From Overstretch to Collapse

In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States has gone from the world’s sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the journalist Fintan O’Toole noted recently […]

Are The Outlines of A Better World Emerging?

Once the government’s ability to sustain its enforcement with money created out of thin air vanishes, the entire order vanishes along with it. The era of waste, greed, fraud and living on borrowed money is dying, and those who’ve known no other way of living are mourning its passing. Its passing was inevitable, for any society […]

Oil Crash Busted Broker’s Computers and Inflicted Big Losses

Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn’t resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn’t lose as […]

Can oil recover from coronavirus? An industry debate is underway.

When the pandemic is all over will society go back to driving cars and hopping on planes with nary a worry as it did just two short months ago? Or is the world more permanently changed, with the commute to work a thing of the past, public events radically scaled back and the confined spaces […]

Oil Expected to Reach $100 Again

The oil price has been predicted to hit $100 per barrel in around 18 months. The oil price will hit $100 per barrel in around 18 months. That’s what Orascom Investment Holding Chairman and CEO Naguib Sawiris believes, a new CNBC television interview has revealed. “I actually believe that in, let’s say, 18 months from […]

Oil Metric Shows Demand Comeback

A gauge of the oil market indicates that demand is rebounding but the comeback should be gradual, according to one market-watcher. Keep reading to learn more about this indicator and additional insights about this oil market from Rigzone panelists in the following review of the past week’s market developments. Rigzone: What were some market expectations […]

The downfall of ‘Professor Lockdown”: triumphs and failure of science based policies

  Scientists normally think that a scientific theory can be good or bad independently of the moral status of the person who proposes it. But in politics, the messenger can be blamed. That was the probable reason for the downfall of Dr. Neil Ferguson, nicknamed “Professor Lockdown,” whose moral position was destroyed by a petty […]

Crashing oil demand drives a 17 MMbpd global output cut in Q2

Consulting firm IHS Markit expects oil demand in the second quarter of 2020 to be 22 MMbpd less than a year ago. This collapse in demand combined with low oil prices, storage constraints and government ordered cuts are driving what is an extraordinary level of liquids production cuts and shut-ins around the world. “The Great […]

“Biblical” Wave Of Bankruptcies Is About To Flood The US

One of the silver linings of the coronacrisis to date is that despite the unprecedented collapse in the broader economy and the 30 or so million unemployed, the pace of bankruptcy filings has been relatively steady compared to the pre-covid levels, as the following Goldman chart shows. Unfortunately the relative calm is not meant to […]

Is Trump Kicking The Saudis To The Curb The Beginning Of Something Not Terrible?

More than anything else in Saudi Arabia, that thing you smell is fear. Everything is coming unglued for the royal family there all at once. If we all weren’t so distracted by the Coronapocalypse these things would all be front page news. In the past week there have been three major stories concerning Saudi Arabia, […]

Visualizing America’s Energy Use, in One Giant Chart

Have you ever wondered where the country’s energy comes from, and how exactly it gets used? Well now, thanks to Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins, we have the answer as The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) crunches the numbers every year, outputting an incredible flow diagram that covers the broad spectrum of U.S. energy use. The […]

Population Boom, or Population Bust?

We all know the world population is set to hit 9 billion by 2050. Or is it? Darrell Bricker says it’s not going to happen, and we should prepare to have fewer mouths to feed — not more. It’s common knowledge that the world population is rapidly expanding, set to hit the 9 billion mark […]

Arc of peak oil: From empty wells to demand destruction

The world once debated whether oil wells would run dry. Now, with crude flooding the market, the debate has turned to whether oil companies can sell enough of it. If peak oil is a relic, the question now is if we’ve hit peak oil demand. The debate, like nearly everything these days, is stoked by […]

Responding to Collapse, Part 16: Shortages of Money

A few posts back I said that shortages of electrical power, diesel fuel and money will be at the heart of the troubles that lie ahead for small remote communities as collapse progresses. I am interested in that sort of community because that is where I am recommending that you take refuge in order to […]

The global food supply chain is passing a severe test

IF YOU LIVE in the rich world and want an example of trade and global co-operation, look no further than your dinner plate. As the lockdowns began in the West two months ago, many feared that bread, butter and beans would run short, causing a wave of stocking-up. Today, thanks to fleets of delivery lorries […]

Millions of farm animals culled as US food supply chain chokes up

Covid-related slaughterhouse shutdowns in the US are leading to fears of meat shortages and price rises, while farmers are being forced to consider “depopulating” their animals. More than 20 slaughterhouses have been forced to close, although some have subsequently reopened. On Tuesday President Trump issued an executive order to keep slaughterhouses open which would, he […]

Is An Oil Supply Shortage Inevitable?

Oil prices are rising as supply shut ins mount and oil demand seems to be turning a corner. Some oil market analysts even warn that a supply deficit could be on the horizon, one that could balloon in the coming years because of the damage done today. Demand remains sharply down, but April is widely […]

Saudi Arabia, Hit With Oil Collapse and Coronavirus, Tosses Lifelines

Saudi Arabia is taking unprecedented measures to cushion the blow of rock-bottom oil prices and the new coronavirus pandemic, as the monarchy seeks to extricate the kingdom from its worst financial predicament in decades. Oil prices have crashed since early March in part because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched an oil-price war with Russia, […]

Oil flows spell deep depression

Energy is not just one commodity among many in the economy; it is the commodity. Without energy, nothing gets done. And, oil is not just one form of energy in the energy commodity complex; it is the energy source upon which our modern way of life depends. In fact, it is the main energy source […]

U.S. Treasury To Borrow $3 Trillion In 3 Months To Pay For Pandemic

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to borrow nearly $3 trillion between April and June to bankroll the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s an unprecedented level of deficit financing to match the historic economic hit caused by the virus. In a single quarter, the government will borrow more than twice as much as it […]

Airline transportation after the epidemic. The problem is being solved, but not the way you would have imagined

  That’s how a hydrogen-powered plane could look like. Honestly, it is not very impressive: it looks more like an Elvis sighting and one may even reasonably doubt that this thing could fly. If it were easy to power planes using hydrogen, someone would be working at real prototypes rather than just these drawings.  Airlines […]

Permian Drillers Slash Output Themselves

On the same day OPEC-style oil quotas in Texas were pronounced dead on arrival, shale drillers disclosed more supply cuts in response to the crude market collapse. Diamondback Energy Inc. and Centennial Resource Development Inc. on Monday became the latest Permian Basin shale explorers to say they were curbing output. A pandemic-fueled crash in oil […]

How natural gas is withstanding the energy market collapse

Natural gas is withstanding the coronavirus-fueled economic crash in a way that its closely associated relative, oil, isn’t. Oil prices have reached record lows, with the U.S. benchmark oil price briefly dropping below zero last month after trading at around $60 per barrel at the start of 2020. The U.S. natural gas price, meanwhile, is […]

The Great Pause Week 6: The Green Child

“There passed long stretches of beautiful waterfront acreage with hanging Spanish moss, decaying mansions and docks, and no people.“ In the early spring of 2032, the two sailors cast lines and tacked into the wind, making for the Alabama coast some 550 miles distant. The principal passenger, the writer Albert Bates, had been holed up […]

The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can

A leakproof, declining cap on fossil fuels is a necessary step to constrain global warming and stabilize the ecosphere, but doing so will have huge economic repercussions, and it’s hard to imagine Big Petroleum, Big Coal, or private utility companies going along with anything like it. As they have throughout their history, they will use […]

The Wave Of Shale Well Closures Has Finally Begun

U.S. shale oil producers have so far held up admirably, hanging on for dear life amidst the biggest oil demand collapse in history. American producers continued to pump at record highs in March, even after dozens of drillers laid out blueprints to limit production. But with U.S. storage about to hit tank tops in a matter of […]

Kunstler: Slouching Toward Resolution

The people of this land have enough trouble in mind — what with livelihoods, careers, businesses, marriages, hopes and dreams circling the drain in the new insta-depression — but let’s hope they have just a little attention left over for the whirlwind denouement of the odious RussiaGate affair, now finally shredding the last defenses of […]

Anticipating the Die-Off

Note: I wrote this post back in 2010.  Although one can see that the points about peak oil have not come true, other claims like the following do seem newly possible:  “Thousands of companies will go bankrupt, and millions will be unemployed. Once affluent cities with street cafés will have queues at soup kitchens and […]

Is November 2019 the New US Peak Oil Date?

A post by Ovi at peakoilbarrel. Here I am again reporting on out of date US February oil production from the EIA April report after the world oil environment has been turned on its head. Fortunately the EIA also has some forward looking reports that make use of more current data to provide projections for […]

Saudi Arabia aiming to dominate oil’s sunset years

Do you remember peak oil? It was the theory, very popular a few years ago, that the world would soon exhaust all easily accessible reserves of oil. We were heading, the analysts assured us, for an energy crunch. Crude prices would climb ever higher, as would demand for the stuff, and eventually we would run […]

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