Drivers to pay 6 pct more for gas this summer

U.S. drivers will pay an average of 24 cents more per gallon for gasoline during this summer’s travel season, the government said Tuesday. Gasoline will cost an average of $3.95 per gallon from April through September, an increase of 6.3 percent from the same period last year, the Energy Information Administration predicted. The peak should […]

French economy grinds to a halt

Hit by the closure of the Petit-Couronne plant, owned by insolvent oil refiner Petroplus, refining activity plunged by 13 percent in February. The Purchasing Managers’ index (PMI) data last week showed the biggest decline in factory activity for 33 months in March, after briefly stabilizing in February France’s economy posted no growth in the first […]

Global Meat Consumption

Download Report: 041012 Global Beef Consumption.mp3 I’m Susan Allen, The world’s population is projected to grow by three billion more people in the  next 40 years. Here in big sky country it’s hard to fathom what that will mean to the rural west. When Open Range returns .Population growth like the national deficit is so overwhelming huge […]

Shortage in India during Global Gas Glut

Oversupply has lead to natural gas prices crashing globally even though crude oil prices have moved up. Despite the global glut Indian households have been surprisingly hit by cooking gas shortage due to laxity of our ‘Petroleum Ministry’. Besides though prices fell globally India’s LPG subsidy bill has ballooned during the last year to nearly […]

Peak Oil: Capitalism & Sustainability

Our difficulties and our dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them   — Winston Churchill Our civilization is driven by an economic system that expects continued and limitless growth. However, during the summer of 2008 when the price of a barrel of oil reached $147, we reached a tipping point for our […]

Canada Rises and Saudi Slides: Top 15 Sources for U.S. Crude Oil Imports in 2011

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently published an article on 2011 U.S. crude oil imports. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at where the U.S. currently obtains its oil, and how that has changed over the past decade. The EIA story is: Nearly 69% of U.S. crude oil imports originated from five […]

Mexico Scraps Plans to Build 10 Nuclear Power Plants in Favor of Using Gas

Mexico, one of three Latin American nations that uses nuclear power, is abandoning plans to build as many as 10 new reactors and will focus on natural gas-fired electricity plants after boosting discoveries of the fuel. The country, which found evidence of trillions of cubic feet of gas in the past year, is “changing all […]

For Japan, shutting down nuclear plants brings surge in oil, gas imports

To make up for its dwindling nuclear supply, Japan is on a frenzied but costly hunt for fossil fuels. As part of that hunt, tankers from as many as 12 countries are pulling up weekly to Japanese port cities, hauling liquefied natural gas super-cooled to 260 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Officials from Tokyo are making […]

We’re Not Going to Run Out of Oil Based Fertilizer

I had thought that worries over the supplies of oil based fertilizers (or fertilisers) were confined to the kookier ends of the Peak Oil conspirators along with the weirder part of the environmental movement. Sadly, I find that it has invaded the editorials of seemingly respectable newspapers like London’s The Guardian. The point being of […]

MIT Predicts That World Economy Will Collapse By 2030

Forty years after its initial publication, a study called The Limits to Growth is looking depressingly prescient. Commissioned by an international think tank called the Club of Rome, the 1972 report found that if civilization continued on its path toward increasing consumption, the global economy would collapse by 2030. Population losses would ensue, and things […]

The Race for BTU

The world’s major central banks — including the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Reserve — appear to have finally won a major battle in the deflationary war that broke out five years ago in 2007. While the ultimate victor is yet to be determined, it now seems likely […]

Food inflation back on the table

World food prices are likely to rise for a third successive month in March, and could gain further beyond that, with expensive oil and chronically low stocks of some key grains putting food inflation firmly back on the economic agenda. Food prices grabbed world policy makers’ attention after hitting record highs in February 2011 and […]

China overtakes US as world’s biggest grocery market

China has overtaken the United States to become the world’s biggest market for grocery shopping, according to the latest report to underscore the country’s growing global economic dominance. The Chinese grocery sector will continue its fast growth over the next few years to hit almost £1tn by 2015, according to grocery industry researchers IGD. That […]

Disposable Cars

In the argument for our future wellbeing, we are told we can rely on the market and human ingenuity to conquer our problems. We are increasingly presented with a vision of a future of electric, hybrid, bio-fuel, and even hydrogen powered cars as the way of the future, so no worries about our unsustainable path […]

A World without Oil

Companies Prepare for a Fossil-Free Future Drivers may hate rising gas prices, but some companies are delighted as they watch the oil price soar. Firms like BMW and Airbus which are leaders in fuel efficiency actually benefit from expensive oil. They are just two of a growing number of companies that are already developing technologies for a […]

The cost of blunting peak oil

The notion of “peak oil” says that the world’s rate of oil production will hit a permanent decline, if it hasn’t already. It’s one compelling reason why we’re supposed to pursue alternative fuel sources, especially for transportation, where oil rules. But as the latest Time Magazine notes (subscription may be necessary, although you get a […]

Oil: Saudis are burning through it

Everyone knows why oil prices, at around $125 for a barrel of Brent crude and $103 for West Texas crude, are so high. The long-term trends are meager supply growth and soaring demand from China and other emerging economies. And in the short term, the market is tight, supplies have been disrupted and Iran is […]

A new energy third world in North America?

by Michael Klare The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.  Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi […]

Peak Oil Evasion Tactics Scraping The Barrel

Probably well-intentioned but always ineffective oil saving plans, schemes and notions are reaching the limit of their low effectiveness, a rising number of indicators suggest. In a week where newswires tell the story of French election-oriented attempts by the outgoing Sarkozy government to persuade the IEA’s main powerbrokers to release oil stocks, and shave a […]

Why One Gas Is Cheap and One Isn’t

THE price of gas has risen rapidly this year. The price of gas has fallen to the lowest level in a decade. Both of those statements are true. The first refers to gasoline, the second to natural gas. As the accompanying charts indicate, never in the two decades that natural gas and oil futures have […]

BRICS starts building

The forceful and positive statement of intent with which Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa concluded their fourth annual summit on Thursday is entirely appropriate for five countries which between them account for 43 per cent of the world’s population and 18 per cent of global trade, and attract 53 per cent of global […]

UK: Fuel Panic ‘Self-Inflicted Insanity’

Leaked emails report that ambulance drivers are having fuel rationed – as an industry leader described the crisis as “self-inflicted insanity”. One email, seen by Sky News, suggested that ambulances were being forced to join lenghty queues at petrol stations and restricted to a maximum of £50 of petrol. Another email suggested that police and […]

How can a smart grid help with peak oil?

Smart-grid people aren’t always peak-oil people, or vice versa. But both have good reasons to back the other, considering how the two issues could increasingly be going hand-in-hand. The idea behind a smart grid is this: an “internet of things” that connects all the parts of our energy infrastructure — coal-fired power plants, wind farms, […]

Global economy squeezed between capacity and demand

The global economy continued to grow last year, world population surpassed 7 billion, and the use of energy and other natural resources generally rose. The Worldwatch Institute captures the impacts of this rising consumption and the increasingly risky state of humanity in Vital Signs 2012, the latest compilation of indicators from the Institute’s Vital Signs […]

Fuel Shortages Reported as UK Drivers Fill Up on Strike Threat

Shortages were reported at U.K. filling stations as car owners filled tanks in response to the the threat of a strike by fuel-tanker drivers. A rush to buy gasoline and diesel has caused queues and shortages in places, according to the AA, a motorists’ organization. They said the race to buy fuel was unnecessary and […]

Five short stories from World Energy Outlook

The IEA’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) is an annual tradition, the result of much work, data analysis and presentation. A formative volume is produced for all to read and digest, but few of us have the time to do so in the detail required. As such we rely to some extent on IEA presentations and summary […]

Saudi Arabia Seeks Lower Crude Price for Growth, Al-Naimi Says

Saudi Arabia’s (OPCRSAUD) Oil Minister Ali al- Naimi said he wants to see lower crude prices to help stimulate economic growth. There is “no rational reason” for current high oil prices, al-Naimi said today in an editorial published in the Financial Times, echoing comments he made to reporters in Doha, Qatar on March 20. “Saudi […]

The bike as a lens

Culturally we believe that the car is a symbol of personal freedom. But the truth is that car ownership can be oppressive on several levels. Personal mobility represents freedom to the individual, but it’s the form it takes that tells the story of freedom. Susan B. Anthony said: Let me tell you what I think […]

Denser, More Efficient Cities Key To Coping With Population Explosion

Cities are expected to expand the combined size of Texas, California and Montana in the next 20 years, adding environmental and cultural strains from population growth and shifts away from rural living, experts said Tuesday at a conference in London called “Planet Under Pressure.” By 2030, humanity’s total urban footprint will expand by an additional 1.5 […]

Young Americans Are Driving Dramatically Less – Will It Continue?

Americans under 40 are driving dramatically less, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. The question is: Is car culture in America waning generationally or is this a temporary phenomenon linked to the recession? The recession hit younger workers particularly hard. Driving by unemployed Americans between the ages of 18-40 plummeted by 19-24% […]

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