Up for Grabs: Land and Food in a Hungry World

The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, warned that battles over water and food will erupt within the next five to ten years as a result of climate change.  As he was talking of the risks of climate change, the UN announced that food prices had risen to their highest in almost a […]

Why Green Growth Won’t Transform the Economy

Green growth is a myth. Because it ignores the social, political and personal dimensions of sustainability, it can never cut deep enough into the structures of self and society to secure solutions to the crises that we face. Credit: Post-Growth Institute (http://postgrowth.org/). All rights reserved. In discussions of the future of economic growth, ‘business as […]

To Reduce Population Growth, Save More Babies

In 2013 the United Nations Population Division revised its population projections to show that population could grow even faster than previously anticipated, especially in Africa. Planning ahead for feeding a hot, hungry, teeming planet is both a numbers game and social venture. Calories, climate change, and acres of land are some of the factors on […]

The Most Likely Armageddon Threat … Preventable for a Small Amount of Money

Well-known physicist Michio Kaku and other members of the American Physical Society asked Congress to appropriate $100 million to harden the country’s electrical grid against solar flares.  As shown below, such an event is actually the most likely Armageddon-type event faced by humanity. Congress refused. Kaku explains that a solar flare like the one that hit the U.S. in 1859 would […]

The Four Industrial Revolutions

Last week’s post on the vacuous catchphrases that so often substitute for thought in today’s America referenced only a few examples of the species under discussion.  It might someday be educational, or at least entertaining, to write a sequel to H.L. Mencken’s The American Credo, bringing his choice collection of thoughtstoppers up to date with […]

Feds propose 2-person crew for crude oil trains

The Federal Railroad Administration announced this morning it will issue a proposed rule requiring two-person crews on freight trains carrying crude oil and establish a minimum crew size for most freight and passenger trains. The Federal Railroad Administration said Wednesday it will issue a proposed rule requiring two-person crews on freight trains carrying crude oil […]

Militant Bombs Stop Iraq Oil for a Record 40 days

Militants whose bombs have shut Iraq’s main northern oil export pipeline for 40 days are preventing repairs, threatening to extend an outage that is already the longest since the days of sanctions in the 1990s. Targeting the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline where it crosses a stretch of desert known as Ain al-Jahash, or Donkey Springs, the saboteurs […]

OPEC oil output in March: A reversal of recent trends

Oil production from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) plunged 550,000 b/d from February to 29.56 million b/d in March — its lowest level since mid-2011 — according to the latest Platts survey of OPEC and oil industry officials and analysts. The decline followed February production of 30.11 million b/d and was mainly […]

US says Russia using natural gas as ‘tool’ against Ukraine

The United States on Thursday said it condemned Russian efforts to use energy as a “tool of coercion” in its dispute with Ukraine. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Russia had reneged on an agreement with Ukraine that offered reduced natural gas prices in exchange for a 25-year lease on Black Sea fleet facilities. […]

BP Can Act As Bridge Between Russia And West

BP can help enhance relations between Russia and the West and is talking to politicians across the world, its executives said on Thursday as they sought to calm shareholders’ concerns over the oil major’s large exposure to Russia. Russia and the West are in a stand-off over Ukraine that is reminiscent of the Cold War. […]

How Japan Replaced Half its Nuclear Capacity with Conservation and Efficiency

Co-Authored by Lauri Myllyvirta, Greenpeace After the Tohoku earthquake three years ago in March 2011, Japan was in a seemingly impossible situation. A tremendous amount of conventional generation capacity, including the entire nuclear fleet, was unavailable and the country faced the risk of power cuts during summer consumption peaks. But miraculously, or seemingly so, in […]

Measuring Suburban Sprawl

Deron Lovaas, Federal Transportation Policy Director, Washington, D.C. Growth is good. Or so we’ve always been taught. But what if growth is poorly managed, so that it creates serious problems too? In an urban context, that’s what we call sprawl. Photo courtesy of USDA Solving sprawl requires alignment of rules and incentives for land-development such that smart […]

High depletion rates in Bakken

If you can, you could term it delusion, the theory that Shale gas is the answer to all problems in terms of energy. Just extract the gas, ship it across the pipeline and export the excess, or so goes the popular theory (boom. How easy!). Let’s call this ‘Sale for Energy Security Theory’ or SEST) […]

White House moves to block Iran’s UN ambassador nominee

The Obama administration said on Tuesday that the nomination of a new Iranian ambassador to the UN who was involved in the 1979 hostage crisis was “not viable”, intensifying a dispute that could have an impact on nuclear negotiations. Jay Carney, White House spokesman, said that the nomination of Hamid Aboutalebi to be Iran’s ambassador […]

Nuclear Fusion in five minutes (ITER)

a 5 – minutes video on fusion produced for the MIIFED conference in Monaco.

The Greens’ Peak-Oil Limits-to-Growth Apocalypse That Wasn’t

A few years ago, some experts predicted the world was about to reach a peak in global oil and gas production to be followed soon by marked decline. It would cause “war, famine, pestilence and death” – the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Another version: “war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of […]

Japan starts cleaning radioactive groundwater at Fukushima before dumping into ocean

TEPCO launched a contaminated water management system at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, which will pump groundwater into tanks before it passes through the premises of the plant. After checking the water’s quality it will be dumped into the ocean. The operator of the highly damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), […]

Alaska North Slope oil production to fall 1.8 pct for year

Alaska’s North Slope oil production is forecast to decline 1.8 percent for the fiscal year ending June 30 instead of falling 3 percent as predicted in December, according to a report released this week. The Alaska Department of Revenue predicts production of 521,800 barrels a day (bpd) versus its December forecast of 508,200 bpd. By […]

16 Signs That Most Americans Are NOT PREPARED For The Coming Economic Colapse

Sometimes I think that I sound like a broken record.  I am constantly using phrases such as “get prepared while you still can” and “time is running out”.  In fact, I use them so often that people are starting to criticize me for it. Image: Food Bank (Wiki Commons). But the truth is that only […]

Five pathways to post-capitalist ‘renaissance’ by a former oil man

‘Capitalism is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies, threatening our children. It must be re-engineered, root and branch.’   Members of Occupy Wall Street celebrate after learning that they can stay on Zuccotti Park in New York Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images In The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance, Dr Jeremy […]

OPEC Plans to Make Room for Extra Oil From Iran, Iraq, Libya

OPEC, which supplies 40 percent of the world’s oil, will accommodate additional output from members Iraq, Iran and Libya, Secretary-General Abdalla El-Badri said, without explaining how it will do so under the group’s ceiling. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will wait until 2015 to discuss output targets with Iraq, which currently operates outside the […]

Gulf Oil Spill “Not Over”: Dolphins, Turtles Dying in Record Numbers

Four years after the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, several species of wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico are still struggling to recover, according to a new report released today. In particular, bottlenose dolphins and sea turtles are dying in record numbers, and the evidence is stronger than ever that their demise is connected […]

40 Central Banks Are Betting the Yuan Will Be The Next Reserve Currency

As we have discussed numerous times, nothing lasts forever – especially reserve currencies – no matter how much one hopes that the status-quo remains so, in the end the exuberant previlege is extorted just one too many times. Headline after headlines shows nations declaring ‘interest’ or direct discussions in diversifying away from the US dollar… […]

Russian Sanctions And The Negative Effect On Global Energy Security

After a series of headline-grabbing statements about the possibility of “switching” European consumers over to American gas, the US media hastened to announce the launch of Obama’s oil and gas offensive against Russia. In reality the EU is not currently prepared, neither technically nor in terms of price, to buy its energy resources from the […]

EIA – Independent Statistics and Analysis

U.S. production of tight oil has increased dramatically in the past few years, from less than 1 million barrels per day (MMbbl/d) in 2010 to more than 3 MMbbl/d in the second half of 2013 [1]. The Annual Energy Outlook 2014 (AEO2014) Reference case reflects continued growth in tight oil production. However, growth potential and […]

Citi vs. Chevron: two opposing views of the oil price future

The direction of oil prices is once again a hot topic. In a recent Barron’s article, Ed Morse, Citigroup’s head of global commodity research, forecasts a collapse in global oil prices to $75 /b over the next three to five years. By contrast, Chevron has announced that it is budgeting with $110/b oil for 2017, […]

Paying for our cheap food choices

A couple of weeks ago, we received an email from a visitor to our website. The author asked, ‘How can anyone say that food is too cheap when food prices are actually going up?’ He was referring to the SFT’s position on ‘true-cost accounting‘, an idea explored at our recent London conference. The email noted the […]

Our High-Energy Planet

More than one billion people globally lack access to electricity, and billions more still burn wood and dung for their basic energy needs. Our High-Energy Planet, a new report from an international group of energy and environment scholars, outlines a radically new framework for meeting the energy needs of the global poor. According to the authors, […]

Iraq Hopes to Complete Oil Pipeline to Raise Exports This Year

Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi said on Wednesday his country hoped to complete construction of a 200 km (124 miles)oil pipeline to raise exports to Turkey to more than 1 million barrels per day (bpd) this year. “We are building a pipeline in Iraq,” Luaibi was speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of an […]

Peak Oil: When Does Planning Begin?

[D]isputes over the precise timing of a global peak in conventional oil production are unhelpful. What is more relevant is the appropriate response to the risk of rising prices and supply constraints and the extent to which markets can be relied upon to mitigate those risks. Mitigation can be achieved through fuel substitution and demand […]

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