Oil may have peaked – but don’t panic

Experts acknowledge that conventional oil production has peaked or at least plateaued, writes Vlado Vivoda. But we shouldn’t be too alarmed about a future beyond “peak oil”. This is the first in The Drum’s series on energy policy and oil. Qatar is one of the world’s richest nations, and its wealth has been built on […]

Will U.S. oil consumption continue to decline?

A lot of attention has been given to the optimistic assessments of future U.S. and Iraqi oil production in the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2012. However, perhaps even more dramatic is the report’s prediction of a significant long-term decline in petroleum consumption from the OECD countries. For example, the report predicts about a 1 mb/d […]

Kunstler: Christmas Story

On Saturday, the town next to us, Cambridge, New York, put on its annual Christmas breakfast in the main theater of its old opera house, Hubbard Hall. Cambridge is a farming town in a farming economy that died and is just beginning to be re-born. The town occupies a landscape of tender hollows and gentle […]

Thoughts For Engineering Majors And Graduates Inspired By Ambrose Evans Pritchard And The ASPO-USA Peak Oil Conference

NOTE: This piece was originally an email to my two engineering major sons. “We just heard the International Energy Agency saying the United States would overtake Saudi Arabia by 2017, which is only five years away, to become the world’s biggest oil producer, essentially because of the shale gas and shale oil revolution. Because of […]

Natural gas supply seen to remain tight

STANDARD & Poor’s Ratings Services expects natural gas prices to remain “regionalized” over the next few years, which would allow existing gas producers to continue enjoying a “favorable pricing power.” In a report titled “Liquefied Natural Gas Producers will Likely Benefit from Regional Pricing a While Longer,” S&P said structural and regulatory factors were causing […]

Is Real Food Too Expensive?

Please don’t claim real food is “too expensive” to eat. What’s “too expensive” is unhealthy processed and fast foods. It is a truism that food is expensive in America. What if we ask, “is real food expensive in America?” Let’s define “real food” as unprocessed or minimally processed: raw fruits and vegetables, whole grains, unprocessed […]

Global consumption outpacing population growt

Meat: It’s something that people around the world take for granted–but maybe not for much longer. Demand for meat is increasing worldwide. One reason is the burgeoning global population, which is forecast to reach 9.3 billion in 2050. But that is not the only factor. As per capita income increases in line with economic development, […]

The one chart about oil’s future everyone should see

When people read about a long-term forecast of world oil supply–say, out to 2030–they often believe that the forecasters are merely incorporating our knowledge of existing fields and figuring out how much oil can be extracted from them over the forecast period. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the forecast supply has […]

Department of Energy: New report on exportation

The US Department of Energy (DOE) released a report on 5 December, 2012 which examined the question of economic benefit to the US of natural gas exportation. Last December, Deloitte issued an independent report regarding exportation which had hauntingly similar conclusions. Interestingly enough, many of the conclusions in the Deloitte report are now known to […]

Chinese Urbanization in Context

Commenter  Don Johnson raised the question of how the speed of Chinese urbanization compared to other countries.  Above are some relevant comparisons – with the US, Japan, and South Korea. Data are from the UN and the US Census Bureau. China is urbanizing much faster than the US did, and probably Japan too, but not as […]

How Data and Social Pressure Can Reduce Home Energy Use

Visit the website of Opower and your eye will be drawn to a counter in the corner, its digits ticking ever higher. The counter represents energy that the company says its customers have saved after it provided them data on electricity usage and employed behavioral science to change their consumption patterns. As of this writing, […]

In Saudi Arabia, unemployment and booming population drive growing poverty

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia A few miles from the blinged-out shopping malls of Saudi Arabia’s capital, Souad al-Shamir lives in a concrete house in a trash-strewn alley, with no job, no money, five children younger than 14 and an unemployed husband who is laid up with chronic heart problems. “We are […]

Energy Efficiency, Economic Efficiency and The Pretense of Knowledge

Key facts: Energy efficiency, as defined by those who embrace it as a policy guide, is focused strictly on saving energy even if it means sacrificing overall economic efficiency. Energy efficiency programs focus on the relationship between one input into the production process, energy, relative to the output generated by that process. This simplistic view […]

Garden contingency planning

I probably won’t get to look at them until after Isaiah’s birthday and our Chanukah party next weekend, but the seed catalogs are piling up, and I’m starting to think about gardens again. I can’t wait to sink down into the couch with a stack of catalogs and dream. This was a tough year for […]

Fossil Food & Agriculture – Richard Heinberg Q&A

While researching the topic of sustainable agriculture for a paper, high school junior Rhian Moore came across the work of PCI Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg. Rhian reached out to Richard for more information on the topic. Below are Rhian’s questions and Richard’s brief responses. We think they make for a nice primer of sorts.  Rhian: […]

UK to Shift Focus from Renewable Energy to Natural Gas

The UK government has finally released its long overdue energy policy, and it seems that Chancellor George Osborne won. The problems that were facing the coalition decision makers in regards to setting the new energy bill were three fold: 1.    Sufficient power must be available to meet demand. 2.    Energy bills must not increase too […]

Greeks turn to the forests for fuel as winter nears

It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers’ pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an […]

The High Cost Of Our Throwaway Culture

As I said in my previous column, we are the biggest force in moving the planet’s rocks and sediments around. Our global extractions are environmentally damaging and depleting some resources to the extent that they are in danger of running out. Many of those resources find their way into the goods, gadgets and machines that […]

Good Morning! It’s The 70th Anniversary Of The Start Of Nationwide Rationing At The Pump

Good morning, it’s Saturday, Dec. 1, the 336th day of 2012. There are 30 days left in the year. We’ll start the day in the 60s and should warm up into the upper 70s this afternoon under a sunny sky. Temperatures overnight will drop into the upper 50s. On December 1, 1942—70 years ago today–nationwide […]

US Power Grid Vulnerable To Just About Everything

As Washington hunts ill-defined al-Qaeda groups in the Middle East and Africa, and concerns itself with Iran’s eventual nuclear potential, it has a much more pressing problem at home: Its energy grid is vulnerable to anyone with basic weapons and know-how. Forget about cyber warfare and highly organized terrorist attacks, a lack of basic physical […]

Did China’s Oil Consumption Decline 4% in 2011?

That’s what the EIA currently says.  See the chart above (red line).  BP doesn’t agree, showing them up by 5.5% over 2010.  Although the Chinese economy has undoubtedly been slowing of late, it’s hard to believe it was sufficient to cause a fall in oil consumption, which would be unprecedented since the time of the […]

Exhaustible resources and economic growth

Oil is fundamentally a depletable resource – once a barrel is extracted from the ground and burned, it is gone. Nevertheless, world oil production has continued to increase steadily for the last century and a half. Most economists attribute this to technological progress. Each year our methods for finding oil become more sophisticated, and our […]

Peak Moment 223: Dignity Village – A community by and for the homeless

“Anybody can come through our gates 8 am-10 pm and use all of our facilities. We have hot showers, a telephone, free computers internet-ready, our commons, offices, [and a free store of donated items.] Anybody has access to this.” Tour guide Jon Hawkes highlights this community’s generosity to the larger community: its residents well understand […]

Are We Heading Toward Peak Fertilizer?

You’ve heard of peak oil—the idea that the globe’s easy-to-get-to petroleum reserves are largely cashed, and most of what’s left is the hard stuff, buried in deep-sea deposits or tar sands. But what about peak phosphorus and potassium? These elements form two-thirds of the holy agricultural triumvirate of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (also known as NPK, from […]

Kunstler: Modernity Bites

There is surely a correspondence between an exhausted culture and a populace devolved so far into mental dullness that it can’t recognize its predicament. We don’t seem to get how much the industrial production spree of the past 200 years has just plumb worn us out, not to mention the ecosystem we were designed to […]

Retracing Cuba’s Special Period Crisis

In Mostoles, Spain, something like the Alamar of Madrid (but with a lot more parks), a collective and self-management initiative known as the “Breaking the Cycle” the Institute of Transition” has carried out work for more than a year. Over time, the issue of “Peak Oil,” has become the focal point for consolidating a communitarian […]

Growing Populations and Wealth Changing Food Demand

The growth of the global population to reach over 9 billion by 2050 is expected to change global consumption, supply and demand patterns for food, writes Chris Harris. The population growth and the growing wealth in the developing nations are changing consumption trends. In China and South East Asia, the migration of the population from […]

Risk of mass blackouts may still be rising

Businesses and households expect reliable electricity to be available at the flick of a switch. But the frequency of large-scale blackouts in the United States has not fallen in the last 30 years, and big blackouts remain a common occurrence throughout emerging markets. The risk of massive failures affecting the supply to millions of customers […]

Could Economic Growth Kill Us?

Now that the U.S. presidential election is over, attention has turned to the challenge of keeping the world’s largest economy growing. The underlying assumption is that growth is always the proper goal. What if that assumption were wrong? Given our current economic malaise, and the obvious needs of the poor in developing nations, growth may […]

Pakistan: Natural gas shortages

As expected, against all the tall claims of the advisor to the ministry of petroleum and natural resources, Pakistan is inching towards the worst natural gas crisis in the forthcoming winter. The irony is that the advisor is misleading the nation and creating a false impression that the solution is round the corner. Sometimes it […]

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