IEA: Global oil demand growth accelerating

After posting near-zero annual growth in the fourth quarter of 2011, global oil demand growth will gradually accelerate throughout 2012, culminating in an increase of 1.2 million b/d by this year’s final quarter, the International Energy Agency said in its latest monthly oil market report. Global oil consumption is set to rise by 800,000 b/d […]

Chris Martenson: PEAK OIL: A Fact? Life As We Know It WILL Change

This is Part 1 of my 2-part interview with author & researcher Chris Martenson. Buckle up, peak oil has arrived and Chris says it’s a fact – our lives are about to change forever.

An Argentine Perspective on Degrowth

The controversial concept of degrowth receives little press coverage in a region like Latin America. But the idea of a way of life that is not aimed exclusively at GDP growth does have its proponents in Argentina. As in other countries of the region, the Argentine perspective on degrowth differs somewhat from that of academics […]

Heinberg: Visualize Gasoline

Next time you find yourself in traffic, try this nifty thought exercise. Ignore the cars within your field of vision and imagine instead the contents of their fuel tanks. Visualize gasoline flowing up and down the highway. Let’s assume the typical American car carries seven gallons of refined petroleum product in its tank at any […]

China to cut fuel prices 3 pct but little boost to demand

China will cut gasoline and diesel prices by about 3 percent from Thursday in response to declines in international crude oil prices, although the moderate cut is unlikely to be sufficient to stimulate demand much in the world’s second-largest oil consumer. The cuts – 330 yuan ($52.3) per tonne for gasoline and 310 yuan per […]

Oil a ‘Little Bit High,’ Saudi Arabia’s Al-Naimi Says

Saudi Arabia is storing as much as 80 million barrels of crude to boost supplies amid international prices that are “still a little bit high,” according to the country’s oil minister Ali al-Naimi. The nation, the world’s largest oil exporter, has set aside supplies “on shore in Saudi Arabia, in pipelines, in tanks,” al-Naimi said […]

UN Sees Risk of Unrest From Food Costs

Food prices may stabilize at high levels and keep government import bills near a record, increasing the risk of social unrest in the world’s least developed countries, the United Nations said. The UN Food & Agriculture Organization is asking international lenders to accelerate the release of funds to help poor countries cope with high food […]

Peak cycling? Bikes are oil hungry beasts

Bicycles came to us with the Age of Oil. Can we keep them once the oil is gone? I am a keen cyclist. When I lived in Vancouver last year I would cycle the four miles to and from work six days a week during the warmer months. Unfortunately my job here back in New […]

What’s Wrong with Our Food System?

Around the world every night, one in seven people go to bed hungry—that’s almost one billion people. People are hungry not because there isn’t enough food produced but because our food system is broken. In fact, 80% of the world’s hungry are directly involved in food production. We can address this hunger if we support […]

Can we expect the economy to keep growing?

If we read the financial pages, economic growth seems to be viewed as the “normal” situation to which economies inevitably return. But is it really? If we look back over the past 50 years, or even over the past 100 years, economic growth has predominated. Over the longer term, we know that people have become […]

Peak Oil is Here: Now What?

At least peak oil is here if I’ve understood what the peak oil argument is properly. And my problem with the peak oil argument is that it isn’t really very clear in itself as to what it means. From what I understand at some point we get to the end of cheap oil, we’ve only […]

Is Another Bout Of Global Food Inflation Just Around The Corner?

While the price of food to the American end consumers has been relatively flat over the past few months (at least according to official CPI data), behind the scenes another food inflationary storm for the “rest of the world” is quietly brewing. The reason: after creeping higher all year, soybean prices are just shy of […]

U.S. Lifestyle Is Not Up for Negotiation

Just before the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, some of the industrial nations, and specifically the United States, were lambasted for their obscenely high consumption of the world’s finite resources, including food, water and energy. The world was being gradually destroyed, environmentalists warned, by unsustainable consumption. Hitting back at critics, then U.S. president […]

World’s population too large to accomodate urban farming, new study finds

The debate of organic versus conventional agriculture continues as a new study published by researchers at McGill University and the University of Minnesota concluded that while organic agriculture may not be able to produce enough food for the world, it will play an important role in minimizing environmental damage for the future. The study found […]

Why High Oil Prices are Here to Stay

On May 3rd I will be delivering a talk called Moving Beyond Oil Dependence as a part of UC Santa Barbara’s Spring 2012 Chemical Engineering Seminar Series. The talk will roughly follow the outline of my book, and I have used several graphics from the book in the presentation. However, I created a couple of […]

Can we expect the economy to keep growing?

If we read the financial pages, economic growth seems to be viewed as the “normal” situation to which economies inevitably return. But is it really? If we look back over the past 50 years, or even over the past 100 years, economic growth has predominated. Over the longer term, we know that people have become […]

A rising tide of global prosperity

I keep stumbling across unswerving predictions that the future belongs to China. Or, perhaps to the contrary, that the Middle Kingdom will always struggle to challenge US primacy. Don’t ask where India and Brazil fit in. Enjoyable as it is, this exercise in the remaking of the geopolitical landscape is also something of a diversion. […]

World Business Council for Sustainable Development: ‘The Energy Mix’

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) held its annual company delegate conference in Switzerland this week.  For the WBCSD Energy and Climate team the event marked the launch of the latest WBCSD publication “The Energy Mix”.  This is a document that started life back in the middle of last year, originally as a response to […]

Breaking Point: The End Of The Cheap Energy Economy

Americans consume 20 million barrels of oil per day and FutureMoneyTrends asks what will happen when the price of gas reaches $4, $5, or $6 per gallon. Between exponentially rising fuel prices and stagnant wage growth for those employed, American consumers were broken in the lead up to the start of the depression recession in […]

GDP, oil consumption and prices

Commenter Nick G noted that Wednesday’s post neglected the role of GDP which is, of course, important to oil consumption in addition to oil prices.  Accordingly I have added a top panel showing real US GDP (in trillions of chained $2005).  A you might expect in the recent era of high oil prices, oil consumption […]

Planning to flourish in a world of 7 billion

Seven billion and counting. That’s the stark figure on global population that’s concentrating minds at the Royal Society, and has led to the publication of its latest report “People and the Planet”. According to the UN that figure is set to rise to 10 billion before the end of the century, while dramatic shifts in […]

The growth of 250 years global transport in three minutes

The animated film charts the growth of humanity from the start of the Industrial Revolution to present day by mapping every land and water transportation route on earth.

Debbie Chachra: peak plastic

Dr Debbie Chachra is a materials scientist: an engineering professor at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Deb’s bio at Olin), and a prolific writer.  She also produces one of my favourite tumblrs, Daily Idioms.   Basically, I learn something every time Deb writes anything.  So I asked her to write to you about whatever […]

Saudi Arabia Builds Up Crude Inventories

Saudi Arabia appears to have been building crude oil inventories in lower domestic demand months in a scramble to offset the risks of “limited” effective spare production capacity, Goldman Sachs said on Wednesday. In a note to clients, Goldman Sachs cited a crude oil inventory build of 35.4 million barrels in the period December-February, based […]

Global food prices on the rise again

* Global food costs up 8 pct December through March * Production outlook strong, could check price rise * African domestic food prices especiallly high (Recasts, adds details, comment from World Bank official) Global food prices are rising again, pushed higher by costlier oil, strong demand from Asia and bad weather in parts of Europe, […]

Tom Murphy: Flex-Fuel Humans

If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, then a non-negligible part of your energy allocation goes into food production. As an approximate rule-of-thumb, each kilocalorie ingested by Americans consumes 10 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and prepare. The energy investment can easily exceed a […]

US Oil Consumption and Oil Prices

The chart above shows weekly US oil consumption since 2000 as the blue curve (the EIA weekly product supplied series).  I have added a 13 week centered moving average (red) to cut the noise a bit.  Both of these are on the left scale in millions of barrels/day (not zero-scaled to better show changes).  Then […]

Indonesia: growing population and hunger for limited energy

Energy is consumed mostly by humans and for the purpose to fuel human activities. It is clear that, for an economy, there is a correlation between the size of a population and the amount of energy demanded. The structure and composition of population bring different influences to the amount of energy consumed. Some general trends […]

Cubashima

Without electricity filling stations cannot pump. Cars pile up, first in long lines, as they did in Russia and Cuba, then simply abandoned on the street. Four months after Fukushima, streets still held cars without gasoline. When there is no gasoline for cars, there is also no gasoline for trucks. This would include the trucks […]

Latest Global Trade

Time for an update in my seasonally adjusted global trade series (see here for sources and methodology).  The data above go through February (which has pretty complete data – and March is too incomplete to form even a preliminary estimate).  You can see that it continues to look like global trade, recovering since 2009, hit […]

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