Generation Y not driven to drive

To Shoshana Gurian-Sherman, driving seemed like a huge hassle. “Part of it was laziness,” the 23-year-old Minneapolis resident recalled. “I didn’t really want to put in the effort to learn how to drive … I knew how to ride the buses, so it was not necessary. “And the other thing was, it was just scary, […]

Natural Gas for Automotive Fuel

It is difficult to say which of the growing number of fuel options will power the cars of the future. But natural gas, given its domestic abundance, low price and lesser carbon footprint, is certainly a contender, at least as far as researchers at the federally funded Argonne National Laboratory are concerned. Some of the […]

Natural gas power generation on par with coal

Healthcare Care and the Euro Surprise Yesterday it appeared that oil and health care have a lot more in common than you’d think. No, I am not talking about oil being used for medical purposes like it was in the old days but the impact on the price of oil after the surprise Supreme Court […]

Coal: The Ignored Juggernaut

Oil, natural gas, and alternatives dominate the headlines when it comes to energy. But there’s a big and largely-overlooked revolution occurring with the energy source likely to become the most preferred fuel for a world in economic decline: coal. The United States coal sector has been hit very, very hard this spring. Demand has been […]

Lower Oil Prices–Not a Good Sign!

Are lower oil prices good news? Not really, if it means the world is sinking into recession. We know from recent past experience and from common sense that higher oil prices are a drag oil importing economies, since if more $$$ are spent on the same amount of oil, there is less to spend on […]

The biggest fraud in economics is economics

What’s the point of having an economy, asks Bill Bonner? It makes no sense to waste trillions of dollars’ worth of resources just to “protect the economy,” he says. The whole point of an economy is to create more stuff, not to waste it. Forget ‘peak oil.’ Or so they say. It has fracked its […]

World Energy Consumption Facts, Figures, and Shockers

In the first installment of this series, I reviewed U.S. and global oil reserves according to the 2012 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. The second installment covered oil production. Today, I want to examine the changes in consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas since 1965 in the three major consuming regions of the world: […]

John Michael Greer: The Cussedness of Whole Systems

There’s an interesting divergence between the extreme complexity of the predicament that besets contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable simplicity of the failures of reasoning that have sent us hurtling face first into that predicament, on the other. Nearly all of those failures share a common root, which is the inability—or […]

Peak Oil Problem-Solving 101

Who knew that Peak Oil, a matter with the potential for so many adverse consequences, could be solved for so easily?! [A]s Donald Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University, explained a couple of years ago, running out of oil ‘is not as much a question of physics as it is one of economics. […]

Growth in global oil market slows

Global oil consumption increased by 0.7 percent in 2011 to reach an all-time high of 88.03 million barrels per day, according to new research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute for its Vital Signs Online service. This rate of increase was considerably slower than in 2010, when oil consumption rose by 3.3 percent following a decline […]

Tom Murphy: Ruthless extrapolation

We humans owe much of our success to our ability to recognize patterns and extrapolate trends to anticipate a future state. My cats, on the other hand, will watch a tossed toy mouse travel toward them across the room—getting ever-bigger—all the way until it smacks them between the eyes (no, they’re not strapped down—I’m not […]

Forget peak oil, we may have reached ‘peak GDP’

We will find out in this century whether we are living in the era of peak everything: peak food, peak water, peak biodiversity, peak energy, peak population and even peak gross domestic product – argues campaigner Economic growth and population growth, these are undoubtedly the questions of our time. These questions are highlighted by most […]

The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years

The graph above is an economic history of the world, after 1 AD, from a research letter written by Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan. I posted it yesterday with this summary: “Everything to the left of 1800 is an approximation of population distribution around the world and everything to […]

As Rock Phosphate Runs Out, What is More Important – Food Crops or Fuel Crops?

By Professor Chris Rhodes | Thu, 21 June 2012 21:41 | 3 World rock phosphate production is set to peak by 2030. Since the material provides fertilizer for agriculture, the consequences are likely to be severe, and worsened by the increased production of biofuels, including those from algae. Introduction. The depletion of world rock phosphate reserves will restrict […]

Statoil Sees Global Oil Demand Peak at 103 Million B/D Around 2030

By Kjetil Malkenes Hovland OSLO–Norwegian oil giant Statoil ASA (STO) said Thursday it expects global oil demand to peak at 103 million barrels a day around 2030, adding it expects increasing complexity to push production costs higher for marginal barrels. In a report, the company estimated the current cost of marginal oil barrels to be […]

Factor E Farm Update June 2012

I visited Factor E Farm while filming the conclusion to my documentary on Open Source Ecology, indiegogo.com/youaregodmovie I joined James Slade and his crew as they returned the modified LifeTrac back to the farm. Marcin gave us an update on the progress at Open Source Ecology since I left after working on the Christmas Gift […]

WSJ: How to Switch America’s Cars From Gasoline to Natural Gas

America has a wealth of natural gas in the ground. So, how do we get it into our cars? The recent deluge of low-cost shale gas is already changing the way the country runs. Electric utilities are turning to gas to power their turbines, and chemical companies that rely on the fuel are coming back […]

Pakistan: Coal answer to energy crisis

Experts have stressed the need for exploiting the country’s vast coal reserves for producing energy in order to cope with the power crunch that has affected the entire nation, ranging from ordinary people to industries. The focus should be on large-scale mechanised coal mining to produce various forms of energy from it, they said while […]

Excerpts from the Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming

Food production and demand are defining elements of the global food system. Changes in agriculture practice over the last 50 years have increased the world’s capacity to provide food through increases in productivity, greater diversity in foods and less seasonal dependence. Global demand for food is now changing rapidly at an unprecedented scale as emerging […]

The Intersection Of Information And Energy

Technology Review has a series of reports on the intersection of computing and the electrical grid, including this article by eSolar’s Bill Gross on improving the price and performance of solar thermal power plants – a textbook example of Bucky Fuller‘s concept of “ephemeralization” – The Intersection Of Information And Energy. I believe that we […]

Peak Oil Mitigation of the Transport Sector – Jeremy Wakeford

Jeremy Wakeford at ASPO 2012

Life After the Peak

Life after the Peak Dr. Samuel Alexander Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne; Co-director, Simplicity Institute Evidence is mounting that the age of cheap energy – the age of cheap oil, in particular – is over. What are the lifestyle implications of this historic turning point? The rise of consumer societies since the industrial […]

US Coal Use Falling Fast

The fuel that powered the U.S. from the industrial revolution into the iPhone era is being pushed aside as utilities switch to cleaner and cheaper alternatives. The share of U.S. electricity that comes from coal is forecast to fall below 40 percent for the year — the lowest level since the government began collecting this […]

Population Explosion Strains World Resources

The UK’s Royal Society has announced that population and consumption must be addressed at the Rio+20 environmental summit. They say past failures on these issues threaten the natural world and prospects for future generations. “The overall message is that we need a renewed focus on both population and consumption – it’s not enough to look […]

You and Your Slaves

“A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.” — Ivan Illich In 2009 a British family living in a four-bedroom house […]

Peak Oil and Price Incentives

Here I describe some interesting new research on modifying Hubbert’s model of peak oil to take into account the incentives for additional production that higher oil prices would be expected to bring. A recent IMF Working paper by Jaromir Benes, Marcelle Chauvet, Ondra Kamenik, Michael Kumhof, Douglas Laxton, Susanna Mursula and Jack Selody begins by […]

America’s love affair with the motor car is running on empty

America’s love of driving is iconic. The open road is a central manifestation of America the free. During the 20th century, the total movement of cars and trucks on our national roads and highways grew as fast as our economy, or faster. Movement – measured by total vehicle miles travelled (VMT) – was considered an […]

BP Review 2012: Coal Use Expanding Faster than Crude Oil

The 2012 BP Statistical Review of World Energy is now available for download. It reveals that worldwide demand for coal is growing significantly faster than worldwide demand for crude oil. And that is just the beginning. BP via GCC   Oil demand grew by less than 1%—the slowest rate amongst fossil fuels—while gas grew by […]

Why We Need Expensive Oil

To some it can seem a joke, but the new definition of “expensive oil” is about $75 a barrel. Even worse fol oil producers, $75 a barrel is rapidly becoming the base price for financially feasible oil production development strategies. Above all, the old paradigm of extreme high oil prices is long dead. It was […]

EIA cuts 2012 world oil demand growth forecast, raises non-OPEC output

OPEC and the U.S. government agreed o n Tuesday that global oil markets could loosen further in the second half of the year, with prospects for demand dimming while non-OPEC supply races ahead more quickly than expected. In its monthly report on market fundamentals, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, cut its forecast for […]

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