Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union

Dmitry Orlov, engineer and author, warns that the US’s reliance on diminishing fuel supplies might be sending it down the same path the Soviet Union took before it collapsed. In this fifth video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Orlov, who was an eyewitness […]

Peak chocolate? World’s supply of sustainable cocoa could run out by 2014

The world faces a chocolate ‘drought’ over the next few years, an expert warned yesterday. Political unrest in the Ivory Coast, where 40 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans are grown, has ‘significantly’ depleted the number of certified fair trade cocoa farmers. Many have fled the West ­African country, while fair trade training programmes […]

Peak Oil and Civil Unrest

As the demonstrations in Egypt continue for a seventh day what few are willing to admit is that the revolutionary demonstrations we are seeing around the world have little to do with politics, oppression or religion. They are instead the result of too many people, too few jobs and lack of affordable food. People who […]

An era of cheap food may be drawing to a close

U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year, according to a Reuters poll, the latest sign that the era of cheap food has come to an end. U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat prices — which surged by as much has 50 percent last year and hit their highest levels since mid-2008 — will dip […]

A New Look At Peak Oil’s Impact: Family Visits

My parents live approximately one hundred miles from me. A drive to their home is at most only ninety minutes, given that each of us lives fairly close to highways that quickly take us to opposite ends of the cross-state Massachusetts Turnpike. If I didn’t own or have access to a car and had to […]

Kurt Kobb: Razor blades and the limits of complexity

A friend of mine once remarked that if current trends continue, razor cartridges will have at least 100 blades each by the end of the century. The razor blade wars are among the most visible absurdities illustrating how the limits of complexity clash with our blind faith in the idea that more complexity will always […]

Abu Dhabi will convert 500 taxis, public vehicles to natural gas

Abu Dhabi Media company’s English publication, reports that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) aims to convert over 500 government vehicles and taxis, including luxury models like the Infiniti G37 sedan, to natural gas by the end of 2012. To date, 177 vehicles have undergone the CNG conversion. ADNOC intends to eventually offer the […]

Max Kaiser interviews James Howard Kunstler

Max’s guest for this edition of Press TV’s On the Edge with Max Kaiser is James Howard Kunstler from kunstler.com. The focus of the program is on peak oil story where James defines as the time when you have just reached the maximum amount of production that you are ever going to get to and […]

China warns of pressure on food supply in next 5 yrs

China faces great pressure in securing its food supply in the next five years due to accelerating domestic demand, a senior official was quoted as saying in local media on Saturday. Chen Xiaohua, a vice agricultural minister, said he expected China’s consumption of grains to grow by 4 billion kgs a year between 2011 to […]

Oil and Food Prices

Several years ago National Geographic magazine published an article on oil that included a stunning photo of mature steer and the barrels of oil needed to grow an animal to that size. I recently went looking for that picture, found it, and post it here because it hasn’t lost its impact or relevance one bit. […]

Four Reasons Why “Progress” Isn’t Always Progress

From the time we were children, we’ve been taught that “progress”—as defined by capitalist American culture—is a good thing. Progress is manifest destiny. Progress is civilizing the uncivilized, elevating the inhabitants of the third world and taming the “savages” that lived off the land. Progress is taming nature, not being at its mercy. Progress means […]

Welcome, ‘Peak Oil’

he day of reckoning is approaching and the world does not have a contingency plan. The truth is that the world’s output of conventional crude oil peaked in 2005 and global oil exports are also past their prime.  Furthermore, the unconventional sources (tar sands, heavy sour crude, ethanol, natural gas liquids, bio-fuels and shale) are […]

Pew Research: World Muslim population doubling in 20 yrs

Twenty years ago, the world had about 1.1 billion Muslims. Twenty years from now, it will have about twice as many – and they’ll represent more than a quarter of all people on earth, according to a new study released Thursday. That’s a rise from less than 20 percent in 1990. Pakistan will overtake Indonesia […]

Chinese Oil Consumption Growth

Time for an update on Chinese oil consumption growth.  I took the annual data from the BP spreadsheet, and extended it to 2010 based on the data in the first three quarters vs the same quarters of 2009 (from the EIA Table 2.4).  This next graph plots both consumption (blue, left scale in millions of […]

Petrol rationing looms

A report by the Lean Economy Connection in association with the 20 MP strong All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil (APPGOPO) has warned that rationing will be needed to deal with energy shortages as well as helping us achieve our green targets. The report, ‘TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas): A Policy Framework for Peak Oil […]

Here Comes $4 Gas, $5 Cups of Coffee

The final dam to stopping $150-a-barrel oil and $4-a-gallon gas is being breached, as financial regulation continues its daily erosion into worthlessness. Watching the CFTC attempt to back up Dodd-Frank legislation since it was passed in July has been like watching salmon flop upstream as the water drains out — it’s slow, arduous and likely […]

Gail Tverberg: Should you pay down your debt?

The question of whether a person should pay down debts comes up often, when there are forecasts that suggest unemployment rates and consequently debt defaults will rise dramatically in future years. I know some people say, definitely, “Yes”. I would say, “It depends.” Clearly, at this point, interest rates you can get in a bank […]

Europe Begins to Run Short of Water

Half of the Czech Republic’s population could face water shortages because of climate change, a top climate change expert has warned. The country has become one of the driest in the EU, according to local media, and climatologists say the land, and crucial underground water supplies, are drying up. Professor Michal Marek, head of the […]

A Long Bet on Peak Travel

The Long Now has a post on a bet on the advent of “peak travel” – Long Bet on Peak Travel. One of the miracles of the modern world is our capacity for getting around – hop on a plane, nap a few hours, and you’re on the other side of a continent! Technologically enabled, […]

The Future Is Becoming More Clear — Abandon Sprawl, Intensify Use of High Speed Rail and Return to Urban Life, Like the US Was in the ’20s

Crippled by economic depression and environmental catastrophe, the American dream is dead in the water. And with peak oil hot on its hyperconsuming heels, America is looking for solutions, and it may have found a good one in the form of an ambitious national high-speed rail network that would connect its metropoles and mid-size cities […]

Toyota’s Jim Lentz Predicts Peak Oil by 2020

Toyota’s Jim Lentz Predicts Peak Oil by 2020 Commonwealth Club – The Commonwealth Club of California Though the auto industry seemed on the brink of collapse, the recent Cash for Clunkers program arguably helped to jump-start the car economy and get wheels moving again. But what does this really mean for cars and drivers today?During […]

Chinese oil demand: still chugging along

Platts’ monthly survey of Chinese oil demand can be found here, and it is more of the same: still hanging in at a per annum rate of increase in excess of 18%. In its recent monthly report, the International Energy Agency said China would see its demand rise 5% to 9.79 million b/d in 2011 from 9.34 […]

High energy prices need not mean doom

BP reckons demand can be met in an economically sustainable way. As on most things, economists disagree – sometimes violently – on the question of whether apparently ballooning global demand for energy can be met in an economically sustainable way. Among the many schisms are two over-arching tendencies. One trusts to the genius of markets […]

Could Inefficiency Save Us From Peak Oil?

Whether it is activists claiming that a “globalized consumer society without oil is nonsense”or Richard Heinberg arguing that we’d best get used to life without growth when peak oil hits—the idea that the end of cheap oil means a permanent and drastic change to our entire notion of economics keeps cropping up recently. The argument […]

Energy intensity is converging across the world

THE energy required to produce a unit of GDP is falling in most countries around the world. As countries industrialise, energy-intensive businesses make up a bigger share of the economy. Peaks generally correlate to the high point of heavy industry, before lighter industry and higher value-added businesses (such as services) begin to replace old-fashioned smokestack […]

Where are the “peak oil” alarmists?

Where are the “peak oil” alarmists when we need them to spice up the news of rising gasoline prices? Have they all gone into hiding? Gas prices in Colorado are about to crack $3 a gallon again and possibly stay there for some time. Isn’t the moment ripe for doomsayers to emerge, blaming this market […]

Could We See Fuel Rationing by 2020?

With secret government talks suggesting peak oil may be nearer than we think and IEA insiders claiming world oil stats have been inflated, it makes sense to start planning for a world where energy is much scarcer than we have gotten used to. I doubt this will please those who believe environmentalism is just an […]

IEA issues bullish oil report as OPEC attacks its projections

The International Energy Agency on January 18 made a big upward revision to its estimate of world oil demand in 2011, even as its oil market projections came under attack from OPEC. The IEA’s latest monthly oil market report predicted that world oil demand would average 89.13 million b/d in 2011, 360,000 b/d higher than previously forecast […]

1.6 bn people still have no access to electricity

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in an address to the Fourth World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi that energy provisions can help fight poverty and improve health care services as part of the Millennium Development Goals for the developing world. ‘Our challenge is transformation,’ Ban said. ‘We need a global clean energy revolution […]

On Not Jumping the Gun By Sharon Astyk

The e-mails started coming in to my mailbox this fall, their quantity and excitement level tracking the rising oil prices. Had I heard that this analyst just predicted $110 a barrel of oil by next year? How about this analyst, who suggested we might hit $200 a barrel by the end of 2015? As oil […]

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