Peak Moment TV Applying a Peak Oil Filter to Financial Choices

Peak Moment TV Applying a Peak Oil Filter to Financial Choices

India’s Coal Bubble

A few short years ago the assumption that coal demand was essentially endless in China and India was seen as irrefutable. Now this ‘coal consensus’ is breaking as analysts from Citi Bank to Bernstein predict a rapidly approaching peak in Chinese coal demand. But while the end of the Chinese coal bubble has generated headlines the […]

Why I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Currency Collapse

For the past 300 years, the historical pattern has been for the era marked by a century to continue into the following century by fourteen or fifteen years. Let me explain.  Everyone knows that the 19th Century, its uprightness, its optimism and sense of purpose, the halcyon days of British Empire, came to an end […]

What About The Elderly?

Traversing an environment built for the automobile in anything other than an automobile, sucks. Even if you can overcome the inhospitable nature of that, there are others that can not. That person may be your grandmother. When I started blog posting, one of the first topics I posted about were the many side-effects of automobile dependency. Today, I’m […]

IEA: Rising Output, Energy Efficiency to Halve US Oil Imports by 2020

Rising oil and gas production and improving energy efficiency in the United States could slash its oil imports in half by the end of 2020 from levels seen two years ago, the West’s energy watchdog said on Wednesday. The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) earlier this month said the United States would overtake Russia next […]

Land and Resource Scarcity: Capitalism, struggle and well-being in a world without fossil fuels

Land and resource scarcity: Capitalism, struggle and well-being in a world without fossil fuels Edited by Andreas Exner, Peter Fleissner, Lukas Kranzl and Werner Zittel Routledge. New York, 2013. This is a book that seems to be created above all for people who are active in social movements, but who are also uneasy about the […]

Gail Tverberg: Two Views of Our Current Economic and Energy Crisis

As the US heads toward debt default and continues with government shutdown, the underlying reason for the predicament is generally not clear to the American people or the world. The story that the press has generally been feeding us places the problem as basically a temporary one, caused by conflicts between the Democrats and Republicans. […]

The Coming Food Stamp Riots

It may not happen this month, or even this year, but food stamp riots are coming to America.  In fact, we got a small preview of the coming food stamp riots this past weekend when a “temporary system failure” caused food stamp cards to stop working in 17 U.S. states.  Within hours, there were “mini-riots” […]

UK could face power blackouts in winter 2014/15

* Power system under strain especially in winter 2014/15 * Government should speed up power market reform – report Britain could see widespread power blackouts during next year’s winter if a series of unforeseen events such as a cold snap or unplanned station outages occurs simultaneously, a report for an advisory body to the prime […]

Commoning in the City

In the architecture museum on the island of Skeppsholmen, in the heart of Stockholm, eleven of us have been brought together to spend two days thinking aloud around the theme of Commoning the City. The human rights researcher Saki Bailey provides a forensic analysis of the foundations of property law. The artist Fritz Haeg tells […]

Why Food Should be a Commons not a Commodity

Food is treated as a private good in today’s industrial food system, but it must be re-conceived as a common good in the transition toward a more sustainable food system that is fairer to food producers and consumers. If we were to treat food as a commons, it could be better produced and distributed by […]

University of Maryland researchers address economic dangers of ‘peak oil’

Researchers from the University of Maryland and a leading university in Spain demonstrate in a new study which sectors could put the entire U.S. economy at risk when global oil production peaks (‘Peak Oil”). This multi-disciplinary team recommends immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce the vulnerability of these sectors. While critics […]

Energy, Ecology, & Economics — Part II

This is part two of a three-part series revisiting HT Odum’s classic Ambio paper on the 3Es, which was written 40 years ago for a special issue of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s Energy in Society issue (Ambio, 1973). The article was republished in Mother Earth News, and the reprint is still available online […]

Understanding the Continued Dominance of Fossil Fuels

We live in a time where rapid change is pretty much the only certainty, but one thing that continues to rather stubbornly maintain the status quo is our energy mix. As shown below, fossil fuels still completely dominate global energy consumption and, since the nuclear boom ended a little more than two decades ago, those dirty […]

Daniel Yergin: Why OPEC No Longer Calls the Shots

WSJ.COM 10/14/13: Forty years ago, on Oct. 17, 1973, the world experienced its first “oil shock” as Arab exporters declared an embargo on shipments to Western countries. The OPEC embargo was prompted by America’s military support for Israel, which was repelling a coordinated surprise attack by Arab countries that had begun on Oct. 6, the […]

Be skeptical of ‘peak ag’

A few years ago, midway through the growing season, I asked a veteran farmer about his crops. He said his immediate area was dry and some of his fields were deteriorating. Then he shrugged and said, “Yeah, there are challenges. But this is a great time to be farming. The tools we have today are […]

Africa Power Needs

The figure above comes from a post at the Center for Global Development by Todd Moss and Madeleine Gleave. They ask, how much power does Africa really need? Their answer (based on estimates and methods you can read in their post) is … a lot. Here is their bottom line: As these countries grow more […]

China’s Crude Oil Imports Increase to Record

China’s daily oil imports rose to a record in September as the world’s second-largest economy expanded and demand for energy grew. China imported a net 25.61 million metric tons of crude oil last month, according to figures on the website of the General Administration of Customs today. That’s equivalent to an average 6.26 million barrels […]

Robert Rapier: Why Gasoline Prices are Falling

Fall Means Falling Gasoline Prices Fall is always a welcome change of pace for most people after a long, hot summer. Not only from the temperatures, but fall almost always brings relief at the gasoline pump. Pundits frequently notice this phenomenon during election years, and assume that vested interests are trying to manipulate prices to […]

Rob Hopkins: The Transition Away from Fossil Fuels

On October 3, 2013, Tufts Peace and Justice Studies Program hosted a conversation with Rob Hopkins, founder of the international Transition Towns Movement, to learn how communities across the country and around the world are transforming their economic, energy, and food systems to be sustainable, just, and resilient. Following Rob’s talk a panel of local […]

The Coming Plague

A climate plague affecting every living thing will likely start in 2020 in southern Indonesia, scientists warned Wednesday in the journal Nature. A few years later the plague will have spread throughout the world’s tropical regions. By mid-century no place on the planet will be unaffected, said the authors of the landmark study. “We don’t […]

China passing US as biggest oil importer

China has achieved another world-beating status its leaders don’t want: Biggest oil importer. China passed the United States in September as the world’s biggest net oil importer, driven by faster economic growth and strong auto sales, according to U.S. government data released this week. Chinese oil consumption outstripped production by 6.3 million barrels per day, […]

EIA Foresees Higher U.S. Gasoline Demand With Lower Pump Prices

The U.S. Energy Information Administration raised its 2013 forecast for gasoline consumption by 0.1 percent from last month’s estimate to 8.71 million barrels a day. Gasoline demand in 2014 may be 8.67 million barrels a day, up from last month’s forecast of 8.66 million, the statistical arm of the Energy Department said today in its […]

Plundering the planet: a report to the Club of Rome

This is a text version of a talk I gave at the World Resource forum in Davos on Oct 07, 2013. For a more detailed description of the same subject, see this post on an earlier talk in Dresden.   Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here and my task today is […]

International Monetary Fund Trims Global Growth Forecast

The International Monetary Fund trimmed its forecasts for global output on Tuesday for the sixth time since early last year, saying stronger growth in most advanced economies would fail to make up for a more sluggish expansion in the developing world. Prospects for emerging markets, long the engine of the global recovery, have dimmed somewhat […]

The Travesty of the Anti-Commons—Conclusion

As the foregoing discussion has demonstrated, the concept of the tragedy of the commons, taken together with its “killer app” in rationalizing privatization of the commons, is riddled with self-contradiction, for in order for the rights of private ownership to be exisercized, there must be a commons in which to exercise them, and in order […]

The price of oil: It’s bad news for the Middle East

Higher oil production in the US coupled with conservation could spell trouble for petrodollar-dependent countries. The oil markets are feverish again because of events in Syria, Egypt and Libya. There is talk of $150 per barrel and dire predictions about what that all means for the future. But let’s take all that with a pinch […]

Judge Hears Conflicting Estimates of BP Oil Spill

For weeks after BP’s massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, people across the globe were captivated by a live video feed from underwater cameras that showed the company’s blown-out well belching plumes of black crude into the water. On Monday, more than three years later, clips from the spill cam were projected […]

Energy, ecology, and economics revisited

We must understand the concept of net energy in order to see the underlying energetic basis for society. Yet net energy is often misunderstood, typically through optimistic measures of valuation that do not address the hidden inputs. Perhaps HT Odum’s clearest, simplest, most understandable paper on the topic was written 40 years ago, in a […]

Have We Reached Peak Federal Reserve?

As the Fed-induced asset bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate follow the inevitable Supernova track to implosion, that we’ve reached Peak Federal Reserve will be obvious–in hindsight. Billionaires and political lackeys alike have been falling all over themselves in the rush to praise the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented monetary intervention since 2008. That billionaires and […]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Why the IEA is Wrong About Peak Oil Demand
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