People can’t imagine life without cars

A majority of people around the world could not imagine living their lives without a car, according to a study released Wednesday at the Frankfurt Motor Show. The findings by the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA), a group that defends the various interests of the car industry, revealed that 57% of people globally […]

Decline Rates Will Ensure Oil Output Falls in 2016

“It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast,” the Red Queen told Alice in Lewis Carroll’s novel “Through the Looking-Glass”. Oil companies have to invest heavily simply to offset the impact of natural decline […]

The receding tide of oil price foreshadows the incoming DEFLATION TSUNAMI.

The receding tide of oil price foreshadows the incoming DEFLATION TSUNAMI. Nothing grows indefinitely in a finite system, not even debt! Almost all (90%) of ‘money’ in existence today is debt (credit) . This debt is created from thin air with every form of loan, from credit cards, through corporate debt to Treasury Notes. All […]

“She Likes Gasoline”: On Latin America and the Coming Energy Crisis

Over the past ten years, reggaeton singers have changed the idea we’d long had about Latin American music. Their music videos are full of adrenaline, aggressiveness, sexual arousal, speed, fast motorcycles, sport cars, luxurious yachts and lascivious young men. One of Daddy Yankee’s popular pieces (where the title of this post comes from) offers us […]

India Approaches Replacement Fertility

This Population Bulletin updates a previous Bulletin from 2006, India’s Population Reality: Reconciling Change and Tradition. Indias’s population (currently at 1.3 billion) will exceed China’s before 2025 to make India the world’s most populous country. India’s annual increase of about 19 million people contributes more to the annual world population growth of about 89 million […]

Western Civilization is on Life Support and Europe is Trying to Pull the Plug

Western Civilization, whether the world chooses to admit it or not, is dying. All the signs point to an inevitable pending disaster: Our liberties are eroding, the culture has fundamentally transformed (in both good and bad ways), the religious underpinnings of our society have been removed, and life as we know it is about to […]

Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?.

Audio Player Whatever happened to “peak oil” – the assertion that the rate at which oil is extracted from the Earth is nearing a maximum or peak level? With falling oil and gasoline prices and a boom of new oil development in the United States and elsewhere, concern about global oil supplies have faded from […]

An Economics Argument For Low Oil Prices

Summary The microeconomics model of residual demand describes the decisions of oil producers very accurately, and can be used to anticipated producers’ reactions to changes in the market. The residual demand model shows that it does not make sense for individual producers to cut production unless they believe that others will cut as well. Both […]

All The Doomsday Prophecies That Didn’t Come True

Ronald Bailey isn’t surprised by those who regularly renew warnings of environmental Armageddon. The award winning author and Reason journalist says there’s a simple reason for so much gloom: “doom sells.” From Peak Oil to the Population Bomb, Bailey goes through a veritable anthology of debunked environmental doomsday prophecies on today’s episode of Federalist Radio. […]

OPEC August Production Flat

The latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market report is out with OPEC production numbers for August 2015. All charts below are in thousand barrels per day with the last data point August 2015. Not much has happened since June, OPEC 12 production was up 12,000 bpd in August that is well within the margin of error. All […]

Peak oil, the next Kondratiev cycle, generational turnings, and ERE

If you’ve read practically all my posts and all the forum posts as well, you’re probably aware of the fact that one of the early catalysts for my own trajectory to what became ERE was my discovery of peak oil(*) in 2001. (I attribute the other two catalysts to the idea of anticonsumerism and fractional […]

Oil Production Is Likely To Fall Much Faster Than The IEA Predicts

Summary According to the IEA, oil production is due to fall by 0.5 million barrels per day next year in non-OPEC nations. While this is bullish for long-oriented investors, I believe it’s a big undershoot compared to what is likely to happen. With oil production in the U.S. alone having already taken a beating and […]

To Understand The Oil Story, You Need To Understand Exports

Despite the attention-grabbing economic volatility that is grabbing headlines, it’s important to keep our eye on the energy story firmly in focus. This is especially true as the headlines we regularly read about Peak Oil being dead ” are “manifestly false” according to this week’s podcast guest, petroleum geologist Jeffrey Brown. As concerning as the […]

Driving Just Got Cheaper for Everyone

Plenty of people have lost big because of the oil price crash over the last year: rig workers, oil-company shareholders, OPEC government coffers. One massive constituency is benefitting universally: drivers. The map below shows the change in gasoline prices from October 2014 to July 2015 in 76 countries tracked by Bloomberg. There’s only one color scale because gasoline […]

Californian water source at 500-year low

Snow cover in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, a water lifeline for California’s cities and agriculture, has hit its lowest level in 500 years, a study said Monday. Measured on April 1, the natural, frozen reservoir was barely five percent of the 1950-2000 average, threatening tens of millions of Californians and the state’s $50-billion (44-billion-euro) […]

Feds to launch sweeping oil patch safety study

Next year, federal health officials will send questionnaires to hundreds of workers in oil and gas fields across the country in a study aimed at making the industry less deadly, according to The Denver Post. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will […]

Gulf Oil Producers Ramp Up Price War as China, Supply Concerns Persist

The Persian Gulf’s biggest oil producers appear to be intensifying their price war in a competition to maintain their share of the Asian market amid uncertainty about the direction of the oil market in 2015. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq all cut their official prices for October deliveries to Asia this month, amid new concerns […]

Fukushima Dumps First Batch of Radioactive Water In Sea

No.1 (L) and No.2 reactor buildings are seen at Kyushu Electric Power’s Sendai nuclear power station in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima prefecture in Japan on July 8, 2015. Kyushu Electric Power Co. started loading uranium fuel rods into a reactor this summer, marking the first attempt to reboot Japan’s nuclear industry in nearly two years after the […]

A less fragile future

The good news is that majority of the world’s population is becoming safer, healthier and richer. The bad news is that for those unlucky enough to live in the most fragile of environments, sickness, poverty and insecurity persist. According to the World Development Report on Conflict, the quarter of the world’s population living in fragile and […]

Syria peak oil weakened government’s finances ahead of Arab Spring in 2011

While the attention of the world is on the refugee crisis we need to look at the causes of this mass exodus. Fig 1: Refugees walking on Hungarian motorway towards Austria in Sep 2015 In May 2013 the Guardian had an article “Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syrian conflict” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/may/13/1 In March […]

Lord Of The Flies: Dystopia Is Arriving

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero  – Voltaire I was driving around Denver yesterday doing my “boots on the ground” due diligence scouting of the local housing market.  I continue to see some “sold” and “under contract” signs but I’m seeing a pile-up forming in new “for sale,” “price reduced,” and “for […]

OPEC Is About to Get Even Bigger

There’s been a lot of debate as to whether OPEC’s decision to protect its market share would work. Some thought that the policy shift from protecting price to protecting market share would eventually lead to a breakup of the organization, as weaker members would revolt or bolt. That, however, doesn’t appear to be the case, […]

Saudi copes with oil drop by selling FX

Look out world—China’s not the only central bank in town selling its currency reserves to cope with a tumultuous global economy. With crude prices having shed more than half their value over the past year, oil producing economies are feeling the sting of cheaper oil. More importantly, Saudi Arabia—OPEC’s largest member and the world’s top […]

Egypt will take Cyprus gas

The recent discovery of giant natural gas deposits in Egypt’s Zohr plot does not negate the country’s export deal with Cyprus, newly-accredited ambassador Hussein Mubarak told the Cyprus Weekly. Although Nicosia is looking into different scenarios, Cairo’s offer to import the gas from the Aphrodite plot offshore Cyprus, liquefy it in Egypt and sell it […]

Saudi Arabia Says It Has Taken In 2.5 Million Fleeing Syrians

After attracting severe criticism on social media and from members of the Muslim community around the world, Saudi Arabia has defended itself saying that the kingdom has accepted more than 2.5 million refugees since the Syrian conflict began. The oil-rich nation also claimed that it has given permanent residency to hundreds of thousands of Syrians […]

Truth takes a hit in the battle over U.S. oil export ban

They say that the first casualty of war is truth. And, on both sides of the fight over lifting the ban on exports of U.S. crude oil, the truth has already fallen into a coma. The ban was instituted in 1975 in order to make America less subject to swings in international oil supply after […]

U.S. Solar PV Electricity: Trickle Flow

Pitiful State of U.S. Solar PV: Solar PV in the United States has demonstrated remarkable growth in capacity (i.e., MW), but lags terribly in actual electricity production (i.e., MWh) in the United States. For example, “Solar electricity generating capacity grew by a factor of 35 between 2000 and 2013 and currently accounts for 0.5% of […]

OPEC Is “Studying” a Proposal for Emergency Meeting

OPEC has made it clear: It will not cut oil production alone. However, it will consider a cut if other non-OPEC members join in. That, however, is easier said than done as other major non-OPEC producers simply can’t shut off their oil pumps quite as easily as some in OPEC can. Still, where there is a […]

Interest in hybrid vehicles wanes

Interest in hybrid motor vehicles rises and falls with the price of gasoline. Today, with gasoline prices relatively low, some of the steam has gone out of the movement to compressed natural gas vehicles or the hybrids that also use gasoline. Interest was sky high in 2011 when the Legislature authorized two state agencies — […]

The Zombie Patrix Apocalypse

““We recapitulate the conditions that create our fears, subconsciously wanting to relieve the original stress, but then we make the same bad choices, because of our conditioning, and so it goes, we have to do it again.”” 161: the number of countries in which environmental disasters, most of them due to weather-related events, have caused […]

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