US oil dependency on Middle East has hardly changed since 2007

This is part 2 of a series of articles on how US tight oil has impacted on oil markets The following graph shows US petroleum imports from OPEC countries starting in 1960. This includes both crude oil and petroleum products. Fig 1: US crude oil and product imports from OPEC Note: Indonesia left OPEC in […]

Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy

One of the factors that makes it difficult to think through the economic consequences of the end of the industrial age is that we’ve all grown up in a world where every form of economic activity has been channeled through certain familiar forms for so long that very few people remember that things could be […]

Oil Price Slide – No Good Way Out

The world is in a dangerous place now. A large share of oil sellers need the revenue from oil sales. They have to continue producing, regardless of how low oil prices go unless they are stopped by bankruptcy, revolution, or something else that gives them a very clear signal to stop. Producers of oil from […]

The Trouble With Mass Delusions

Excerpted from Paul Singer’s Elliott Management letter to investors, MASS DELUSIONS The trouble with mass delusions is that they are recognized as such only when they are over – when the dazzling absurdity of certain widely held beliefs is unmasked by subsequent events. Interestingly, many delusions relate to war. At the beginning of World War […]

Crude jumps on rumor of oil pipeline blast in Saudi Arabia

U.S. and Brent crude futures extended gains on Wednesday on an unconfirmed market rumor of an oil pipeline explosion in Saudi Arabia. Oil futures had already been lifted by a government report showing a smaller-than-expected rise in U.S. crude stocks and drops in gasoline and distillate inventories. Brent December crude futures were up $1.60 at $84.42 […]

More than 40 percent of China’s Arable Land Degraded

More than 40 percent of China’s arable land is suffering from degradation, official news agency Xinhua said, reducing its capacity to produce food for the world’s biggest population. The rich black soil in northern Heilongjiang province, which forms part of China’s bread basket, is thinning, while farmland in China’s south is suffering from acidification, the […]

Peak Oil – Adapting for Big Changes Ahead

Peak Moment 155: With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great […]

The Power of a Plan B

  When Hay on Wye was threatened with a new supermarket in what appeared to be a cosy done deal between the local authority and a developer, a group of local people responded with a ‘Plan B For Hay‘, bringing together architects, lawyers, designers and campaigners to create an alternative, viable, more popular scheme.  I […]

Webster Tarpley on the Peak Oil myth

Webster Griffin Tarpley (born 1946) is an American author, historian, economist, journalist and lecturer. He is not a member of any political party and a former member of the U.S. Labor Party.

Panicked by Population Hysteria?

A steady stream of headlines are hyping a new journal article that claims that the world population is a terrifying goliath resolutely stomping towards human destruction. Written by two environmental scientists in Australia, Corey Bradshaw and Barry Brook, and edited by Paul Ehrlich, (a Stanford zoologist famous for his sensationalist claims about population growth in […]

Prince Alwaleed: Saudi reliance on oil ‘dangerous’

The fall of crude oil prices below $80 a barrel proves Saudi Arabia’s reliance on petroleum revenue is “dangerous”, billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said on Tuesday. “Clearly the fact that the price of oil went down to below 80 proved that we were correct by asking the government to have other sources of income”, […]

Statoil Forecasts New North Sea Oil Bonanza

  Norway’s Statoil AS A said on Monday that the giant Johan Sverdrup oil field in the North Sea could generate revenue of 1.35 trillion Norwegian kroner ($204.55 billion) over the next five decades. The Norwegian oil producer said the oil field could produce up to 650,000 barrels of oil a day at its peak. […]

The Oil Crash: it is happening now!

James Schlesinger said once that humans have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic. This bimodal kind of functioning seems to be applied also to the oil market, where everything is judged on the base of a simple binary rule: high prices: bad; low prices: good. So, with oil prices falling rapidly during the […]

Heinberg: How to Shrink the Economy without Crashing It A Ten-Point Plan

The human economy is currently too big to be sustainable. We know this because Global Footprint Network, which methodically tracks the relevant data, informs us that humanity is now using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources. We can temporarily use resources faster than Earth regenerates them only by borrowing from the future productivity of the planet, […]

Peak Oil: A New Paradigm Suggested

‘[P]eak oil’ is a global issue resulting from dependency on finite oil resources and associated vulnerability to changes in supply. The global economy must engage in changes and these changes must start with our misperceptions of prosperity as synonymous with capital. If we can transition to a paradigm in which equitable distribution of resources, social […]

Kunstler: Signs and Wonders

“Holy smokes,” Janet Yellen must have barked last week when Japan stepped up to plug the liquidity hole left by the US Federal Reserve’s final taper trot to the zero finish line of Quantitative Easing 3. The gallant samurai Haruhiko Kuroda of Japan’s central bank announced that his grateful nation had accepted the gift of […]

Norway ranked the world’s most prosperous country

Legatum Institute’s 2014 Prosperity Index ranked Norway as the world’s most prosperous country for the second year in a row, The Local reports. The United States came in 10th. The study, now in its eighth year, takes into account each country’s economy, entrepreneurship, governance, education, personal freedom, health, security, and social capital. The research included […]

Bad Energy. Good Energy. Choose Your Side.

The fight to develop renewable energy is a battle of good against evil, and the future of humanity hangs in the balance. No, I’m not talking about climate change (though that is certainly important). I’m talking about the distribution of wealth and power across the whole planet. The question of who will reap the benefits […]

How The Petrodollar Quietly Died, And Nobody Noticed

Two years ago, in hushed tones at first, then ever louder, the financial world began discussing that which shall never be discussed in polite company – the end of the system that according to many has framed and facilitated the US Dollar’s reserve currency status: the Petrodollar, or the world in which oil export countries […]

Winners and losers in the new age of cheap oil

Oil prices have fallen more than 20 percent from their June peak, on weaker demand and ramped up output. So where does the price go from here, and who are set to be the winners and losers? Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie reports.

Israel must move quickly to develop Leviathan gas reservoir

“We are urging Israel to move quickly,” US envoy says at the Israel Energy and Business Convention in Tel Aviv. Acknowledging the enormous economic and strategic prospects available to Israel’s expanding natural gas sector, US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro warned on Monday that the country must stabilize its investment environment in order to attract […]

American kids in the Age of Oil: ‘Economically worthless but emotionally priceless’

In colonial America, kids died young. No matter how unwelcome, Death was a frequent visitor at family firesides from Boston to Savannah, where parents could expect to lose, on average, up to half of their brood before they reached adulthood. According to 17th-century Puritan minister Cotton Mather, “a dead child [was] a sight no more […]

It is Time to Stop Measuring Fuel Efficiency in Miles Per Gallon

Due to the absurdities of history, America uses what is essentially a mediaeval unit system that appears completely untouched by the scientific revolution. Corn yields are measured in bushels; slabs of meat are measured in pounds; distances are measured in miles, feet and inches. Why such units have not been recognised as a menace to […]

Why your environmentalism is nauseating

Oil products are essential to maintaining our quality of life Recently, I’ve been in the throes of a group project that requires students to address a social issue. At the start of the semester, I groaned inwardly when classmates expressed their interest in an environmental topic. During presentations about environmentally related issues, I resisted the […]

Global Oil and Other Liquid Fuels Production Update

Global conventional crude oil + condensate production (C+C) attained a value of 73 million barrels per day (Mbpd) in May 2005. Since then conventional C+C has been bumping along a jagged plateau with the all time high of 73.3 reached in July 2008, immediately prior to the Chinese Olympic Games and the financial crash. It […]

China Seizes Opportunity to Fill Its Petroleum Reserve. Should Others?

China is apparently snapping up cheap oil cargoes to fill its strategic petroleum reserve. That might make sense for the US, too, if earmarked for new regional SPRs, rather than refilling the existing one on the Gulf. The Wall St. Journal has reported that state-owned oil companies in China are capitalizing on lower prices to fill […]

When the Shale Runs Dry: A Look at the Future of Fracking

If you want to see the future of the shale industry — what today’s drilling rush will leave behind — come to Bradford, Pennsylvania. A small city, it was home to one of America’s first energy booms, producing over three quarters of the world’s oil in 1877. A wooden oil rig towering over a local […]

About that Shale Oil ‘Miracle’…

Our work here at Peak Prosperity largely centers on trying to use facts and data to shift people’s actions towards the more positive and sustainable things that we not only can do, but should do. There’s nothing preventing us from behaving in ways that increase the Earth’s abundance rather than deplete it, but generally speaking […]

Is there really an oil glut?

Back in March 1999 “The Economist” magazine carried a cover photo of two men drenched in oil as they attempted to close a faulty valve that was spraying a huge stream of crude skyward. Over the photo was the headline: “Drowning in oil.” At the time it really did seem as if the world were drowning in […]

Financial reserves of oil-producing countries vulnerable to depletion

A specialized economist said that the financial reserves and surpluses of oil-producing countries are vulnerable to depletion in the event of continuing decline of global oil prices and with the pace of public spending remaining around the current high levels. Professor of economics at the College of Administrative Sciences, Kuwait University, Dr. Mohammed Al-Saqqa said […]

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