate profits are at levels never seen before, […]

Qatar confident of future gas demand

The conference “Peak Oil: Challenges and Opportunities for the GCC Countries” in Doha, Qatar, has ended. It was a very interesting Peak Oil conference and was the first to be held in the Middle East. I was given the honour of summarizing the conference and will write a summary when I am back in Sweden. […]

Fusion Ignition Failed

If all goes according to Mike Dunne’s plan, the United States will build its first nuclear fusion power plant by the end of the next decade. Sixteen times a second, as the National Ignition Facility’s program director for laser fusion energy envisions it, a two-millimeter-wide capsule of cryogenic hydrogen will drop into a steel chamber […]

Overpopulation A Concern Of The Past? This Study Thinks So.

Overpopulation may not be such a big threat after all: using global population data from 1900 to 2010, scientists have developed a mathematical model showing that the number of Earth’s inhabitants may level off in the next 40 years. Conducted by a team of researchers from the Autonomous University of Madrid and CEU-San Pablo University, […]

Japan makes breakthrough in extracting seabed gas

Japan today said it had successfully extracted natural gas from methane hydrate deposits under the sea, in the first example of production of the gas offshore. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry showed what it said was gas flaming from a pipe at the project in the Pacific Ocean, 80km off the coast of […]

How Oil Exporters Reach Financial Collapse

Recently, I explained how high oil prices can bring on financial collapse for oil importers. In this post, I’ll discuss the flip side of the situation: how oil exporters reach financial collapse. Unfortunately, we have many examples of countries that were oil exporters, but are dealing with collapse situations. Egypt, Syria, and Yemen all have […]

How to make disaster pay

From the San Francisco Earthquake to Superstorm Sandy, How Capitalism Stacks the Deck on Disaster In 2007, a financial firestorm ravaged Wall Street and the rest of the country.  In 2012, Hurricane Sandy obliterated a substantial chunk of the Atlantic seaboard.  We think of the first as a man-made calamity, the second as the malignant […]

« Previous Page — Next Page »

LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Why the IEA is Wrong About Peak Oil Demand
• Did we inadvertently speed global warming?  
• Venezuela’s Oil Monopoly Eases
• Why Germany is Choosing Natural Gas Over Nuclear Power
• U.S. coal-fired electricity generation decreased in 2022 and 2023

• America Cracks Down on Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas Facilities
• Meet America’s Newest Oil Trader Extraordinaire: Joe Biden
• Is It Time To Refill America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
• Oil prices set to end year 10% lower as demand concerns snap winning streak
• What’s Driving America’s New Oil and Gas Boom?
• China’s peak oil demand bombshell eviscerates Danielle Smith’s energy strategy