Kunstler: Real Life is Not Spin Art

The authorities keep emphasizing that the nurse who caught ebola from Thomas Eric Duncan was sealed in her haz-mat suit the whole time she cared for the poor fellow and blah blah nobody knows how she could possibly catch the darn thing…. But the newspapers and cable news networks are not asking: What about all […]

Wind Power Is Cheaper Than Coal, Leaked Report Shows

 If your price doesn’t reflect the true cost of your product, then you are either going to go out of business, or you are going to have to foist the costs onto other people. It’s clear that fossil fuel industries have been pursuing the latter strategy for quite some time now. But as awareness of […]

Oil Falls After IEA Cuts Demand Forecasts

Brent crude fell to a fresh low below $88 a barrel on Tuesday, trading at the weakest level since 2010 after the West’s energy watchdog cut its estimates for oil demand this year and next. The global oil benchmark has dropped almost 25 percent from its 2014 high in June as supplies have risen and […]

Peak Oil: Same Nonsense, Different Day

If they don’t get it [doubtful], then they either need to learn some basics, or write about what they know. If they do know but have made a determination that full disclosure of facts to the public would not be in their own best interests, well … draw your own conclusions. The seemingly endless parade […]

Energy, Diminishing Returns and the Future of Food

It was another warm summer morning as I set off on a lightly used trail, venturing east through the forest and then through a wetland left dry by sparse rain over the previous few weeks. After passing through a bottomland forest I find, off to the trail’s right, the elm I’d met the previous year. […]

One Of The World’s Biggest Oil Projects Is A Total Fiasco

REUTERS/Anatoly UstinenkoAn aerial view shows artificial islands on Kashagan offshore oil field in the Caspian sea, western Kazakhstan, April 7, 2013. Picture taken April 7, 2013. WHEN it was discovered in 2000, the Kashagan oilfield in Kazakhstan’s waters in the northern Caspian Sea was the world’s biggest oil find in three decades. By now it […]

Global Collapse, Local Survival

* The world is collapsing from overpopulation and its converse, declining reserves of natural resources such as oil (petroleum). The entire world economy is tied to oil and other fossil fuels for manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, mining, electricity, and so on. * World oil production in the year 2030 will be about half that of the […]

World War III: It’s here and energy is largely behind it

I’ve been advancing a thesis for several months with friends that World War III is now underway. It’s just that it’s not the war we thought it would be, that is, a confrontation between major powers with the possibility of a nuclear exchange. Instead, we are getting a set of low-intensity, on-again, off-again conflicts involving […]

Forget What You’ve Heard: Oil and Gas Are Actually “Renewable” Resources

We’ve been taught that fossil fuels, like oil and natural gas, formed hundreds of millions of years ago. Prehistoric animals that once roamed the earth died. From the buried remains of these animals as well as plants, a natural decomposition process took place that required eons of time, intense heat, and a lot of pressure. […]

Energy Balance: Is Peak Oil Now a Phantom?

While this edited article of mine (on page 4) was published in The Professional Engineer a while ago, I have only just discovered its existencehttp://www.professionalengineers-uk.org/pdfs/newsletters/ProEngSpr13-issue79.pdf!I remember being asked to write a piece for them, by someone in the audience at a talk that I gave in Guildford a while back on “What happens When the […]

Is Fusion Power Closer Than We Thought?

The promise of generating energy with nuclear fusion is tantalizing because it would be free of toxic emissions and nuclear waste, and would have a virtually infinite fuel supply. On the downside, though, it is extremely costly compared with fossil fuels like natural gas and coal. Now engineers at the University of Washington (UW) have […]

Saudi Arabia’s “Oil-Weapon” Hits Europe

We first exposed the “secret” US-Saudi deal in September which led to the inevitable bombing of Syria. We then progressed to explain the quid pro quo of the deal in lower oil prices (benefiting US consumers into an election and crushing Russian revenues). In today’s Wall Street Journal we get the final piece of the […]

Russia hopeful for government agreement on gas with China

* Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to visit Moscow * Deputy minister says several deals to be signed * Analysts doubt Russia and China can finalise gas deal soon * Deputy minister says several deals to be signed Russia has prepared intergovernmental agreements to sign during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Moscow next week including […]

Bill Reiner Interview: Peak Oil

This posting is the first in what will be a series of Monday posts which are portions of an interview that I was privileged to do with Bill Reinert this past summer. Reinert has about the most wide-ranging knowledge and understanding of energy issues of anyone that I’ve ever come across. I also happen to […]

Can We Lose the Violent Muslim Cliché?

Most Muslims, like most people everywhere, are peaceable and law-abiding. So why are we continually inundated with images and hate speech perpetuating this harmful lie? There has been a lot of ranting about Muslims in the press, as when Bill Maher recently dissed the entire religion of Islam on television: “It’s the only religion that […]

Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch

“This latest edition of the Living Planet Report is not for the faint-hearted. One key point that jumps out and captures the overall picture is that the Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures more than 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, has declined by 52 per cent since 1970. Put another […]

2030, This Is the End.

Will it really be “The End” like The Doors were telling us back in the seventies or will it not? Today we have enough data about our ecosystems to make sound decisions that could potentially shift the needle slightly towards the better end. In a world where most of us do not have time to […]

Why Oil Is Plunging: The Other Part Of The “Secret Deal” Between The US And Saudi Arabia

Two weeks ago, we revealed one part of the “Secret Deal” between the US and Saudi Arabia: namely what the US ‘brought to the table’ as part of its grand alliance strategy in the middle east, which proudly revealed Saudi Arabia to be “aligned” with the US against ISIS, when in reality John Kerry was […]

Peak Travel: Envisioning a post-air-travel age

One of the more disruptive consequences of peak oil is likely to be peak air travel. What does peak air travel mean? Why is it likely? Why haven’t you already heard more about it? And what business and investment opportunities does this coming disruption create? I’ve been writing about the unsustainability of air travel for […]

An Energy Revolution in Our Midst

Anyone who doubts that the deployment of the technologies we have come to call fracking constitutes a revolution should consider this. U.S. oil production has soared by 70 percent in the past six years. American refineries have cut in half their imports from the OPEC cartel, setting off a scramble by those countries to find […]

Heinberg: Paul Krugman and the limits of hubris

Economist Paul Krugman evidently feels irked and irritated by the notion that there might be limits to economic expansion: he has followed up his New York Times op-ed of September 18 (“Errors and Emissions,” to which I replied here) with a new piece titled “Slow Steaming and the Supposed Limits to Growth. It’s interesting to […]

Libya to Produce Million Barrels of Oil a Day This Month

Libya’s crude output will soon reach one million barrels a day after ports and fields reopened, a lawmaker said, adding the government is fully in control of its oil industry. The news comes as oil markets have been rattled by increasing production in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Speaking to The Wall Street […]

Ebola and the Five Stages of Collapse

At the moment, the Ebola virus is ravaging three countries—Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone—where it is doubling every few weeks, but singular cases and clusters of them are cropping up in dense population centers across the world. An entirely separate Ebola outbreak in the Congo appears to be contained, but illustrates an important point: even […]

Michael Lynch: Oil Prices And Costs Correcting Misperceptions

The decline in oil prices, Brent dropping $15 a barrel in 8 weeks, has concentrated the minds of the oil industry, and raised the prospect of falling investment in oil production. This argument is used to support the idea of long term oil prices being above $100. The interaction between upstream costs and prices has […]

Peak Oil Game – Cabrillo College

Peak Oil Game John Welch, Cabrillo College   Concepts and skills taught:   Production inevitably peaks before oil ‘runs out’ Production becomes more difficult as the ‘easy-to-reach’ oil is used up first. Graphing data in Excel.   Materials needed: 1/4 teaspoons, ½ teaspoons, teaspoons, tablespoons, long handled spoons, larger spoons, litter box scoopers, large bag […]

Michael Klare, Washington Wields the Oil Weapon

It was heinous. It was underhanded.  It was beyond the bounds of international morality. It was an attack on the American way of life.  It was what you might expect from unscrupulous Arabs.  It was “the oil weapon” — and back in 1973, it was directed at the United States. Skip ahead four decades and […]

Chinese renminbi becomes directly tradable with the euro

The Chinese central bank, People’s Bank of China, issued a press release announcing the authorization of direct trading between the renminbi and the euro on the inter-bank foreign exchange market. This is huge. The euro is the second most traded currency in the world, after the US dollar. The European Union is already China’s biggest […]

Why is the Arctic at the Center of World Politics?

News coverage of the Arctic has been steadily growing in tandem with the rising importance of the region in recent years. The focus of international politics often tends to revolve around energy security within the context of a global scramble for resources to keep individual countries’ economic growth engines humming. In view of the possibilities […]

Oil: More About Supply Than The Dollar

Summary The dollar has pulled back this week and oil prices are still falling. Saudi Arabia appears to have shifted its stance. US output is strong, inventories high, refineries slowing. The US dollar’s upside momentum has faded, but oil prices remain depressed. Many observers try, too hard perhaps, to link the decline in commodity prices […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Cold Fusion – A New Report

The second independent report on the performance of Andrea Rossi’s low energy nuclear reactor was just released. Even though the first round of tests were conducted by a group of respected European physicists, they received considerable criticism from those who believe “cold fusion” to be impossible and that the scientists reporting positive test results had […]

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