Electricity Prices Surge to Record

The average price for a kilowatthour (KWH) of electricity hit a March record of 13.5 cents, according data released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was up about 5.5 percent from 12.8 cents per KWH in March 2013. The relative price of electricity in the United States tends to rise in spring, peak […]

Personal travel growth significantly influences projected transportation energy demand

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2014, Issues in Focus Personal travel, measured in light-duty vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per licensed driver, reached 12,900 miles per year in 2007 and decreased to about 12,500 in 2012. This shift in travel behavior is important because it directly influences light-duty vehicle (LDV) energy demand for […]

Fruit and Vegetable Prices Are Rising

Grocery shoppers may soon need more green in their wallets to afford their next salad. The cost of fresh produce is poised to jump in the coming months as a three-year drought in California shows few signs of abating, according to an Arizona State University study set to be released Wednesday. The study found a […]

Peak Oil: Taking A Stand

We live in a society where it is impossible to live a functional lifestyle and not consume products made from petro-chemicals every single day — electronics, fabrics, painkillers, food additives, cosmetics, fabrics, cleaning supplies, building materials, the list goes on. More than ever, it is precisely because it is incredibly difficult to survive outside of […]

Soaring Food Inflation Full Frontal: Beef, Pork And Shrimp Prices Soar To Record Highs

We previously noted that both beef and pork (courtesy of the affectionately named Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus) prices have been reaching new all time highs on an almost daily basis. It is time to update the chart. Below we show what a world in which the Fed is constantly lamenting the lack of inflation looks […]

Desalination Plant to Provide Third of Beijing’s Water

One-third of the tap water used in Beijing in five years will be desalinated from the sea to make it potable and boost clean supplies, according to state media. Beijing Enterprises (371) Water Group, the biggest publicly traded water-treatment company in China, is developing the reverse-osmosis project in the Caofeidian district of Tangshan in Hebei […]

King Coal Is Dying a Slow Death in America

You’ve seen the photos or read the stories. In some of China’s cities you can’t even see the sun. People walk down the streets wearing surgical masks. Tourists pose for photos in front of fake landmarks since the real ones are obscured. China’s economic salvation might end up its undoing… and ours. The country’s prosperity […]

A Concept for Optimizing Strategic Energy Infrastructure?

A timely new report published by the World Economic Forum in April 2014 titled “Strategic Infrastructure Steps to Operate and Maintain Infrastructure Efficiently and Effectively” addresses an important area for necessary investment globally: infrastructure. The current focus in the US is on energy infrastructure – whether this concerns the need to build out the petroleum […]

How the marginal cost revolution is aiding the emergence of post-capitalist commons economics

“The capitalist era is passing… not quickly, but inevitably. A new economic paradigm — the Collaborative Commons — is rising in its wake that will transform our way of life. We are already witnessing the emergence of a hybrid economy, part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons. The two economic systems often work in tandem […]

IMF: North American boom to keep oil prices low

A dramatic increase in US and Canadian oil production will push oil prices down, according to the International Monetary Fund. The growth in US shale oil and Canadian oil sands is already spilling over to the global marketplace. A dramatic increase in US and Canadian oil production will push oil prices down, according to the […]

Richard O’ Rourke on Peak Oil

Positive Money Podcast Episode 3 – Richard O’ Rourke on Peak Oil Pause Download Positive Money Podcast Episode 3 

This will be a stable year for oil

Evaluation is by the Secretary General of Opec, Abdallah El-Badri. ‘The market as relatively balanced, and we expect this to be the case for the rest of 2014’, he said. The oil market should stay balanced in 2014, unless there is some unexpected development, said the secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting […]

Natural Gas: a Cleaner Fuel for the Environment

On Earth Day, Summit Natural Gas of Maine is proud to offer an environmentally-friendly energy source. As America joins more than 190 countries to celebrate Earth Day this month, Summit Natural Gas of Maine is proud to offer homes and businesses an environmentally-friendly energy source that is helping Maine reduce its dependency on foreign oil. […]

Chris Martenson: “Oil’s not cheap anymore, and it will never be cheap again”

Click Here to Listen to the Interview “Social unrest is merely a sign. It’s a hallmark of what happens when you have an energy dependent economy, when we’ve grown our population to absolute bursting limits and we’ve all become accustomed to having lots and lots and lots of cheap energy—and guess what? Oil’s not cheap […]

IEA Trims 2014 Oil Demand Growth Forecast

The International Energy Agency on Friday highlighted ongoing “elevated” risks in the oil market, as it trimmed its forecast for an increase in demand this year following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but also warned of lower oil production. In its closely watched monthly report, the Paris-based energy watchdog lowered its 2014 forecast for Russian oil […]

Why Green Growth Won’t Transform the Economy

Green growth is a myth. Because it ignores the social, political and personal dimensions of sustainability, it can never cut deep enough into the structures of self and society to secure solutions to the crises that we face. Credit: Post-Growth Institute (http://postgrowth.org/). All rights reserved. In discussions of the future of economic growth, ‘business as […]

Measuring Suburban Sprawl

Deron Lovaas, Federal Transportation Policy Director, Washington, D.C. Growth is good. Or so we’ve always been taught. But what if growth is poorly managed, so that it creates serious problems too? In an urban context, that’s what we call sprawl. Photo courtesy of USDA Solving sprawl requires alignment of rules and incentives for land-development such that smart […]

16 Signs That Most Americans Are NOT PREPARED For The Coming Economic Colapse

Sometimes I think that I sound like a broken record.  I am constantly using phrases such as “get prepared while you still can” and “time is running out”.  In fact, I use them so often that people are starting to criticize me for it. Image: Food Bank (Wiki Commons). But the truth is that only […]

Five pathways to post-capitalist ‘renaissance’ by a former oil man

‘Capitalism is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies, threatening our children. It must be re-engineered, root and branch.’   Members of Occupy Wall Street celebrate after learning that they can stay on Zuccotti Park in New York Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images In The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance, Dr Jeremy […]

Paying for our cheap food choices

A couple of weeks ago, we received an email from a visitor to our website. The author asked, ‘How can anyone say that food is too cheap when food prices are actually going up?’ He was referring to the SFT’s position on ‘true-cost accounting‘, an idea explored at our recent London conference. The email noted the […]

Who’s looking beyond growth?

Is there a way off the economic escalator? Does economic growth have a place in the future of high-income countries? This hotly debated question covers many different debates, each with arguments to be taken seriously on both sides. There’s a long history to the beyond-growth perspective (Mill and Keynes wrote about it, for starters) but […]

Welcome To Terminus

“Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.” – Edward Teller I was a late arrival to the Walking Dead television program. I don’t watch much of the mindless drivel passing for entertainment on the 600 worthless channels available 24/7 on cable TV. I assumed it was another superficial zombie […]

US Oil Imports Seen Falling to Zero by 2037

Net oil imports to the U.S. could fall to zero by 2037 because of robust production in areas including North Dakota’s Bakken field and Texas’s Eagle Ford formation, according to a government projection released today. The Energy Information Administration, the branch of the Energy Department that collects and analyzes energy data, said the once-chimerical goal […]

And The Next Big Thing Is… Degrowth?

This is not doom-and-gloom for society–it is only doom-and-gloom for the current unsustainable arrangement (Plan A). The Grand Narrative of the past few centuries goes something like this: from religious authority to secular authority, from agriculture to industrial, from rural to urban, from local to global, from periphery to center, from decentralized to centralized, from low-density […]

Energy and the Financial System: What Everyone Needs to Know

Peak oil theorists have long been regarded by mainstream economists as the boys and girls who cried wolf. But just because the outlooks of mainstream economists failed to see the wolf does not mean it was not there. Rather, according to Roger Boyd’s Energy and the Financial System: What Every Economist, Financial Analyst, and Investor […]

Apres Moi le Deluge

“The American way of life,” George H.W. Bush infamously declared in 1992, “is not-negotiable.”  This presents a problem if the American way of life is also unsustainable. The context for these remarks was the first Earth Summit in Rio, which unsuccessfully set out to curb carbon emissions.  Bush’s platform was based on his assertion that […]

Fuel Shortages Dog Africa’s Biggest Oil Producer

The man in the large SUV forces his way to the front of the line at the gas station, ignoring the blaring horns and threats of fisticuffs from drivers who have slept in their cars and waited for more than 12 hours for the scarce fuel. Raw anger and frayed tempers give way to resignation […]

Excessive consumption

Just 80% of global private consumption is snapped up by 20% of the world population living in the richest countries, which is “left overs” for 80% of the population (5.6 billion people), residing in poorer countries and in the process of development, with only 20% of world production. Only the U.S., with 4.5% of the […]

Energy Slaves

Our command of energy resources has created amazing technologies and social systems at a grand scale, but at what cost? Where past societies shackled human muscle with force and subjugation to create an energy surplus, beginning in the late 19th century we have used coal, oil & gas to create an unprecedented energy abundance. As […]

Will Rising Oil Output Bring Down Prices?

It’s all about supply and demand—the first, last, and everything for estimating the projected path of prices. Geopolitics can and does intrude, of course. This is oil, after all. But the raw numbers of economics have the last word eventually—even for the world’s most valuable commodity. The price of Crude Oil has been trending higher this […]

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