The World’s Crop Yields Are Maxing Out

Photo:farouqtaj/Flickr/Creative Commons License In order to understand the draw of the zombie movie, you have to first get that zombie movies are pretty much never about zombies. (Like anything, there are exceptions to this rule, but not many.) They’re really about our own society, and what happens to it when the basic comforts we’ve built […]

Th Real Oil Extraction Limit, and How It Affects the Downslope

There is a lot of confusion about which limit we are reaching with respect to oil supply. There seems to be a huge amount of “reserves,” and oil production seems to be increasing right now, so people can’t imagine that there might be a near term problem. There are at least three different views regarding […]

Local Demand, Not Shale, Poses Risk for Saudi Oil

For Saudi Arabia, as well as the other oil-rich Persian Gulf countries, the challenge of recent years has been how far and fast it can increase oil production to offset any possible fall in market output. But now shale oil, responsible for an unexpected surge in production in North America, is starting to pose a […]

Forget Peak Oil, The World Is Heading to ‘Peak Food’

Photo: Getty/David McNew The world may be nearing the upper limits of agricultural production, raising questions about how we will feed a more crowded planet. US researchers say yields of about 30 per cent of crops, including rice and wheat, have decreased abruptly or have plateaued in recent years. Most future projections that would ensure […]

American Collapse, Recovery or Whatever

“Don’t call me a whore!” a friend wrote me angrily. She was correcting me, explaining that her current work was not true prostitution because it only involved massage and hand jobs. I hadn’t paid attention to precise nomenclature as I was trying to convince her to quit. My point was that by working as a […]

More Oil, More Gas, Less Carbon. Yay America!

The federal government’s Energy Information Administration is out today with an early version of its Annual Energy Outlook for 2014. Their headline finding: that the United States will continue to grow less dependent on foreign oil as the miracle of our tight oil boom adds to supply and more efficient vehicles reduce demand. Yay America! By […]

Natural Gas to Overtake Coal by 2035

The latest projections from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) are unlikely to quell concern in the coal industry, as the EIA has increased its projections for natural gas production and power burn, while continuing its gloomy outlook for coal. The EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook Early Release, posted Dec. 16, boosts its estimates of natural gas […]

Consumerism and Happiness

The Gift of Death George Monbiot, Monbiot.com There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or […]

Energy Department predicts near-record oil output, moderate gasoline prices; natural gas soars

The Energy Department says the nation’s energy picture is getting ever rosier. Production is rising, consumption is slowing, and prices are expected to remain in check. According to the Energy Department’s annual outlook, domestic oil output may regain the peak it reached in 1970 over the next two years and gasoline prices will fall over […]

India may face gas shortage

New Delhi: A Parliamentary standing committee has expressed fear that India could witness acute shortage of natural gas in two years, which may not be met even through imports due to lack of infrastructure. “As the government pursued the economic policy to achieve high growth, the demand for natural gas has also sharply increased in India […]

Relational Foodsheds?

What is it, really, that I am up to with my current work? Don’t you ask that yourself? Where is this leading me? What has me so in its grip? Relational eating is one part – the personal, spiritual, embodied, earthy self-as-eater. Community food systems, or as I say in my new book, complementary food […]

As America enjoys cheap gas, Asia’s top buyers to pay more

* Already paying world’s highest gas prices, Asia buyers set to pay more * LNG contracts being renegotiated as demand outpaces supply in region * Cheap U.S. shale gas yet to make it onto global markets Asia’s biggest economies face paying twice as much for some natural gas as old supply deals are renewed, with […]

Fuel Economy Hits Record High

The official numbers are in. In its new Fuel Economy Trends report the U.S. EPA finds that new automobiles sold in model year 2012 averaged a record-high 23.6 miles per gallon (sticker value) and that model year 2013 is expected to continue the upward trend to reach a new record of 24 mpg. In recent […]

The trend to watch is peak car

We all spend so much time looking at the dramatic changes on the supply side of the energy business that we risk overlooking the more gradual but equally important shifts on the demand side. To correct that its worth looking at some new work from the Transportation Research Institute picked up in the excellent Energy […]

Exporting American Oil: A Primer

Exxon Mobil says the U.S. should lift its decades-long restriction on exporting crude oil.  ”We are not dealing with an era of scarcity, we are dealing with a situation of abundance,” Ken Cohen, Exxon’s vice president of public and government affairs, told the Wall Street Journal. Here’s what’s behind the ban – and the energy […]

Farming´s Future: New insights into the agricultural landscape

As the global population continues to rise and arable land becomes scarcer, global food security faces a tough challenge. According to the forecast of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), food production needs to increase by some 70 percent until 2050. “To help advance world food security in light of this […]

Inexpensive oil vanishing at alarming rate

The United States is awash in shale oil. Iran, once OPEC’s second-largest producer, is slowly ramping up output. Oil consumption growth in the Western world has been somewhere between negative and flat since the 2008 financial crisis. The “peak oil” theory has pretty much vanished, along with The Oil Drum, the bible of peak oil […]

The End of Power: Review

* Book: THE END OF POWER. By Moises Naim. From a review by Tom Atlee: “Moises Naim’s new book THE END OF POWER should properly be called “The Decay of Power”. His thesis is that while it is becoming easier to get power, it is also becoming harder to use it to control others and […]

The Fire This Time

A few days ago I watched the documentary Chasing Ice, as part of our local Transition initiative’s film series. What really struck me in the film was the narrator’s four word comment about 1/3 through the film when he was discussing what we can/should do about arctic melting and runaway climate change: “There is no […]

Exxon: Rising Living Standards Propel Energy Needs

Exxon Mobil says the drive for higher living standards around the world will keep demand for electricity and transportation fuels growing even as economies get more efficient and governments put a price on pollution. The company’s annual long-term energy outlook, released Thursday, predicts world energy demand will grow 35 percent by 2040 as electricity and […]

Natural gas demand to rise by 65% by 2040

Natural-gas prices on Thursday logged their highest close in more than two years as freezing temperatures throughout much of the U.S. boosted the demand outlook for the heating fuel, lifting prices for a fourth-straight session. Oil futures, meanwhile, settled with a minor gain finding some support as a rise in U.S. retail sales buoyed the […]

World needs 70% more food by 2050

The world will need 70 per cent more food, as measured by calories, to feed a global population of 9.6 billion in 2050, and must achieve this through improvements in the way people produce and consume, according to a report from the United Nations and its partners. “Over the next several decades, the world faces […]

Millennials like the suburbs

It is a habit of haters of the suburbs to regularly predict the imminent demise of the quarter-acre tract home good life. These predictions date to the post-World War II housing boom, from Lewis Mumford’s distaste of Levittown and places like it (“An encapsulated life spent more and more either in a motor car or […]

Peak Car? We’re Not Even Close

The term “peak oil” has been around for decades, referring to when domestic oil production in America would peak. The jury is still out on peak oil, though the latest term to go around is “peak car”, with some studies indicating that the American car market is over saturated, and shrinking. But on a global […]

OPEC Update, November Production Data

OPEC just published their latest Monthly Oil Market Report with crude only production data through November 2013. Their October numbers were revised downward by 67,000 barrels per day to 29,827 kb/d. Their November production was 29,633 /b/d. That was 261 kb/d below their unrevised October production and 194 kb/d below their revised October production numbers. OPEC production […]

How different would the world be if we paid the True Cost of food and farming?

What would our food system look like if the impacts of production on the environment and on public health were taken into account?  At present the polluter doesn’t pay, and those producing food sustainably are not rewarded for positive outcomes.  How might things work if the true costs of agriculture were taken into account?  Tamzin […]

IEA report: US oil demand recovery steps on the gas

Signs that the US is experiencing at least a temporary surge in oil demand were reinforced Wednesday after the International Energy Agency said the US has seen its biggest spurt in demand growth for almost a decade. In its latest monthly oil market report, the IEA said US oil demand likely averaged nearly 19.1 million […]

The American Local Food Movement

itizen advocates of the “right to food” are using democratic roots to create local food security. As the local food movement, or, more properly stated, local food movements have taken root in the U.S. during recent years, advocates have discovered the need to express this evolving “locus focus” in new ways.  Despite its multiple uses […]

Population growth rate bodes decline in living standards

In 1972 a group of scientists, known collectively as the Club of Rome, constructed a detailed mathematical model to test whether population growth and economic development could continue indefinitely and if not, what the limits to growth and its manifestations would be. Their findings were published in a report called The Limits to Growth. The […]

America, The Energy Exporter

Bolstering North American energy infrastructure will solidify the United States as an energy exporter by the end of this decade. It is time to start the conversation about changing U.S. laws to allow exporting of American crude oil. U.S. Government estimates released this month show the United States producing 25 million barrels of oil equivalent […]

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