Dmitry Orlov: Making the Best Use of your Energy Elves

Presented on May 21 at the Northern California Eco-fest

Models of Community: Alternatives to Corporate America

As I have often observed, the majority of America’s household income flows to a handful of corporate cartels protected by the Central State. Most of the mortgage payments flow to the “too big to fail” banks. Most of the telecom payments flow to the few companies in the telecom cartel. Most of the energy money […]

Peak cars – is our addiction ending?

In the 1980’s it was dubbed “automobile dependency” – a term coined by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy to describe the largely Western phenomenon of building cities around cars and thus cultivating a kind of addiction to them. But according to a new paper by Professors Newman and Kenworthy – part of the team at WA’s […]

Rocky Mountain Institute: A Buildings Success Story

RMI has identified whole system retrofits as a critical component to reducing the U.S. building stock’s energy use and moving to an energy era of efficiency and renewables. In order to achieve widespread adoption of deep building retrofits, energy modeling of buildings is necessary to accurately identify potential energy savings. And while the number of energy […]

The Tyranny of the Temporary

For just short of a year now, my posts here have focused on exploring one extensive set of options for dealing with the crisis of industrial civilization – the toolkit that came to maturity in the organic gardening and appropriate technology movements of the Seventies, and has been more or less sitting on a shelf […]

Peak Oil’s Impact: Dining Out

While rising gasoline prices at our local stations are the most immediate and obvious consequences of oil supply and demand problems, Peak Oil is about much more than how big a hit our wallets can take. It’s easy to get caught up with the financial impact in our own households, which may explain why there’s […]

US Vehicle Miles Travelled

With global oil supply on a rough plateau, and developing oil countries’ usage increasing, oil usage in developed countries must decline.  This has to be accomplished through some combination of using oil more efficiently and just doing less.  The above are the data for US vehicle miles traveled, and indicate that US VMT has not […]

Heinberg: Shrinking Pie Competition and Relative Growth in a Finite World

. . [C]ommerce is but a means to an end, the diffusion of civilization and wealth. To allow commerce to proceed until the source of civilization is weakened and overturned is like killing the goose to get the golden egg. Is the immediate creation of material wealth to be our only object? Have we not […]

Humanity Can and Must Do More With Less

By 2050, humanity could consume an estimated 140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year — three times its current appetite — unless the economic growth rate is “decoupled” from the rate of natural resource consumption, warns a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme. Citizens of developed countries consume […]

Where Will We Spend Our Vacation?

Watching TV this time of year, we are bombarded with commercials extolling the wonders and enjoyment to be had vacationing in their particular state. Some of these states are close by, others far away. Vacation 2011 isn’t looking very promising for most families this year. We are all seeking some escape from the constant bombardment […]

MrEnergyCzar Video: Peak Oil Debt

Getting out of debt is one way to prepare for Peak Oil. Loans are given out because it is assumed that future growth and rising incomes will be able to pay back the interest and loan balance. Peak Oil and the end of growth may cause the lending of money to stop.

Kurt Cobb: Would vested interests starve the world?

In his latest book entitled Bottleneck sociologist and ecologist William Catton Jr. explains in detail why he believes human society is destined for a major dieoff, a “bottleneck” from which few survivors will emerge. One cause, he says, is an array of vested interests who manipulate the media and the power structure, oblivious to the […]

Quarter of UK households predicted to turn off heating

Rising fuel bills may force a quarter of homes to turn off their heating at some point next winter, a price comparison site claims. Uswitch says that last winter, an estimated 20% of people it surveyed had regularly turned off their heating. And it predicts that with fuel tariffs expected to rise, the number will […]

Who will feed the world?

THE world is in a tough spot. Food and water supplies are running out, population is growing and the climate is getting warmer. Respected science journalist and author of The Coming Famine, Julian Cribb, believes all these issues will lead to the world becoming virtually unsustainable. Mr Cribb was in WA last week addressing the […]

Global resource consumption to triple by 2050: UN

Global consumption of natural resources could almost triple to 140 billion tons a year by 2050 unless nations take drastic steps, the United Nations warned Thursday. A UN environment panel said the world cannot sustain the tearaway rate of use of minerals, ores and fossil and plant fuels. It called on governments to “decouple” economic […]

Resource demand threatens future

The world is set to consume three times more natural resources than current rates by the middle of the century, according to a United Nations report. It predicts that humanity will annually use about 140 billion tonnes of fossil fuels, minerals and ores by 2050. The authors call for resource consumption to be “decoupled” from […]

Over a billion tonnes of food wasted every year

Around a third of the food produced in the world every year — around 1.3 billion tons — gets lost or wasted, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Wednesday. “Given the limited availability of natural resources it is more effective to reduce food losses than increase food production in order to feed a […]

Fleeing Vesuvius: The psychological roots of resource over-consumption

Humans have an innate need for status and for novelty in their lives. Unfortunately, the modern world has adopted very energy- and resource-intensive ways of meeting those needs. Other ways are going to have to be found as part of the move to a more sustainable world. Most people associate the word “sustainability” with changes to […]

Europe increases natural gas consumption

Not so long ago Gazprom held another meeting on natural gas supplies. Aleksey Miller, the head of Gazprom, said that the gas export had increased by 20% in April 2011 as compared to April 2010. It is May but the gas supplies to Europe are at the same level as in winter. According to Miller, […]

Anton Smedshaug’s Definitive Guide To The Oil-Driven Food Crisis

One of the best presentations at last week’s peak oil conference in Chicago was given by Norwegian agronomist Anton Smedshaug. Smedshaug showed how the Malthusian food crisis of the nineteenth century was averted by increased crop yields and a transportation revolution. As fuel prices increase, however, food supply will be limited to what’s local. Moreover, […]

ASPO-9: the ghost of hyperinflation to come

What if hyperinflation is the next big thing? At ASPO-9 in Brussels, Jeff Rubin and Douglas Reynolds said exactly that. At the 9th conference of the Association for the study of peak oil (ASPO) in Brussels, one of the speakers said that it was time to stop economists bashing. That is probably correct: economists are […]

US calls on China to spend more

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has called on China to rely more on its own spending and less on exports. “The challenge is to lay the foundation for a new growth model, driven more by domestic demand,” he advised his Chinese counterparts. His comments came at the start of a two-day bilateral summit on security […]

IEA: Demand, not speculation, cited for rising oil prices

High oil prices are here to stay, and they’re caused by surging demand and limited new supply, not Wall Street speculators. That’s the message from Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency. “Speculators are only responding to what is going on in the markets,” Birol said. “We don’t see enough oil in the […]

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’s Impact: Concerts

Not too long ago, I had the good fortune of attending an outstanding concert performance by a blues/rock guitarist whose music I recently “discovered.” The musician (Joe Bonamassa*) played in central Massachusetts, and I attended the performance with my brother, who lives at the western end of the state. While his trip was a bit […]

India Revives Energy Ties with Iran

In a visible attempt to re-engage with Iran’s energy sector, India has submitted a reworked master development plan for Iran’s Farsi natural gas block. A consortium led by ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL), the overseas arm of state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd, won the bid in 2002, but is yet to develop the gas […]

Peak oil? Now it’s peak cars

listen now | download audio Australian and world peak car ownership per capita was in 2004 and since has shown a slow decline. It marks an end to car dependence. Teenage car ownership has dropped markedly. Figures suggest a big cultural shift as well as structural change within cities. Some very large cities such as […]

World energy use in 2010: over 5% growth

Energy markets have combined crisis recovery and strong industry dynamism Enerdata analyses the trends in energy demand, based on its 2010 data for G20 countries. Energy consumption in the G20 soared by more than 5% in 2010, after the slight decrease of 2009. This strong increase is the result of two converging trends. On the […]

War and the Global Economic Crisis: Collapse of the American Standard of Living

As the economy stumbles the American standard of living recedes. 44 million people are using food stamps and in one year that figure will be 60 million. Washington and Wall Street say, what me worry? Of course not they are the masters of the universe. We are 24 months into an inflationary depression and it […]

Richard Douthwaite: How will peak oil affect the economy?

Economist Richard Douthwaite discusses the impact of peak oil on the world economy. Our current economic model requires sustained growth based on cheap fossil fuels; oil depletion, rising oil prices and climate change will cause a global economic crisis.

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