Electricity Prices Will Spike This Winter

Residential electricity in and around Boston this winter will cost as much as 35 percent more than it did last winter. Several factors are driving that spike, but the common denominator is the cost of natural gas. When utilities like National Grid bill residential customers for electricity, it’s really just a pass-through: They contract for […]

Big trucking companies ready to shift to natural gas across the US

Sales of natural-gas powered big rigs could jump as much as fivefold this year as falling prices for both natural gas and the carbon fuel tanks required for such trucks come down, the Wall Street Journal says. Lowe’s, Procter & Gamble, UPS and PepsiCo are among the major US companies that have gone on record […]

Misunderstanding The Limits To Growth

I never cease to be amazed by how many people misunderstood (or more likely, never read) The Limits To Growth. Paddy Manning at Crikey has an article both outlining a recent example and being one itself, as Paddy infuriatingly describes “Limits” as making a forecast rather than what it actually did – which was describe […]

Turning electricity into food

Our paper published in the “Journal of Cleaner Production” where we discuss the possibility of using renewable electric energy to power all the phases of the agricultural process. For a copy of this paper, send a message to ugo.bardi(whirlywhirl)unifi.it. You know that when energy in agriculture is discussed, the paradigm is energy production in the […]

Are We Headed For ‘The End Of The Suburbs’?

Download MP3 More millennials are moving from the suburbs into cities, such as Brooklyn, New York. (karlnorling/Flickr) For many people, cities are becoming the place to live, while sprawling suburbs are losing their appeal. In her new book, “The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving,” Leigh Gallagher, assistant managing editor of Fortune, […]

China cuts gas supply to industry as shortages hit

China’s top natural gas producers have begun to cut supplies to industrial consumers in a bid to make sure that homes and users of transport are not left short as demand surges over the winter. Chemical fertilizer makers and other industrial users are likely to bear the brunt of Beijing’s latest efforts to ration scarce […]

The propaganda campaign against peaking fossil fuel production

(Paper produced after a presentation at the Fenner Conference on Population, Resources and Climate Change: Implications for Australia’s Near Future, Canberra, October 2013)   Energy and civilisation A formal definition of “energy” is “the capacity to do work”. The overwhelming majority – ~80%) of the work done in our advanced technological society (i.e. the “economic […]

EROEI: The global economy sinks under its debts as the real cost of energy rises

ALTHOUGH the economy is improving, this is turning out to be “a recovery, but not as we know it”. Britain may be getting better off, but people keep getting poorer, as the costs of essentials continue to grow much more rapidly than incomes. Yet far from being a uniquely British problem, this is a worldwide […]

Unfortunately, peak oil is not at hand

A Citi Research report on so-called peak oil demand has been drawing a lot of attention lately. Understandably: what could be bigger news for anyone concerned with climate change, energy security, etc.? The report comes out hot right from the start, suggesting “The End is Nigh” and we are “Approaching a Tipping Point” on global […]

Sustainability: How Humans’ Economy Differs from Natures’

A few years ago, I had an ah-ha moment when it comes to what we as humans would need to do to live in a sustainable manner. It is very easy. All we have to do is leave our homes, take off all of our clothes, and learn to live on the raw food we […]

Peak Coal: Will the US Run Out of Coal in 20 Years or 200 Years?

“Most U.S. coal is buried too deeply to be mined at a profit.” U.S. coal production has peaked, and the miscalculations that have led to estimates of a 200-year supply could create a serious electricity deficit for the nation, according to a new report from advocacy group Clean Energy Action. “The belief that the U.S. […]

Many households switching to natural gas

Although oil prices are not expected to spike this winter, local utility companies report thousands of people continue to switch their heating fuel to natural gas. An NStar spokesman said his company expects to make 2,500 conversions to gas this year while a National Grid spokesman said the company expects to complete about 6,200 between […]

How Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition are responding to austerity

One of the most inspiring Transition initiatives I visited in the US recently was Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition in Boston. With our theme for this month focusing on austerity, JPNET (as they are known to their friends) have useful contributions to make to our discussions.  They formed in 2009, and hosted a Transition Training. […]

What’s After Oil ?

If you’re wondering about the direction of gasoline prices over the long term, forget for a moment about OPEC quotas and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and consider instead the matter of Hubbert’s Peak. That’s not a place, it’s a concept developed a half-century ago by a geologist named M. King Hubbert, and […]

Goodbye, $100 oil. Hello, $3 gasoline!

Crude-oil stockpiles in the U.S. are heading toward a record, pushing off a return to $100-a-barrel oil, and giving drivers a shot at $3-a-gallon gasoline. “With the overhang of crude supplies building over six weeks, we are unlikely to see $100 oil again very soon,” said Kevin Kerr, president of Kerr Trading International. “This is […]

These maps show where the U.S. is most vulnerable to oil shocks

Nearly 40 years ago to the day, oil producers in the Middle East retaliated against America’s support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War by cutting their output by five percent. The result? Oil prices quadrupled and dented the U.S. economy. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters) In the decades since, the United States has been trying to insulate itself from […]

Peak Global Energy Efficiency

Fossil fuels are finite and eventually their global production will peak and decline.  Since our global economic growth has a nearly perfect correlation with global energy consumption, a decline in global fossil fuel energy availability could mean “the end of growth.”  The argument on the other side is that we will simply become more efficient […]

Peak “Cheap” Oil: Shale Oil Proves Peak Oil Is Indeed Upon Us

Ever the contrarian, I have been quite skeptical of the many breathless claims being made by wide swaths of the media about how a new energy bonanza is going to overtake the U.S. and eventually the world. The subject, of course, is the new shale plays in both natural gas and oil. While these plays […]

Shell Oil Predicts Gasoline Cars Will End By 2070

With the emergence of hybrid and electric cars, the end of gasoline vehicles may become a reality sooner than you think. Shell Oil, one of the largest petroleum companies in the world, predicted this week that petroleum-powered vehicles will pretty much be gone by 2070, according to VentureBeat.com. The prediction was a part of Shell’s […]

Five facts about the human scale

Urban life is as exciting as it is dysfunctional—at least from the point of view of Danish architect Jan Gehl, whose research is explored in a startling new doc. City Mice. Fifty percent of the world’s population currently lives in urban centres; that’s expected to increase to 80 percent over the next 40 years. That […]

Chris Martenson: Re-Thinking Peak Oil

This week, we have a fantastic interview with Chris Martenson, an independent economist and author. Porter and Chris share and compare their world views and perspectives on the U.S. economy… Listen to find out why Chris says we are on an unsustainable course. Some of the topics covered include the financial crisis, the expansion of […]

Peak waste: Another phenomenon that should bother us

Peak oil, defined as the time when oil production is less than the demand, is an idea that has fuelled many energy policies. Backers of the fossil fuel economy sometimes worry about peak oil, but now there is another phenomenon that should bother us more: peak waste. Unlike in the case of oil, the worry […]

China pushes coal-to-gas power despite doubts

Beijing has acted with unusual speed to approve several coal-to-gas (CTG) projects recently. The expedited approvals indicate a shift in official thinking, with past perceptions of CTG as costly and dirty yielding to more favourable impressions prompted by low-priced coal, restricted gas supplies, and the introduction of technologies said to minimise CTG’s environmental impact. Carbon […]

Zombie Cannibalism: Why We Should Be Concerned if There’s a Business Case for Eating People

I ate a few of bites of a particularly bad cut of meat last night for dinner before I had to throw the rest of it out, I’m sorry to say. I don’t know what made it taste so bad, but as I was lying awake waiting for an expected case of food poisoning, I […]

Nicole Foss – End of The Fix: Facing the Limits to Growth

Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth presenting in Madison, WI. The talk was recorded on October 27, 2013.

US will always remain a crude oil importer

US shale oil has so far replaced 2 mb/d of its crude oil imports which peaked at around 10 mb/d in 2005. If this effort can be doubled the US would still need to import around 6 mb/d. US crude oil imports vs production History: US crude imports skyrocketed in the early 1970s after the […]

The Government Says That The Inflation You See Is Just Your Imagination

If you believe that there is high inflation in the United States, you are just imagining things.  That is the message that the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve would have us to believe.  You might have noticed that the government announced on Wednesday that the cost of living increase for Social Security beneficiaries will only […]

Pakistan food security: Increase production, not population

Linking food security with peace and war-free world, agriculture scientists and experts here on Wednesday stressed the need for taking immediate measures to cater to increasing demand for food, keeping in view the fast growing population. They were speaking at a function organised to mark the World Food Day, celebrations of which were delayed due […]

Electricity commons: Towards a new industrial society

This article would not have been possible without the efforts of Sebastian Gallehr. I am very grateful to him as well as to Stefan Ulreich, Hans-Joachim Ziesing, Thomas Meister, Helmuth Groscurth, Daniel Dahm and Marian Bichler for the many valuable insights I received from them when preparing this contribution. From the beginning the modern energy […]

An oil crash is on its way and we should be ready

FIVE years ago the world was in the grip of a financial crisis that is still reverberating around the globe. Much of the blame for that can be attributed to weaknesses in human psychology: we have a collective tendency to be blind to the kind of risks that can crash economies and imperil civilisations. Today, […]

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