Daniel Yergin on peak oil, an industry rebound and Houston’s place in the energy future

When energy expert Dan Yergin wrote “The Prize,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 book on the history of the global oil industry, the United States was dependent on foreign oil to power its economy. Since the shale revolution transformed the U.S. into the world’s top oil producer, America has become energy independent and, moreover, a net […]

Kuntler: Going Full Orwell

Oscar Wilde observed that “life imitates art,” and there they were: the three grand poohbahs of social media, stone-facing the Senate Homeland Security Committee on their zoom screens like a trio of James Bond villains — Jack “Twitter” Dorsey, complete with sinister nose-ring and necromancer’s beard, Mark “Facebook” Zuckerberg, pasty and blank as a knish, […]

The Yellow Peril: Propaganda and the Pandemic

  The idea of the “Yellow Peril” about China was once a common way of thinking. Here I am illustrating how bad could that be from a short story by Jack London. Given the current situation, I wouldn’t bet that this kind of attitude couldn’t return, together with proposals for wiping out the Chinese population […]

Greenpeace Claims Fukushima Water Release Could Change Human DNA

Contaminated water that could soon be released into the sea from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contains radioactive carbon with the potential to damage human DNA, environmental rights organization Greenpeace has warned. The environmental group claims that the 1.23 million metric tons of water stored at the plant — scene of the 2011 Fukushima […]

Biden: “I would transition away from the oil industry”

In the final presidential debate, Joe Biden pledges to gradually transition the country from oil to renewable energy on a path to net-zero emissions by 2050. (Associated Press) Democrat Joe Biden’s remark that he would “transition” away from oil in the U.S. in favor of renewable energy drew quick attention Thursday night from President Donald […]

Not transitioning away from fossil fuels will kill the economy — and our planet. Who wants to tell right-wing media?

During last night’s final presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the former vice president suggested that to combat climate change we must ultimately move away from fossil fuels. The right-wing media latched onto his plan to “transition” to a clean energy economy as proof that Biden will eliminate oil and gas jobs and […]

Mexico and the US: Whose Oil?

A quick glance back at Mexico’s history, the government acting to protect its sovereignty by nationalizing oil (President Lázaro Cárdenas, 1938), suffices to explain the symbolic role of oil in Mexico. Britain severed relations. Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, realizing the importance of Mexico in times of crisis, vowed to keep good relations. The current president […]

Peak oil is coming – it’s just a question of when

This month marks a historic but largely forgotten moment in the history of the oil sector, and something that is unlikely to ever be repeated if forecasts for the demise of the world’s most valuable fossil fuel prove accurate. Fifty years ago, BP — then known as British Petroleum and majority state-owned — discovered oil off the […]

Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile

Masking the rot and fragility is not the same thing as strength or permanence. The great irony of the past 75 years of expanding consumption is the belief that all these decades of success prove the system is rock-solid and future success is thus guaranteed. The irony lies in the systemic fragility that’s built into the large-scale industrial […]

Capital Economics predicts global oil demand will peak around 2030

Oil prices are predicted to fall for much of the decade because of the Covid-19 crisis, with the peak in oil demand now not expected until 2030, according to a new report by Capital Economics. With countries implementing lockdown measures to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control earlier this year, global demand for fuel dropped […]

Floods, Drought Are Destroying Crops and Sparking Food Inflation

Wild weather is wreaking havoc on crops around the world, sending their prices skyrocketing. On wheat farms in the U.S. and Russia, it’s a drought that’s ruining harvests. The soybean fields of Brazil are bone dry too, touched by little more than the occasional shower. In Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, the problem is the exact […]

Fossil fuels are bridge to a carbon-free world

Pres. Trump and Joe Biden clashed vigorously over climate change and fossil fuels in the presidential debate Thursday evening. Trump defended the oil and gas industries, while Biden said he would phase out fossil fuels. In reality, validity exists in both of their positions. I firmly believe that fossil fuels will, in fact, be phased […]

Kunstler: Bleeding Out

“The difference between you and me,” Mr. Trump said to the ever more ghostly Joe Biden, fading mentally late in the action on the debate stage, “is that I’m not a politician and you are, and you’re a crooked politician.” Millions watching this spectacle might not have noticed, due to the media’s near-complete blackout of […]

The Tragedy of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’

Fifty years ago, University of California professor Garrett Hardin penned an influential essay in the journal Science. Hardin saw all humans as selfish herders: we worry that our neighbors’ cattle will graze the best grass. So, we send more of our cows out to consume that grass first. We take it first, before someone else […]

A new normal for energy?

COVID-19 has changed the world in many ways and energy hasn’t been excused. In early 2020, there was a perfect storm of excess supply and massive reductions in demand. Since then, the market has become far more balanced and the oil price seems to be tightly bound in a narrow price range. The restrictions on […]

Israel and UAE Eye Pipeline Linking Red and Med Seas

Israel and the United Arab Emirates have opened talks over an oil pipeline linking the Red Sea with the Mediterranean and whose operations Israeli officials treat as top secret. Europe Asia Pipeline Co., controlled by Israel’s government, and UAE-based MED-RED Land Bridge Ltd. signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on the transportation of crude […]

Big Oil’s Godzillas are keeping the pipe dream alive

As big western oil giants like BP and Shell agonise over how to reinvent themselves in the face of a warming climate, some of the world’s other top producers are taking a very different approach. At BP’s headquarters in London, chief executive Bernard Looney is mapping out plans to cut oil and gas production over […]

The Big Oil Side Hustle: Where ‘Renewable’ Money Is Really Going

“It is unrealistic to suggest that renewables could replace conventional baseload fuels.“–Gregory Boyce, former CEO Peabody Energy Corp., 2010. Every time an oil and gas major announces a major foray into renewable energy, the skeptics come out like clockwork and lambast the sector for merely trying to burnish its green credentials. Sometimes the criticism appears […]

IEA expects global oil consumption to peak by 2030

The era of growth in global oil consumption is coming to an end and will end in the period until 2030, follows from the forecast of the International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2020 (WEO), received by TASS on Tuesday. “The era of rising global oil demand will come to an end within 10 […]

The Great Pause Week 31: The Inevitable Glide Path

“This week I am starting to build raised beds from street rubble and found bottles.“ I gave a talk on Tuesday of this week at the Scaling Biochar Forum put on by the Sonoma Ecology Center in California. I canned the talk at the end of September and posted it to YouTube because I worried […]

The militarization of the Western Empire: How the COVID pandemic accelerated the process

  Donald Trump may not have been not such a warlike emperor as previous Western Emperors have been (and probably will be). But, even assuming that Trump is trying to avoid wars, he cannot oppose the militarization trends of the Western economy that was boosted by the COVID-19 epidemics.    History repeats itself – oh, […]

Japan decides to release Fukushima water into the sea

Japan will release more than a million tons of treated radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea in a decades-long operation, reports said Friday, despite strong opposition from environmentalists, local fishermen and farmers. The release of the water, which has been filtered to reduce radioactivity, is likely to start in 2022 […]

America’s First Nuclear Fusion Reactor Could Go Online in 2025

In 2014, Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) shocked the world with the announcement that it was building a nuclear fusion reactor and planned to have it online “in as little as ten years.” Five years later, Lockheed confirmed that it is still working on the project — but had made very little progress in nuclear fusion energy. […]

What point in growth?

In a capitalist society, economic growth is all important.  Why?  Because the underlying force in all societies is the growth of population.  With rare exceptions, mankind has not found a solution to stopping population growth.  (Think of China, which tried to encourage its people to have only one child.  This did not work).  If population […]

Stripper Lives Matter

396,000 marginal stripper oil wells produced 284 million barrels of oil in 2016 in the United States. So who really gives a rats ass, right? All of the US shale oil industry, from floor hand to CEO, thinks their shit doesn’t stink and shale oil is America’s future. The media feels the same way; when […]

The Death Of Oil

Summary Energy stocks have taken a beating over the last few weeks. Concerns about a worldwide resurgence of COVID-19 have raised the specter of declining economic activity and the negative potential impact on oil demand. Longer-term two news items last month, one from the governor of California and one from China, probably pushed the sentiment […]

Can we predict collapses before they happen? What we learned from the pandemic

My 2019 book “Before the Collapse.” In it, I examined several scenarios of the future of humankind. Was I able to predict the current pandemic? Of course not in the details, but I think that I did note an important facet of the story: epidemics are never very deadly when they come alone. They become […]

Who is “we”?

We humans have made a mess of things, which is readily evident if we face the avalanche of studies and statistics describing the contemporary ecological crises we face. But even with the mounting evidence of the consequences for people and planet, we have not committed to a serious project to slow the damage that we do. One reasonable response to those statements is, “Who […]

What’s Next for Food Supply Chains?

Ecosystems are under tremendous stress to cater to an increasing world population. Urbanization, economic inequality, geopolitical conflicts, and climate change are further disturbing the ecosystem and emerging diseases with long, indefinite durations that are not just a growing risk but perhaps the new normal as pressures from food shortages increase. Billions of people are now […]

Forget Peak Oil Demand, Supply Crisis Could be Hitting First

In today’s IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook 2020 report, the OECD energy watchdog states that it doesn’t see a peak oil demand before 2040, only a possible oil demand flattening. The energy agency repeats that oil demand is effected by COVID, but all scenarios show that oil demand has not peaked yet. The energy agency […]

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