Conventional Wisdom About Clean Energy Is Still Way Out of Date

For Greentech Media this week, I reviewed some exhaustive recent research on energy trends and forecasts, which showed that the conventional wisdom about renewables and their future is way out of date, and the renewably-powered grid will be here sooner than most people expect. “It’s not 1990 anymore,” the report’s lead author observed at the […]

Production Falls as U.S. Feels Pull of Global Weakness

Industrial production declined in April by the most in eight months, indicating American manufacturers will provide little support for an economy beset by weaker global markets and federal budget cuts. The larger-than-forecast 0.5 percent decrease in output at factories, mines and utilities followed a revised 0.3 percent gain that was weaker than first reported, Federal […]

India’s Oil Ministry proposal on doubling natural gas prices rejected

New Delhi: Oil Ministry’s proposal for an across-the-board near doubling of natural gas prices has been rejected by the Cabinet Secretariat saying a ministerial panel headed by Defence Minister AK Antony did not have powers to do so. The Ministry had sent a draft proposal for the consideration of the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) […]

Women in the Wind Energy Industry

Women are under-represented in wind and the other renewable energy industries, according to Kristen Graf, Executive Director of Women of Wind Energy (WoWE). She believes progress in renewables may depend on correcting that. “Statistics are difficult [to come by] because there is little historic data,” Graf said, “but preliminary results from an as-yet-unreleased NREL study […]

The IEA Says Peak Oil Is Dead. That’s Bad News for Climate Policy

No one—aside maybe from survivalists who’d stocked up on MREs and assault rifles—was really looking forward to a peak-oil world. Read this 2007 GQ piece by Benjamin Kunkel—while we’re discussing topics from the mid-2000s—that imagines what a world without oil would really be like. Think uncomfortable and violent. Oil is in nearly every modern product […]

Oil Production in the Polar Regions

Today, the Arctic Council’s eight foreign ministers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Russia, Canada and the USA meet in Sweden to discuss, among other things, oil production in the Arctic. They will attempt to agree on a binding joint treaty regarding what preparations will exist in case of an oil spill/accident. The amount of […]

Vietnam, Russia Sign Production, Exploration Deals

Vietnam and Russia have signed deals for three oil and gas projects during Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s visit to Moscow, the Vietnamese government said in a statement late Tuesday. State-run Petrovietnam signed an agreement on the production and use of natural gas with Gazprom OAO and a letter of intention on petrochemical and oil […]

10 Scenes From The Economic Collapse That Is Sweeping Across The Planet

When is the economic collapse going to happen?  Just open up your eyes and take a look around the globe.  The next wave of the economic collapse may not have reached Wall Street yet, but it is already deeply affecting billions of lives all over the planet.  Much of Europe has already descended into a […]

No, Really: We’re Going to Keep Burning Oil—and Lots of It

I am grateful that Amory B. Lovins devoted so much attention to my piece, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to stand my ground. As I understand him, Lovins makes five main critiques: 1) My article “is entirely about quantity of [petroleum] supply,” when “mainstream analysts see ‘peak oil’ emerging not in supply but […]

Scarcity-mind or Eco-mind: Where Do They Lead?

In Brief: Humans see the world through largely unconscious frames that determine what we believe our nature to be and therefore what we believe to be possible. To address our biggest global challenges, we can shed this non-ecological mental map—what the author calls “scarcity-mind”—based in lack and fear. Locked in scarcity-mind, we remain blind to our […]

USGS: New Insight on GOM Gas Hydrates

Scientists have returned from a 15‑day research expedition in the northern Gulf of Mexico with the best high-resolution seismic data and imagery ever obtained of sediments with high gas hydrate saturations. The expedition and the data and imagery collected resulted from long-standing cooperation between the U.S. Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and […]

Orlov: Look for loopholes to avoid extinction

A tiny blip in the news media registered the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide has exceeded four hundred parts per million for the first time in the history of the human species, with no sign of slowing down. Among other things, it means that ocean levels will be going up by at least 30 feet, […]

Kuwait: The Transformation Game

Kuwait’s first commercial production of oil began in 1946, some 65 years ago. Up until 1990, its production had been dominated by a few reservoirs. Burgan Al Kabeer Field (Greater Burgan) had the biggest share of the total production reaching 70-80 percent. At that time, all its production was natural flow, water free and average […]

Iraq Oil Exports Suspended after Attack

Exports of crude oil from northern Iraq have been suspended after a new bomb attack against a key pipeline, an Iraqi person familiar with the matter and a Middle East shipping agent said Tuesday, the second such interruption in less than a week. Iraq normally exports an average of 300,000 to 350,000 barrels a day […]

EA Sees U.S. Oil Shockwaves Displacing OPEC as Supply Driver

The U.S. shale boom will send “shockwaves” through the global oil trade over the next five years, benefiting the nation’s refiners and displacing OPEC as the driver of supply growth, the IEA said. North America will provide 40 percent of new supplies to 2018 through the development of light, tight oil and oil sands, while […]

The Illogic And Folly Of Peak Oil (Or Is It Peak Gas?) Alarmism

The “peak oil”, “peak gas”, or peak-whatever-you-want-to-call-it mini-movement continues on, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.   Last week it even made its way onto the Forbes.com website in the form of this piece authored by economist Robert U. Ayres.  This piece is so filled with illogic, factual errors and omissions of context that it requires a response. […]

Grub’s up! Insects could feed the world

BEETLES, caterpillars and wasps could supplement diets around the world as an environmentally friendly food source if only Western consumers could get over their “disgust”, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says. “The main message is really: `Eat insects’,” Eva Mueller, director of forest economics at the FAO, told a press conference in Rome on […]

Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syria conflict

Root-cause environmental and energy factors sparking violence will continue to destabilise Arab world without urgent reforms The civil war in Syria has been devastating, generating a death toll fast approaching 100,000, while uprooting millions of civilians from their homes. But as the US and Russia signed an unprecedented accord on Wednesday in search of a […]

Why are birthrates falling around the world? Blame television

“I find it extraordinary that the massive global drop in human fertility has been so little noticed by the media,” writes Stanford geographer Martin Lewis, “escaping the attention of even highly educated Americans.” Lewis has a fascinating, chart-heavy essay over at the Breakthrough Institute pointing out that birthrates are dropping rapidly almost everywhere around the […]

Kunstler: No Mo’ PoMo?

Whenever the Federal Reserve wants to tweak the dials of the economy — or pretend that it can — it turns first to its sock puppet at The Wall Street Journal, John Hilsenrath, and “leaks” a rumor of policy change (here). They like to do this late on Fridays when financial markets are about to […]

DOE’s High Impact Energy Innovation Incubator Program

Buried in the President’s FY2014 budget proposal is an interesting reform that could impact energy innovation without relying on Congress for any new – and hard to come by – federal investments. The idea is to create eight new research incubator programs at the Department of Energy that forge collaborations with early-stage start-ups to bring […]

Chinese Power Consumption Collapses: Economic Growth Slowest Since Early 2009

Not much to add here. If there still is any confusion why China is desperately manipulating its economic data, so balatantly in fact that virtually everyone has now noticed, this chart should put all doubt to rest. According to CLSA’s Chris Wood using NEA data, China’s monthly power consumption (the most accurate proxy for underlying […]

Rethinking hot dinners and cold drinks

This is part 5 of our serialization of Chapter 4 (Energy) from the latest Resilience guide, “Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable & Secure Food Systems“. In this excerpt we enter the kitchen. Read Part 1, Read Part 2, Read Part 3, Read Part 4 Food Storage and Preparation Data sometimes hurts, especially […]

BP Withdraws Staff from Libya

BP is withdrawing some of its staff from Libya amid potential violence in the country. BP said in a statement Sunday that it was withdrawing non-essential overseas staff out of Libya “as a precautionary measure” following advice given to it by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. However, BP said that its Libyan staff remain in […]

Requiem for 400

“The scope and speed of the climate changes, our lack of information about coupled systems, and our limited ability to influence human behavior all make it probable that more large surprises lie ahead.” We take no relish nor revel in saying we told you so. We will be long dead before the really worst of […]

India’s Empowered group of ministers (EGoM) to finally meet

The ministry of petroleum and natural gas is likely to inform the EGoM that the current production level is not even sufficient to meet the core sector allocation After 15 months of being non-functional, the empowered group of ministers (EGoM) on natural gas is likely to meet shortly, with re-prioritisation of consumers one of the […]

Peak Oil: Our Children

An observation worth noting … and pondering, from John James Audubon: A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children. Sage advice for those of with children (or just care about them). All the more pointed when those of us who have […]

Banks Now Asking for Data on Fracking Risks

Rich Liroff reports in his blog on GreenBiz.com that European banks want more hard data on risks from frackers. According to Rich, some of the world’s largest banks, as part of the Climate Principles for the Finance Sector, wish to see quantitative data on key performance indicators in 16 areas of corporate performance. The data are being […]

Old Technology Fuels New Energy Boom

With U.S. oil imports hitting a 17-year low, the mainstream media has awoken to the fact that, as I pointed out three years ago, peak oil is not happening anytime soon.  Charles Mann’s excellent cover story in this month’s Atlantic, “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” focuses on an obscure, exotic, though potentially vast source of […]

What Saudi Arabia Thinks About the U.S. Oil Boom

For some three decades, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, have wielded tremendous influence over the global oil markets. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has enjoyed the unparalleled ability to influence global oil prices by increasing or reducing its production and exports — an advantage it has […]

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