Food crisis in Asia

As the global population rises, farmers, particularly in developing countries, are coming under pressure to increase their crop yields to meet growing demand. D J Clark looks at the problems facing farmers and consumers in different parts of Asia, and examines some of the possible solutions. Naryana Reddy farms a 1.5 hectare plot of land […]

Could a US Default Push Oil Prices Above $130? ‎

Could the price of oil, already high at about $96 per barrel, rise above $150 if the U.S Government defaults on its debt? Indeed it could. Here’s why: Oil, priced in dollars, tends to move higher as the U.S. dollar falls, and vice-versa. It’s a result of oil traders trying to maintain their “purchasing power” […]

MPG Ratings for Buildings: The Next Wave of Energy Efficiency

My organization, the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) is an energy efficiency think tank in Washington, D.C. and has just released a landmark report on building energy rating and disclosure requirements in U.S. cities and states. New laws in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas, as well as in the […]

Shell CEO: Oil Price Will Continue Long-Term Rise

Natural resources such as oil and gas will continue their long-term price rise, according to the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s biggest oil companies. “It’s getting more difficult to get resources out of the ground,” Peter Voser, chief executive of Shell, told CNBC. “We need a lot of technology and […]

The cars that didn’t eat Paris

It seems everything is peaking these days. You’ve heard of peak oil – the point at which our global oil extraction starts falling. There’s also discussion of peak food, peak wood, peak phosphorous, peak water and peak rare earths. Now here’s a new one for you: peak cars. Australians Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy write […]

Urban Farming Takes Root in Europe

Since the end of World War II, and especially since the 1960s, the Kreuzberg district in Berlin has been a melting pot of cultures, with residents hailing from the Balkans, Central Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia and Latin America. In keeping with this cultural diversity, the Moritzplatz urban garden in the heart of Kreuzberg – […]

Monitors empower customers on their electricity use

Real-time information about the cost of electricity use can change consumers’ behavior significantly, according to a study by local power grid operator CenterPoint Energy. The study of 300 Houston-area homes where residents were given devices that provided minute-by-minute power use information showed that more than 75 percent of the participants cut back their power usage […]

Autos in the US Economy

Yesterday, I did a simple rough calculation about General Motors to try to get at how much manufacturing job loss one could attribute to foreign competition versus automation and productivity increases. Various commenters objected that my assumptions were too simplistic, particularly in neglecting the domestic content in foreign autos and the importance of shifts in […]

How Limited Oil Supply can lead to a Continuing Financial Crisis

I recently wrote an article called Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis, which has been accepted by the journal Energy. It is still in pre-publication status, but the corrected proof is available for purchase. Because of copyright limitations, I can’t reproduce the article, but I wanted to at least provide a summary. When […]

Goodbye retail therapy

WHAT enables civilised life and economic growth? It’s an issue that I was forced to contemplate after listening to a sobering yet insightful lecture by Jeremy Wake­ford, chairperson of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (Aspo), at a Finwrite conference on financial journalism at Wits University in Johannesburg recently. Along with the numerous […]

Cheap Plastic Made from Sugarcane

Technology Review has an article on bioplastic – “Dow Chemical is building a plant to make polyethylene from sugarcane at costs that rival petrochemical production” – Cheap Plastic Made from Sugarcane. Making plastic from sugar can be just as cheap as making it from petroleum, says Dow Chemical. The company plans to build a plant […]

UN: Food Prices to Stay High Amid Underinvestment, Climate Change

Global food prices will remain high as underinvestment in agriculture over decades has left supplies unable to meet demand, according to a United Nations agency. “We are just depleting our stocks and now we have this high population growth,” Kanayo F Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, said in an interview. “Prices […]

Grantham: recycle and farm as if your life depended on it…because it will

In his last quarterly letter, GMO’s perma bear Jeremy Grantham highlighted with devastating effect the inevitable mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth. This quarter, he focuses on the ‘most dangerous’ parts of the coming shortages. In a piece titled: ‘Resource Limitations 2: Separating the Dangerous from the Merely Serious’ Grantham orders the resource problems he […]

Can economic growth last?

As we saw in the previous post, the U.S. has expanded its use of energy at a typical rate of 2.9% per year since 1650. We learned that continuation of this growth rate in any form of technology leads to a thermal reckoning in just a few hundred years (not the tepid global warming, but […]

In America’s National Interest – Canadian Oil

Attempting to restrict American imports of Canadian oil is a mistake that ignores both the reality of US dependence on imported oil, as well as the only major alternative sources of such oil—repressive governments that restrict civil, political, and economic freedoms. The study points out that Canada now provides more oil to America than all […]

India to fill Iran supply gap with Saudi, Iraqi oil

India’s immediate strategy to deal with the loss of crude from Iran in August is to buy more from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, while inventories and plant maintenance give refiners breathing space as they seek to establish new supply lines. Iran has cut supply as it tries to put pressure on Indian refiners to settle […]

Energy Crisis Prices Persist

Watching oil prices is a hard habit to break, once formed. They’re always moving up and down, sometimes for obvious reasons and sometimes not. It has probably escaped most observers’ notice that the magnitude of this year’s price moves has exceeded the total nominal price of oil that prevailed not many years ago, yet without […]

Energy in the Industrial Revolution

The above graph shows energy consumption in the UK through the industrial revolution, along with Italy in the 1860s, when they were still an agrarian society.  It’s from an essay by Tony Wrigley, a retired Cambridge economic historian.  He writes: The most fundamental defining feature of the industrial revolution was that it made possible exponential […]

Headed for a lower standard of living?

The amount of oil that is extracted from the ground each year has been close to flat since 2005, regardless of what has happened to price. Since world population has been growing, this means less and less is available for each person. We use oil in many important ways, including growing food, manufacturing and transporting […]

Preparing for post-peak

South Africans trying to fill their cars with petrol last week will have some idea of what it would be like to live in a world of diminishing oil supply. Though sector strikes were the reason this time, future oil price shocks, supply disruptions and shrinking economies could be the outcome of a continuing global […]

Surge in Saudi oil burn adds new demand twist

Saudi Arabia is best known as the world’s largest oil producer and exporter and last month pumped 9.7 million barrels a day, the second highest level in three decades, but the country could soon become one of the world’s top oil consumers. The emergence of Saudi Arabia as an important consumer sets a critical new […]

24 Small Towns May Lose Air Service

Rural America, already struggling to recover from the recession and the flight of its young people, is about to take another blow: the loss of its airline service. That was underscored last week when Delta Air Lines announced that it “can no longer afford” to continue service at 24 small airports. The carrier says it […]

Ensuring fair shares in a world of limits

As worldwide demand increases for natural resources that are already in short supply, how should aid donors and campaigners respond? As the 21st-century global economy increasingly hits natural resource limits and planetary boundaries, fundamental questions about fair shares will start to arise. How these arguments play out will exert a crucial influence over prospects for […]

International Oil Efficiency vs Gas Prices

The above graph shows per capita oil consumption versus the retail price of gasoline in 22 developed countries.  The 2010 oil consumption data come from BP, the population figures from Wikipedia, and the 2010/2011 gasoline prices from GTZ. This is a rough exercise – ideally I would have liked to compare vehicle fleet efficiency to […]

Rwanda seeks more energy as economy idles

The East African has a report on the development of a range of renewable energy projects in Rwanda, including hydro, geothermal power and gas from the great lakes – Rwanda seeks more energy as economy idles. Rwanda is set to double its energy production in the next one year by tapping into geothermal, solar and […]

Will Sheep Dogs Return for Post-Peak Oil Farming?

As a kid growing up in England, I occasionally used to catch a glimpse of a show called “One Man and His Dog” on TV. It was, essentially, competition sheep herding. At the time it seemed like a rather quaint, even absurd, throw back to a bygone era. Now I am not so sure. At […]

Peak oil now More About Demand Than Supply

We have all seen the headlines stating boldly that we will sooner or later face a crisis with the supply of oil unable to meet the demand.  A new study in “peak oil” is going to question this theory and investigate whether we should not actually start to think of “Peak oil demand.” As the […]

Fossil fuels can’t save Japan from power shortage

Japan would face a serious electricity shortage if all its 54 nuclear reactors stopped operating, since the country would be unable to bridge the gap with just fossil fuel, the Japan Center for Economic Research said in a report. Disagreement within the government on how to handle public anxiety about nuclear power plant safety and […]

Less energy is better

I now make it a staple of my public talks on energy to ask who in the audience has been to Europe. Usually many hands rise. I then explain that Americans seem to love to get on a jet plane, cross the Atlantic, and spend time in a theme park called Europe where good meals […]

Americans Have Become So Desperate That They Will Do Just About Anything For Money

The following are 15 examples that show many Americans have become so desperate that they will do just about anything for money…. #1 In Utah, one unemployed 28 year old man is offering to be “human prey” for hunters for the bargain price of $10,000.  For an additional $2,000, he will let people hunt him […]

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