Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable

In 2009, the historian David Kaiser, then a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, got a call from a guy named Steve Bannon. Bannon wanted to interview Kaiser for a documentary he was making based on the work of the generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. Kaiser, an expert on […]

Oil and gas discoveries dry up to lowest total for 60 years

Discoveries of new oil and gasfields have dropped to a fresh 60-year low, as companies put a brake on exploration and large fields have become harder to find. There were only 174 oil and gas discoveries worldwide last year, compared to an average of 400-500 per year up until 2013, according to IHS Markit, the […]

Fireballs and booby traps: On the front lines with the oil workers …

The flames exploded into the sky like a volcanic eruption, blanketing a swath of the Iraqi countryside in a noxious haze of black smoke. The inferno reached more than 300 feet high on a recent afternoon when the wind shifted direction, bending the billowing wall of fire toward the men from Iraq’s North Oil Co. […]

Does the Australian LNG export experience foreshadow soaring U.S. natural gas prices?

Two times last winter Australians living in the country’s eastern region paid more than twice as much for natural gas as did Japanese customers taking delivery of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the same region. (Australia has three separate natural gas pipeline networks which create three domestic natural gas markets, Eastern, Northern and Western.) The […]

EV growth may force peak oil demand by 2035

Fast growth in electric vehicles (EVs) coupled with increased carpooling/sharing and autonomous driving may force peak oil demand by 2035, said the Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) in its latest research report Global Energy Weekly. Even so, the incoming Trump Administration could well reverse some policies. An aggressive descaling of EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) […]

The Orphaned Solution

“By combining compost with biochar, or feeding biochar to those herds of migrating herbivores, the story could become one of negative emissions — net sequestration — almost immediately, continuing indefinitely. “ Let’s summarize: so here we stand. The ocean is going out, the fish are flopping in the sand. Do we stay and scoop them […]

Russia’s economy grows at $40 per barrel oil

The Russian economy will be on the positive side of growth even if the price of crude oil falls to $40 per barrel, the Central Bank of Russia said. Central Bank Gov. Elvira Nabiullina said Thursday the Russian economy stands to exhibit growth this year. The number of economic sectors expected to expand this year […]

Entropy in Geopolitics

A hundred and fifty years ago, a German physicist derived the concept of “entropy” from the second law of thermodynamics.  Since then, entropy has stood for the idea that everything in the universe eventually moves from order to disorder, from structure to formlessness, and from predictability to uncertainty.  Entropy is the measurement of that change.  […]

EIA: Short-Term Energy Outlook

  Forecast Highlights Global liquid fuels Implied global petroleum and liquid fuels inventories are estimated to have increased by 0.8 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2016. EIA expects the oil market to be relatively balanced in 2017 and 2018, with inventory draws averaging 0.1 million b/d in 2017 and builds averaging 0.2 million b/d […]

There’s been an explosion at a major nuclear plant in the English channel

An explosion occurred at the Flamanville nuclear plant in Normandy on Thursday morning, newspaper France Ouest reports. State-owned Eléctricité de France (EDF) said in a statement that a fire in a machine room caused the explosion in a “non-nuclear” part of the power station and added that there were no casualties and no environmental or safety concerns. The […]

The Blood Bath Continues in the US Oil Industry

Guest Post by SRSrocco This post does not necessarily reflect the views of Dennis Coyne or Ron Patterson. The carnage continues in the U.S. major oil industry as they sink further and further in the RED. The top three U.S. oil companies, whose profits were once the envy of the energy sector, are now forced […]

An Energy Giant Bigger Than Exxon in the Shadow of Saudi Aramco

Qatar Petroleum’s output has more than doubled since 2006 World’s top LNG producer now seeks international expansion Qatar Petroleum is the hidden giant of the global energy industry, overshadowed by its neighbor Saudi Aramco. Yet, the country’s colossal natural gas resources allow the state-run company to pump more oil and gas than Rosneft PJSC or […]

The World as Representation

It can be hard to remember these days that not much more than half a century ago, philosophy was something you read about in general-interest magazines and the better grade of newspapers. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was an international celebrity; the posthumous publication of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phenomenon Humaine (the English translation, predictably, […]

Oil Companies, Corrupt Governments to Benefit as Congress Guts Transparency Rule

On February 3, the Republican-led Senate used an obscure procedural tool to end a bipartisan provision meant to fight corruption and overseas oil bribery, a rule opposed by Rex Tillerson as head of ExxonMobil. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) transparency rule, part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, was created to reduce corruption by […]

Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion

In part 5 of a 6-part lecture, Hans Rosling uses statistics to give an overview of population growth and an explanation of why the total human population will never reach 11 billion, as others predict and fear.

Do we have a population crisis or a consumption crisis?

Screen capture The dangers of overconsumption, population growth and a toxic environment We love comments, really we do! But sometimes it seems that every post ends up with a discussion of the population crisis, like a rerun of a Star Trek episode. If we cover a tree-covered tower: Cities aren’t the problem, too many people […]

Shining a light on Kenya’s electrification

Reports on the success of Kenya’s electrification program seem too good to be true. Official figures suggest that the proportion of the population with access to electricity at home has increased from 27% in 2013 to 55% this year, putting the country on course to achieve its goal of 95% electrification by 2021. While the […]

Yemen war causing world’s worst food crisis

Two years since the conflict escalated in Yemen, more than 17 million Yemenis do not know if they will be able to put food on the table to feed their families, the Norwegian Refugee Council warned today at the start of a donor conference for Yemen. “In Yemen, if bombs don’t kill you, a slow […]

US Army Corps Grants Key Easement for Dakota Access Pipeline

Following a boost from the Trump administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) on Tuesday returned to its original assessment and granted an easement to the backers of the controversial $3.8 billion, 1,200-mile Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) for its final leg, a water crossing in south-central North Dakota. Although opponents said they would file […]

Love, Intelligence and Art — Musings on the Natural World

Derrick Jensen reflects on the bird and frog songs he loves, and the richness of longtime relationships with natural places where one lives. By contrast, and especially in cities, our sensory input is largely mediated by machines (computers, television, radio, cars, etc.) Being surrounded only by human input, it can be very easy to forget […]

The World Could Reach Peak Coal And Oil In Three Years, Thanks To Cheap Renewables

The world could reach peak oil and coal in as little as three years—not because either is close to running out, but because of the falling cost of solar power and electric cars and stronger climate policy. A new report from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative analyzed how […]

New Radiation Level at Fukushima Dwarfs the Highest Peak at Chernobyl

The Fukushima Disaster We noted a few days after the Japanese earthquake that the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima dwarfs that at Chernobyl … and that the cesium fallout from Fukushima already rivaled Chernobyl (we also noted that Fukushima radiation could end up on the West Coast of North America. And see this.). The […]

Renewable Lies And The Deception Of Dutch Commuters

It’s been a while since the Automatic Earth featured an article from Energy Matters, the site run by our longtime friend Euan Mearns, Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Aberdeen, and his co-conspirator Roger Andrews, a British engineer/geophysicist, semi-retired in Mexico. But I read a piece by Roger yesterday that I like, because it […]

The world needs fewer people, but our economy needs more

What would happen to B.C.’s real estate industry … if the world’s population and consequent in-migration to B.C. miraculously, or tragically, dropped? When I first learned that West Vancouver’s population was declining, amid what I thought was the inexorable arrival of 35,000 new people in the Lower Mainland each year, I enjoyed a little inside […]

Could 3-D printers hasten peak oil demand?

A global transition away from oil and gas is well underway as booming renewable energy sources and electric cars portend major changes for the industry. Last week BP outlined the challenges ahead, but the company’s crystal ball has yet to focus on the disruptive potential from what may be the biggest paradigm shift in manufacturing […]

Israeli settlement law ‘violates rights and dignity’

Palestinian politicians and human rights groups are warning that a new law passed by the Israeli parliament violates international laws and is a step towards Israel annexing the occupied West Bank. The so-called Regulation Law, passed on Monday night, allows for the retroactive legalisation of about 4,000 homes built by Jewish settlers on privately owned […]

Electric Cars – An Existential Threat For Oil?

Nobody would have predicted ten years ago, back when everyone was talking about Who Killed the Electric Car, that oil would someday have to fear the future of General Motor’s EV1. Practically none of the 1,117 units were still in commission in 2006 when the movie first aired, but today there’s a whole new fleet. […]

Alex Jones’ Bat Signal To Donald Trump

The weird spectacle of the day out of the White House is a crazy list of “under-reported” terrorist attacks in recent years (including the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney, which had saturation coverage in the media here for months, but not including the now infamous, nonexistent “Bowling Green massacre” made up by Trump PR lady […]

On the belt and road, the Chinese civilisation is on the march

Peter T. C. Chang says Beijing’s ambition to build a pan-Asian sphere of common prosperity will affect far more than the region’s economy, and it would be wise to watch out for the civilisational fault lines Just as the Euro-American world grapples with the sombre after-effects of Brexit and the installation of a pugnacious Trump […]

Qatar ‘Very Comfortable’ With Current Oil Prices

Al Emadi says government hasn’t decided on bond issuance Government is spending $500 million a week on capital projects Current oil prices are close to the level Qatar needs to finance spending, and the government hasn’t made a decision on whether to sell debt, according to Finance Minister Ali Al Emadi. “We feel very comfortable,” […]

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