Why Oil Prices Haven’t Gone Crazy

Why Oil Prices Haven’t Gone Crazy By Matthew Philips Bloomberg Businessweek Illustration by 731 The oil markets have plenty of reasons to be spooked. In Libya, home to Africa’s largest reserves, production has fallen more than 80 percent since militias seized control of the country’s biggest ports last summer. Most of Iran’s oil remains trapped […]

Supply or demand? Peak oil with Richard Heinberg and James Hamilton

Our lead story: This week Stanford said that it would divest all of its investments in coal mining companies, becoming the wealthiest US university to pledge divestment from sectors of the fossil fuel industry. Erin gives you her take on the situation. For our interviews today, we look at peak oil theory with Richard Heinberg […]

Mike’s Story Part 17: Fallout

Back at FTW, another fire erupted:  Readers were placing product orders which could never, under the current administration, be fulfilled.  When Mike learned of the situation, he emailed those in charge that it could constitute fraud; they were to return whatever money had come in and freeze the sales portion of the site immediately.  (If I […]

Mike Ruppert’s Story Part 16: Honeypot(?)

Meanwhile up north, FTW was wandering in the wilderness. Mike’s account of the unraveling of the company may be found in By the Light of a Burning Bridge.  A key figure is an unnamed “female employee.”  In the article, he presents a scenario in which he played along with her sexual provocations in order to make […]

End of oil boom threatens Norway’s welfare model

Norway’s energy boom is tailing off years ahead of expectations, exposing an economy unprepared for life after oil and threatening the long-term viability of the world’s most generous welfare model. High spending within the sector has pushed up wages and other costs to unsustainable levels, not just for the oil and gas industry but for […]

Vietnam and China ships ‘collide in South China Sea’

Vietnamese naval ships and Chinese vessels have collided in the South China Sea, Vietnamese officials say. The incident happened as the Vietnamese navy was trying to prevent the Chinese from setting up an oil rig in an area claimed by both nations. No shots were fired, reports say. But Vietnamese officials said that water cannons […]

This planet comes with limits

When I was in my 20s, a girlfriend surprised me by saying that we didn’t have to worry about overpopulation because technology would make sure we always had what everyone needed. Of course, economists have been saying this for decades. And of course, billions of people today don’t have what they need. Because such people […]

Portland, Oregon Memorial For Mike Ruppert, May 17

Mike’s Public Memorial/Celebration of Life will be at the Unitarian Universal Church complex, in the Eliot Chapel located 1011 SW Main St Portland, OR 97205. We will start at 5 PM Pacific, and we’ll try to keep the program to an hour or less. I intend to show a video tribute to Mike, including his […]

Heinberg: The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us

We need to recognize we share the planet with millions of other life forms Time to celebrate! Woo-hoo! It’s official: we humans have started a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. Who’d have thought that just one species among millions might be capable of such an amazing accomplishment? Let’s wait to stock up on party […]

Oil & Gas Boom 2014: No End In Sight

In February, oil production in Texas hit a 34-year high, with combined oil and condensate volumes exceeding 2.9 million barrels of oil per day.  For the first time in memory, Texas now produces more than 36% of all the oil produced in the United States, and if it were a separate country, Texas would now […]

Peak Phosphorus Will be a Shortage We Can’t Stomach

Here’s the good news. We probably don’t have to worry about peak oil just yet, as it isn’t going to run out anytime soon. The bad news is, as the IPCC has recently reported, we can’t afford the costs of what liberating all that carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere would do to the climate. So […]

Only 12% of the world’s population breathe clean air

A report released Wednesday by the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that air quality deteriorates gradually in the world and more than half of the world population living in cities with pollution levels 2.5 times higher recommended by the agency. The report made an analysis of air quality in 600 cities of 91 thousand countries, […]

Hollowing Out the Middle — Precarity in a time of Cholera

Peak Oil, Peak Soil, Peak Minerals, Peak Food, Peak Water, Peak Everything. a whole lot of writing going on, but no more shaking . . . rattling the cages I’ll get to the school and the yard and the fights in a minute. But . . . . Okay, a guest on the “alternative radio […]

Tech Talk – Fast destruction and slow reconstruction

Underlying many of the projections of future energy supply that are now being made there are, as mentioned earlier, a lot of assumptions that are beginning to appear more questionable as time passes. Much of the concern has to focus on the instability in the Middle East and North African nations (MENA) that are now […]

Russia and the Ukraine – The Worrisome Connection to World Oil and Gas Problems

What is behind the Russia/Ukraine problem? It seems to me that what we are seeing is Russia’s attempt to fix a two-part problem: Some oil and gas exporters, including Russia, are not receiving enough oil and gas revenue to meet their needs. They are not able to collect enough taxes to provide the services they […]

Of Fossil Fuels and Human Destiny

There have been hundreds of books and essays written on the evolution of Homo sapiens and I assume you are familiar with that history. In this short essay I am going to point out a few things that are usually left out of that story, the part that deals with the very nature of the […]

On the Warpath towards WW III

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the generation that lived through the Cold War era generally assumed that the risk of a major nuclear war had all but disappeared. However, the current Ukrainian crisis has reminded us all that as long as there are still thousands of nuclear warheads in the […]

Ethanol fuels ozone pollution

Running vehicles on ethanol rather than petrol can increase ground-level ozone pollution, according to a study of fuel use in São Paulo, Brazil. Ozone (O3) is a major urban pollutant that can cause severe respiratory problems. It can form when sunlight triggers chemical reactions involving hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emitted by vehicles. Ethanol has […]

Energy Future Holdings files for Chapter 11

Echos of Enron?? Tuesday, Apr. 29, 2014 – “Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early today after reaching a deal with creditors that calls for breaking off its power generation and retail arms in exchange for reducing debt. The bankruptcy petition was filed in Delaware….. ……KKR, TPG, Goldman Sachs and their […]

Did the Supreme Court Just Kill Dirty Coal Plants and Save the World?

The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed that the Environmental Protection Agency has the prerogative to regulate air pollution that spills across state lines. The EPA wants to force 28 states to reduce emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from their power plants. Sulphur dioxide causes acid rain and breathing problems. Nitrogen oxide causes ground-level […]

Mexico’s Oil Belongs to Its Citizens, Not the Global 1%

Oil in Mexico is much more than a symbol of national pride. For the past 75 years it has been an enormous source of income for developing Mexico’s infrastructure and improving social welfare. When, on this day in 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated U.S.- and U.K.-owned oil companies, he allowed Mexico to achieve relative independence […]

Optimism and Overpopulation

“Without the motivation to limit family size, access to modern contraception is nearly irrelevant.” Virginia Abernethy, The Atlantic Monthly December 1994. The above quote is from an article that was written almost 20 years ago. The author argues that the key driver of population growth is the desired number of children, rather than the lack […]

US Senate Takes Up Energy Bill

The Senate began debate Tuesday on a bill that supporters of the Keystone XL oil pipeline want to use as a vehicle to authorize immediate construction of the proposed pipeline from Canada to the United States. The 79-20 vote to limit debate on an energy efficiency bill lost much of its significance as the two […]

Saudi Arabia Says Broke Up Al-Qaeda Cell Planning Strike

Saudi Arabia said its security forces arrested dozens of al-Qaeda-linked militants who were planning to carry out attacks on government and foreign targets in the country. More than 60 people, almost all Saudi nationals, were arrested, Major General Mansour Al Turki, a senior Interior Ministry official, told reporters in Riyadh yesterday. He said the group […]

Both sides bury dead as Ukraine slides towards war

Both sides have been burying their dead as Ukraine slides further towards war, with supporters of Russia and of a united Ukraine accusing each other of tearing the country apart. Tuesday was generally quieter than past days in most of eastern and southern Ukraine, but violence flared at dusk in the eastern port of Mariupol, […]

BP Oil Is Becoming ‘Part Of The Geological Record’ Of The Sea Floor

Life is returning to the Macondo well blowout site that resulted in the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, according to a research crew who journeyed to the well site last month. Researchers from the University of Georgia, Florida State University, and University of North Carolina spent March 30 through April 22 in the […]

Orlov: Resilient Health Care

When I asked people to contribute content to the book on Communities that Abide, which is now nearing publication (with two chapters already at the proofreading stage), I didn’t know quite to expect. The results went far beyond my expectations. This week I will highlight the chapter by James Truong, MD, who practices emergency and […]

Energy Dollars Hard at Work on Capitol Hill

Is the alternative energy industry losing the influence-peddling war to fossil fuels? Perhaps you caught the editorial in Sunday’s New York Times taking “the Koch Brothers and their conservative allies” to task for “spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy.” The editorial noted that such efforts are being spearheaded by the American Legislative Exchange Council […]

The invasion of the resource zombies

You probably heard that new ideas are “are born as heresies and die as superstitions”. But it can be worse than that: there are ideas which simply refuse to die and, like zombies, continue forever haunting the human mindscape. One of these ideas is that the problem with mineral resources consists in “running out” of […]

Israel to be Major Force in Energy Market

A former Royal Dutch Shell plc Chief Scientist has urged the international oil and gas industry to take note of the significant potential that Israel has to become a major force in the energy market. Dr. Harold J. Vinegar said Tuesday: “These are very exciting times for Israel’s budding energy industry. The same qualities which […]

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