Doomsday Prophet Falls Off Peak Oil Bandwagon

In today’s rant, I attempt to explain once and for all why this former believer in the Peak Oil doomsday scenario has fallen off the Peak Oil bandwagon, and no longer believes that Peak Oil will bring down this global industrial civilization — as much as it pains me to say that.

ExxonMobil starts Julia ultradeepwater gulf oil project

ExxonMobil Corp. will develop a field with nearly 6 billion bbl of resource in place more than 30,000 ft below the sea floor in more than 7,000 ft of water in the Gulf of Mexico. An initial development phase will result in production of 34,000 b/d of oil from Julia field starting in 2016. Capital […]

Australia’s Central Bank Would Like To Weaken Its Currency

Overnight the Reserve Bank of Australia (Australia’s central bank) cut benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points to 2.75%. The full statement from Governor Glenn Stevens is here. In a note, Nomura economist Charles St. Arnaud flags one particularly interesting line that will get the “currency wars” crowd buzzing.: The accompanying statement was not overly […]

All Empires Crash Soon After They Reach Their Peak

Thomas Edison said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”   And because I love my country, I frequently criticize America’s shortcomings in the hopes of making her better. But the truth is that the United States is not unusual … it is just like all other empires which have hit their peak and then quickly […]

Jeremy Grantham Has Bad News and Good News

Jeremy Grantham, the famed investor and co-founder of GMO, one of the world’s most successful investments firms, has both bad news and good news for us. The bad news, briefly stated, is that we are on the road to economic and ecological ruin. Grantham’s good news, if I can characterize it, is that there may […]

Saudi Aramco to Open 3 US Research Centers

Saudi Aramco has announced the opening of three research centers in the United States with Houston named one of the cities to house a new facility focused on upstream research. Houston joins two other U.S.- based centers in Cambridge, Mass. and Detroit designed to extend the energy giant’s global research and development (R&D) network. The […]

The truth about China, statistically speaking

China’s economic achievement is so enormous, indeed literally without parallel in human history, that it is sometimes difficult for people to take in its scale. A country which in 1978, when “reform and opening up” was launched, was one of the poorest in the world, has now reached a point where it has a higher […]

Shale Oil and Gas: The Contrarian View

No one is questioning the fact that we have either reached or will soon reach “peak oil”; that existing fields are being depleted at the rapid rate of 7 percent a year, and that the search is on for “unconventional oil” as alternative forms of energy are slow to reach critical mass. There are many […]

OECD Oil Consumption

Here’s a slightly more detailed look at OECD oil consumption than last week, based on the EIA monthly data.  Here’s the history since 1990, broken down into three major regions (the US, Europe, and everywhere else in the OECD: Japan, Korea, Canada, Anz, etc). Consumption peaked in 2005, fell into the great recession, recovered briefly, […]

Official Food Inflation over Past 5 Years

Up over 12% (up 27% in the UK) during a period characterized by a liquidity trap, high unemployment and weak economic activity. Reconcile that!   And Japan is the next target…. plan b economics

How the oil and gas boom will change America: An interview with Michael Levi

Let’s get this out of the way first: Michael Levi’s new book, “The Power Surge,” is very likely to be one of the best things you’ll read about the ongoing oil and gas boom in the United States. True, the book doesn’t really have a grand overarching theory. There aren’t any sweeping predictions that shale […]

Boom in Jellyfish: Overfishing Called Into Question

Will we soon be forced to eat jellyfish? Since the beginning of the 2000s, these gelatinous creatures have invaded many of the world’s seas, like the Japan Sea, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, etc. Is it a cyclic phenomenon, caused by changes in marine currents or even global warming? Until now, the causes remained […]

What Would War Between Israel And Syria Do To The Already Fragile Global Economy?

War is a horrible thing. Just ask anyone that has ever been in the middle of it. And in this day and age governments around the world possess weapons of such incalculable power that war should be unthinkable. In future wars, we could literally see millions of people killed on a single day. Nobody should […]

Reaching Limits in a Finite World

We don’t usually think about it, but we live in a finite world. In other words, in theory we can count precisely how many atoms make up the earth. We can also theoretically count how many humans live on earth and how many of any other species live on earth at a particular point in […]

Fridges could be switched off without owner’s consent to reduce strain on power stations

White goods such as electric ovens would be affected by the proposals to fit all new appliances with sensors that could shut them down when the UK’s generators struggle to meet demand for power. The measures proposed by the UK’s National Grid, along with its counterparts in 34 European countries, to install the controversial devices […]

The surprising reason why Obama favors natural-gas exports

For the past year, there’s been a simmering debate in Washington over whether the Department of Energy should approve more terminals to export liquefied natural gas. The country, after all, is newly awash in shale gas. Should we sell it abroad or keep it all for ourselves? Now here’s the latest twist: The Financial Times […]

Kunstler: The Deep End of the Risk Pool

    Where on earth did Paul Krugman get the idea — expressed Monday morning — that ours is “a weak economy?” The Dow Jones Industrial Average is about to scale previously uncharted heights and the Standard & Poors Index is piling onto its molehill, too. If stocks are up the economy can’t be weak […]

North American tight oil play economics compared

Barry Rodgers Rodgers Oil & Gas Consulting Edmonton This report is the second of two parts on the economics and fiscal competitiveness of North American tight oil resources. The purpose of the first part of the report was to establish general context for considering the individual plays and to highlight the importance of the fiscal […]

Are We Heading For a 2008-Style Economic Implosion

The media is jumping for joy over last week’s US jobs numbers. But beneath the veneer of headline numbers lies a truly horrible economic reality.   Let’s have a look at the two key economies for the world: China and the US.   For starters, China’s recent economic data, as massaged as it is to […]

Building an Agricultural Empire

Genghis Khan knew about hard times. The founder of the Mongol Empire, which spanned most of Eurasia until roughly 1227, Genghis and his clan had to survive on their wits and natural surroundings, often resorting to meals of “green leafy things” when food was scarce. Today that history seems to have been lost, with most […]

Convinced that food can save America

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of food. Yet, sometimes it appears just as hard for food writers to avoid hype. It’s all too easy for people who love food enough to write about food to lose themselves in breathless raptures over the deliciousness of forest foraged mushrooms or the power of artisanal pork to […]

Looking Back at Peak Oil

Peak Oil – the maximum sustainable rate of global oil production – happened in 2012. That’s one of the main conclusions of a new report, Fossil and Nuclear Fuels – The Supply Outlook, released in March 2013 by the Energy Watch Group (EWG). This event will have profound long-term implications for how advisors should manage […]

Population and Ecology

World  governments, the public, and the UN now recognize that the human population number matters in achieving ecological sustainability for human communities. For forty years, since the first United Nations environment meeting in Stockholm in 1972, environmentalists have debated whether we should include human population growth among the urgent challenges of  human consumption, industrial toxins, […]

Weather radicalization worsening, global food supply at increased risk of regional failures

If you live in the USA, you’re probably experiencing some of the effects of a cold weather front and multi-state blizzard that’s sweeping across much of North America. While the weather felt like summer just a few days ago, suddenly much of the upper Midwest is blanketed in snow and reeling from freezing temperatures. As […]

Patient contrarians: The natural gas market isn’t what it seems

Maybe it’s the gloomy Seattle weather that has made investment manager Jim Hansen and his son and partner, Kevin, at Ravenna Capital Management immune to oil and gas industry hype about the supposed U.S. shale gas “revolution.” More likely it is thorough research focused on making their clients money and keeping that money out of […]

The Oil and Gold Booms Are Over

The wreckage caused by China’s great, juddering slowdown continues to spread far beyond the country’s shores. Although most commodities enjoyed a bounce on May 3, after better-than-expected U.S. employment data, the plunge in their prices over the past few months suggests the past decade’s rally is truly broken. For those of us not in the […]

Should we be scared of peak oil?

Peak oil is logically inevitable – one day the planet will either run out of fossil fuels, or they will become too expensive to extract. But what will that mean for us, and should we be worrying now? What can we do to avoid a catastrophe when oil production eventually slows down?

A mainstream brokerage firm talks End of Growth

perfect storm energy, finance and the end of growth The economy as we know it is facing a lethal confluence of four critical factors – the fall-out from the biggest debt bubble in history; a disastrous experiment with globalisation; the massaging of data to the point where economic trends are obscured; and, most important of […]

Why US Mileage Ratings Are So Inaccurate

We were impressed when Ford announced that the 2013 Fusion hybrid earned an EPA ­rating of 47 mpg for both city and highway driving. Here was a generously sized and relatively conventional-looking sedan rivaling the efficiency of the ­Toyota Prius. Then we racked up a mere 32 mpg in our road test [December 2012]. That’s […]

Surging US oil production pushes reserves to highest levels in 30 years

Surging oil production has put the United States on track toward greater energy independence, pushing US reserves to their highest levels in 30 years. But analysts say bottlenecks in the distribution system are keeping oil from reaching markets. US oil stocks reached 395.3 million barrels last week, a level not seen since US authorities began […]

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