Hydrogen-Powered Tram Developed in China

In an effort to reduce China’s harmful and plentiful greenhouse gas emissions, Chinese company Sifang (a subsidiary of China South Rail Corporation) has developed the world’s first hydrogen powered tram. The tram took two years of research and development to complete, and will be powered entirely by hydrogen fuel cells. Since this is a tram […]

U.S. oil production is probably peaking right now

U.S. crude production will peak this month, according to revised forecasts published by the country’s Energy Information Administration (EIA). Output will average 9.37 million barrels per day (bpd) in April and the same in May before falling to 9.33 million bpd in June and 9.04 million bpd by September, the EIA predicted in the April […]

China Turns to the Sea for Fresh Water

The government plans to quadruple desalination by 2020 On the shores of Bohai Bay near the industrial city of Tangshan, construction has begun on an engineering project ambitious even by Chinese standards. Starting in 2019, the facility will remove salt from 120,000 tons of seawater each day. The result will be 50,000 tons of potable […]

America’s Top 100 Oil Fields

 With everyone’s attention in recent months falling squarely on the US oil industry, and specifically how much longer various shale companies will be able to keep operating now that Saudi Arabia is openly on a war path with US marginal producers, we thought it may be an opportune time to remind readers just where America’s […]

Japan considers evaporation of Fukushima water

Japan is considering evaporating or storing underground tritium-laced water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant as an alternative to releasing it into the ocean, Tokyo Electric Power Co’s chief decommissioning officer told Reuters on Wednesday. The removal of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of water containing tritium, a relatively harmless radioactive isotope left behind in […]

Heinberg: The Law of Diminishing Returns

In this new short video Richard Heinberg explores how — in our economy, the environment, and energy production — we may well be. When previous societies have hit similar limits, they often doubled-down by attempting ever more complex interventions to keep things going, before finally collapsing. Will this be our fate too? And is there […]

Banks and the Money Supply

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Sensible advice, especially when it comes to tinkering with the money supply: with laws about how money is made, how we get it, how we spend it. What would happen if the financial system was dismantled or thrown out of joint? Would we be able to pay the […]

Peaked Oil?

Peak Oil is back at least for now! U.S. oil futures soared after he Energy Information Administration (EIA) acknowledged that U.S. oil output will fall despite earlier predictions to the contrary only to fall back after the American Petroleum Institute reported a 12.2 million barrel increase in crude oil supply. The market seemed to ignore […]

“Peak Oil” Theory May Have Peaked

There are various versions of the “peak oil” theory, but for decades it garnered high-fives because it had been right about the U.S. Specifically, geophysicist M. King Hubbert published a theory of oil field development in 1956 that predicted total U.S. oil production would “peak” by about 1971 (at the latest) after which it would […]

Enforcement Of Mandatory Water Restrictions Is Only Just The Beginning

Smart meters are now being used by authorities to crack down on “water wasters” in the state of California, but this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as what they can be used for.  Ultimately, smart meters are designed to be part of an entire “smart grid” that will enable government bureaucrats […]

Get ready for peak chocolate!

A GLOBAL chocolate shortage could see prices double by 2020, thanks to instability in West Africa, which drives world cocoa production. So far the looming “choc shock” is failing to deter Australians, like East Lismore’s Alexis Galea, 3, from enjoying plenty of Easter eggs. Australians this year spent an estimated $185 million on chocolate eggs. […]

A mostly Muslim world

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. By the year 2030, Pakistan will overtake Indonesia as the largest Muslim country in the world. This and other notable demographic trends were announced by the Pew Research Centre in its latest survey, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth and Projections 2010-2050. The […]

The world’s largest oil companies are about to start devouring each other

It was only a matter of time. The Wall Street Journal reports that international oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is in talks to buy BG Group, a giant shipper of natural gas with extensive holdings in Brazil’s oil fields. It may be the opening shot of a consolidation war that many have been expecting. The reason, […]

Saudi Arabia boosts crude oil production to highest level on record

Output reaches 10.3m barrels a day in March as kingdom responds to unexpectedly strong global demand. Saudi Arabia has revved up crude production to its highest rate on record, feeding unexpectedly strong demand from foreign refiners and increased capacity at home. The oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said on Tuesday the country produced 10.3m barrels per […]

The Bakken bust continues

In North Dakota’s Bakken shale oil play, the drilling boom has gone bust. It may only be a temporary bust—but aren’t all booms, and all busts? Here I show a compilation of the latest data from North Dakota, assembled in advance of the state’s monthly release. Production was down 1.5 percent from January to February, […]

Big Agriculture, Big Oil and the water crisis in California

The Los Angeles Times reports, “Gov. Jerry Brown [has] ordered cities and towns across California to cut water use by 25% as part of a sweeping set of mandatory drought restrictions, the first in state history. Emphasizing that the drought could persist, Brown said Californians must change their water habits.” The news article highlights, “The […]

Oil production to decline 0.7 to 8 percent

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City today forecasted that domestic oil production could fall by as much as 8 percent in 2015. The central bank said oil and gas production has increased by more than 50 percent since 2005, but things could be sliding backward with low prices. “With oil prices at about half […]

Exhausted world stuck in permanent stagnation

The global economy is caught in a low-growth trap as innovation withers and the population ages across the Northern Hemisphere. It will not regain its lost dynamism in the foreseeable future, the International Monetary Fund has warned. The IMF said the world as a whole has seen a “persistent reduction” in its growth rate since […]

Communities that Abide Revisited

My tropical wanderings have taken me to the exact same spot where I was last year, when I took the photograph that ended up on the cover of the book Communities that Abide: I took a number of pictures of this tree, during different times of day, until I got the one I wanted: the […]

Why democracy doesn’t work (and how to fix it)

This post is not supposed to be a proposal for reforming democracy. Any real reform seems to be impossible in a world where the main (and perhaps the only) rule seems to be “don’t even think of changing anything important” (DETOCAI). This said, I noticed a recent article by Dean Burnett on “the Guardian” that […]

Oil prices could be $5-$15 a barrel lower in 2016 if Iran sanctions lifted

World oil prices could be $5 to $15 a barrel lower than forecast next year if oil-related sanctions against Iran are lifted, the U.S. government’s energy agency said on Tuesday. In its monthly report, the Energy Information Administration said U.S. oil production growth was slowing even more quickly than it expected a month ago, while […]

U.S. leads global oil and gas production for third year

For the third year running, the U.S. produced more crude oil and natural gas than any other country in the world in 2014. More oil than Saudi Arabia. More gas than Russia. And it’s happening at time when the U.S. is trying to take a leadership role in slashing greenhouse gas emissions to avert the […]

Saudi Dictator Gunning Down Domestic Anti-War Protesters

Five points on Saudi Arabia that “US officials and the establishment media are neglecting to talk about”: 1) Sharia Law runs the country. 2) Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian dictatorship: There are no national elections, no parties, and no rights. 3) People are publicly beheaded in the Kingdom. 4) Human rights for Saudi women are among the […]

Rice 2.0? The search for a more sustainable staple food

Ten thousand years ago, China’s ancient inhabitants harvested the grains of wild rice, a perennial grass growing up to 15 feet tall in bogs and streams. The grains were small and red, maturing in waves and often shattering into the water. Their descendants transformed that grain into the high-yielding annual crop that today feeds half […]

Underground Coal Gasification, the next extreme energy front?

After over a century of coal ash and colliery waste dumping, the Tyne and Wear coastline is no stranger to industrial pollution. But soon a horrific new technology – underground coal gasification (UCG) – will endanger human health and the environment, backed by unflinching Government support and generous lashings of taxpayers’ money. The toxic by-products […]

One of Libya’s Rival Governments Moves to Control Oil Revenue

One of the two factions battling for control of Libya took steps on Sunday to divert incoming oil revenue away from the central bank and into its own new account, a steep escalation in the contest over the country’s vast wealth. Libya’s oil and money are the prizes that have driven much of the competition […]

The BP Oil Spill 5 Years After: How Has It Affected You?

On April 20, 2010, a blowout at the Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico sank the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, operated by BP. Eleven people died. And the wellhead, protruding from the seafloor, spewed millions of gallons of crude into the ocean. That oil spread far and wide, killing microorganisms and larger animals, […]

In California, Farmers Rely on Oil Wastewater

The wet, white noise of gushing water rises above a background track of twangy guitar. Water is tumbling out of a pipe into a holding pond that looks as though it has sat nearly empty for ages, its sandy sides the color of parched desert. It looks like the California of recent headlines: drought so […]

Fukushima radiation reaches N American shores

Seaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has reached North America. Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution detected small amounts of cesium-134 and cesium-137 in a sample of seawater taken in February from a dock on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It’s the first time radioactivity from the March 2011 triple meltdown has been identified […]

New York to Build World’s Most Powerful Smart Energy Lab

The New York Power Authority and SUNY Polytechnic Institute will partner to build the world’s largest research and development facility focused on energy technology innovation. New York State has goals of eliminating electricity peaks, enabling distributed energy resources and incorporating more large-scale renewables as part of its Reforming the Energy Vision proposal. The yet-to-be-built facility, […]

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