Trying to spend a pile of oil-driven cash in Colombia

Managing Colombia’s rising tide of oil dollars is a problem any government would love to have. And Mauricio Cardenas, a UC-Berkeley PhD and former think tanker who has been the country’s finance minister since September 2012, admits he is only too happy getting his feet wet. What a tsunami it’s been. Export sales of Colombian […]

Energy: Thriving On Five Percent?

In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion. The modern city has been shaped by the availability […]

Natural Gas Vehicles to Boom Over Next Decade

New research from Navigant Consulting finds that the number of vehicles using natural gas will double over the next decade to 39.8 million. Much of that growth will occur in Europe and China, although the market in the United States will also grow due to low-priced natural gas. Natural gas vehicles will still only be a niche […]

20 Years After Doomsday Predictions, China Is Feeding Itself, But Global Impacts Remain Unclear

How has China managed to feed nearly one-quarter of the world’s population with only seven percent of the world’s arable land? In 1995, Lester Brown forecasted doom and gloom for China’s ability to produce enough grain for its people, in his popular book, Who Will Feed China? He hypothesized that China would be forced to […]

Sharecropping 2.0

Institutional investors eyeing US farmland. Beginning farmers often priced out. There’s a global land rush underway. While human population continues to grow, the amount of arable farmland on the planet is essentially a fixed resource, and in recent years worries about long-term food security have spurred a drive to snatch up agricultural lands. Enterprising journalists […]

Post peak countries: the collapse of Yemen

Image from “Our Finite World” When I saw for the first time the data about oil production in Yemen, I was so impressed that I wanted to know more. I found a news source in English – the “Yemen Times” and I placed the link in my feed. For several months, by now, I have […]

Robert Rapier: Natural Gas Inventories are Headed Toward Zero

This winter has been one of the coldest on record. It’s been the coldest winter in at least 30 years, and I saw a report today that there is a chance that this will be Chicago’s coldest winter on record. Presently it is the 3rd coldest on record for Chicago, but another blast of cold […]

Peak Oil: Reasoned Exuberance

The key take-away from the US EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook released [in December] jumps out in the graph below: US crude oil production should peak in 2016 at a level 26% higher than that projected just one year ago. That’s an additional 2 million barrels a day (mb/d), pushing the US total to 9.6 mb/d […]

How Much Energy are We Flushing Down the Drain?

  California is in the middle of a drought. In the Bay Area, that has meant day after day of glorious, uncharacteristically sunny winter weather. But, I am haunted by media images of dry creek beds and by my own mental images of driving by the Rim Fire near Yosemite last summer. Who knows what […]

Fossil Fuels to Keep Dominating Energy Consumption Mix

Despite more than 25 years of efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption and boost renewable energy use, fossil fuels will keep dominating the global energy consumption mix, said International Energy Agency (IEA) Chief Economist Fatih Birol. In 1987, a number of countries kicked off a major effort to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels and […]

Can the World Feed China?

Overnight, China has become a leading world grain importer, set to buy a staggering 22 million tons in the 2013–14 trade year, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture projections. As recently as 2006—just eight years ago—China had a grain surplus and was exporting 10 million tons. What caused this dramatic shift? It wasn’t […]

Beginning of the End? Oil Companies Cut Back on Spending

Steve Kopits recently gave a presentation explaining our current predicament: the cost of oil extraction has been rising rapidly (10.9% per year) but oil prices have been flat. Major oil companies are finding their profits squeezed, and have recently announced plans to sell off part of their assets in order to have funds to pay their dividends. […]

Water Rationing Begins Outside Malaysia Capital Amid Drought

Water rationing began in areas surrounding Malaysia’s capital after a prolonged drought, as Selangor state officials sought to wrap up talks to nationalize the local industry. “The supply of raw water in Selangor state is in a critical condition,” Khalid Ibrahim, the state’s chief minister, said in a faxed statement late yesterday. “The water levels […]

The austerity of the commons: a struggle for the essential

In a precarious context induced by a struggle for the essential, one term has re-emerged as indispensable, providing many of us with a new sense of direction, creation and sharing, and ultimately, like a boomerang, assuming the ‘austere’ dignity of that which cannot be renounced: the commons.   When in Spring 2010 ‘austerity’ began to […]

Local Alternatives to Globalized Development: A View from India

In this extended episode, Local Bites interviews scholar/activist, Ashish Kothari about his book, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, co-authored by Aseem Shrivastava. During the first half of the interview, Kothari provides a sobering account of the social and environmental impacts of globalized development in India, arguing persuasively that the costs outweigh the benefits, and calling […]

Daniel Yergin: Looking Back and Forward at Big Trends in Energy

Pulitzer prize-winning author and energy analyst Daniel Yergin kicked off the 2014 MIT Energy Conference Friday by looking back at big changes in the energy landscape since the conference launched in 2006—and ahead at three visions for the future of energy. Dr. Yergin, Vice President of IHS and author of two bestselling books on the […]

Woes of Megacity Driving Signal Dawn of ‘Peak Car’ Era

The world that Henry Ford put on wheels is poised for a stall. In the globe’s growing megacities, pollution and gridlock are putting a damper on driving. In India, some commuters are leaving their cars at home to avoid traffic snarls and long prowls for parking. More young Americans are forgoing the dream of auto […]

Thirst for water and energy: Challenge for regional cooperation

AS the world’s population continues to grow, so does its thirst for water and energy. Unfortunately, not every nation is able to get an equitable share of the precious water and energy resources. If we look into the history of the prolonged Middle Eastern conflicts, we will see that many of them are related to […]

G-20 Agrees To Grow Global Economy By $2 Trillion

Apparently all it takes to kick the world out of a secular recession and back into growth mode, is for several dozen finance ministers and central bankers to sit down and sign on the dotted line, agreeing it has to be done. That is the take home message from the just concluded latest G-20 meeting […]

Innovation, Not Regulation, Will Increase Global Prosperity

Everyone seems to have an opinion about the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and whether the conference demonizes those who are successful, or as Pope Francis said, promotes business practices that lead to “widespread social exclusion.” But bringing together powerful global interests to address social injustices is among the most effective ways to encourage the kind of […]

OPEC and oil prices: Leaky barrels

SEEN one way, economic recovery in Europe and America is good for the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Oil stocks in industrialised countries are at their lowest for five years; the latest monthly report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a club of oil-consuming countries, anxiously urges producers to keep pumping to replenish […]

Canada Inflation Accelerates on Heating Costs

Canada’s inflation rate accelerated the most in 20 months on a surge in home heating costs amid one of the most severe winters in decades. The consumer price index rose 1.5 percent in January from a year earlier, the most since June 2012, following December’s 1.2 percent pace, Statistics Canada said today from Ottawa. The […]

There’s No Tomorrow (peak oil, energy, growth & the future)

BBC – Modern civilization depends on energy from fossil fuels. For years, we have ignored warnings about peak oil. Now we need to pay attention. We are not running out of oil. But we have used up all the easy-to-access oil

Transition Towns: The Solution To Peak Oil?

Peak oil is the ever approaching, if not already passed point in which the world’s crude oil production rate reaches its maximum output, and then falls into decline. 86 million barrels of crude oil are produced everyday, however as a planet, we are using around 88 million barrels a day (Transition Culture 2007), showing an […]

Jobs, Economic Growth And Security

For all the climate-based hysteria put out into the public domain in recent weeks attacking the oil and natural gas industry (even the Weather Channel got into that act recently), three key factors continue to give policymakers pause about acting in ways that would negatively impact the ongoing boom.  Those factors are: Jobs; Ancillary stimulative […]

Overcoming Asia’s resource challenge

These are historic times for Asia. Recent years have seen the region’s economies enter an unprecedented phase of industrialisation and urbanization. According to McKinsey, the Chinese economy is changing at 10 times the speed of Britain’s during the Industrial Revolution — and on 100 times the scale. The Asia-Pacific region as a whole is experiencing […]

Peak Oil: Higher Prices

It is unfortunate, however, that we cannot look at the real problem. Unless we can understand the problem as it really is, it is impossible to find solutions that might actually be helpful. [1]   MIXED MESSAGES   The message behind messages like that one aren’t usually anyone’s first choice for contemplation, planning, or doing. […]

The Open Food Foundation

The Open Food Foundation has been established to accumulate and protect a commons of open source knowledge, code, applications and platforms to support the proliferation of fair and sustainable food systems in Australia and beyond. In this interview founders Kirsten Larsen and Serenity Hill explain how they’re applying the principles of open access and peer […]

Feeding the expanding global population

pys.org says we can’t do it the way we’ve done it for the past 2,000 years.  Maybe the news hasn’t reached parts of the academy that we aren’t doing it the way we did it 2,000 years ago.  An article on phys.org covers recent work by Dr. Poppy of Southampton University.  Professor Poppy believes that […]

China grapples with food for fifth of world

Feeding nearly a fifth of the world’s population is no easy feat – and the Chinese government says farming methods will have to be overhauled if it’s going to feed its 1.3 billion people in the future. A visiting senior Chinese government official and agricultural expert, Chen Xiwen, told a meeting at the Beehive on […]

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