Can we feed our world without Monsanto?

Every minute of every day, our global family welcomes 255 babies into the world. That’s 134 million new mouths to feed every year, for a total population increase of 2.2 billion in the next thirty years. Hugh Grant, the CEO of agricultural giant Monsanto, often cites the world’s booming population as the core reason global […]

Global oil demand to outgrow decline

2010 demand level is 86.4 million b/d in the most recent Medium-Term Oil Market Outlook, compared with the 84.3 million b/d projection a year ago. That additional “wedge of demand” relative to the expectations of a year ago translated to an increase in the expected call on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ crude in […]

India Cuts Subsidies for Fuels

Heavily subsidized fuels like kerosene, for instance, are used by many poor Indians for lighting and cooking. Moreover, opposition politicians have criticized the government for not doing enough to bring down escalating prices, especially for food. Consumer prices jumped 14.4 percent in April from a year earlier. The opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist) called […]

All The Facts Behind The World’s Water Crisis

1. By 2025, more than 2.8 billion people will live in 48 countries facing water stress or water scarcity, a recently revised United Nations medium population projected. Of these 48 countries, 40 are either in the Near East and North Africa or in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the next two decades population increase alone—not to mention […]

Asia and Japan — are looking more toward unconventional gas

Amid brightening prospects for increasing unconventional gas production and supply, energy ministers from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation countries meeting recently recognized the need to explore ways to secure supplies coming from streams other than conventional gas. It was arguably the first recognition of the need to develop unconventional gas at any energy ministerial talks, which […]

Study Says Natural Gas Use Likely to Double

Natural gas will provide an increasing share of America’s energy needs over the next several decades, doubling its share of the energy market to 40 percent, from 20 percent, according to a report to be released Friday by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The increase, the report concluded, will come largely at the expense of […]

Raising Water Productivity to Increase Food Security

With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity over the last half-century. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, it is not surprising that 70 percent of world water use is devoted […]

Peak Shrimp: Vietnam runs out of shrimp to sell

Prices offered for black tiger shrimp have reached $13 per kilo, an increase of 30 percent over 2009 levels and the highest price seen in ten years. Hot weather and decreased production in competing countries are also pushing  prices up.  An epidemic has killed 80 percent of Indonesia’s farmed shrimp, and 20 percent in Thailand […]

Will the post-oil future be bicycle-free?

This distressing line of thought occurred to me recently as I was finishing James Howard Kunstler’s beautifully written post-oil novel, A World Made by Hand. I spotted not a single bicycle in its 317 pages. Why? Because in the novel the roads upon which one might ride are crumbling beyond passable. These roads are navigable […]

What happens when energy resources deplete?

nergy expenditures are not a big share of income for high income people, but they are for the many people getting along on minimum wage, or close to minimum wage. If oil prices go up, these folks find the price of food and gasoline going up, and perhaps the price of home heating and electricity […]

World Population Requires 70% Increase in Food Production by 2050

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said feeding a global population of 9.15 billion people in 2050 requires an increase in total food production of some 70 per cent (nearly 100% in the developing countries). Giving the alert, the organization said in its “long-term Outlook for Global Agriculture”, the demand for cereals is projected to […]

A Peak Oil Garden…

Learning to grow food is an important skill to acquire when preparing for Peak Oil…One family is preparing for Peak Oil over a 10 year period and this is their garden after the third year..

Food Prices Forecast to Rise This Decade on Population, Diets

World food prices will rise this decade, boosted by a growing population and changing diets, the OECD and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said in their annual outlook report. “Real prices of all products other than pig meat are expected to be above their average 1997-2006 level,” the Paris- based Organization for Economic […]

Why we may never be able to say goodbye to oil

It is not what most of us want to hear, but energy demand growth will remain focused on oil and gas because there are no ready alternatives. Nuclear power will continue to supply a proportion of the world’s energy needs, but questions remain over public confidence, commerciality, and waste disposal. Renewables and alternative sources of […]

Rethinking Disposable

Create, use, toss Disposable is a classic example of cradle-to-grave thinking, the design philosophy that has dominated much of humankind’s development. We create something, use it for a while, ship it off to the dump when we are done with it and then just get a new one. But cradle-to-grave thinking has a critical weakness: […]

Air travel in 2050 will be safe, clean and delay-free, says industry

Under the organization’s Vision 2050 plan, in 40 years the world’s airlines will be “very close to zero accidents” and emitting half the carbon with the help of locally-produced biofuels from jatropha, camelina, algae or even urban waste, which could “break the tyranny of oil.” “Today’s jet fuel cannot sustain our industry,” said Bisignani, “our […]

Think gas is too pricey? Think again.

Some of the best work on this subject has been done by Ian Parry, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future. His calculations — plus some data from other sources and studies — suggest that adding all the quantifiable costs into the price of oil would increase the cost of each gallon by about […]

I Can’t Believe It’s Oil!

It’s no surprise that most petroleum products are used to generate energy. Gasoline and diesel fuel power our cars and trucks, and kerosene and jet fuel keep our airplanes flying. Some of the propane we use is separated from crude oil during the refining process. On average, a 42-gallon barrel of refined crude oil yields […]

Rethinking our oil-drenched lifestyles

Changing that culture will be tough, because it inevitably means sacrifice. “No politician wants to stand up in front of his constituency and say look, fossil fuel should be more expensive, we should be traveling less and so on. He’d be hooted off the stage,’’ Heinberg told me. But he paints a dire portrait of […]

Water: Will There Be Enough?

As the limitations of big‑infrastructure strategies have become more apparent, a vanguard of citizens, communities, farmers, and corporations are thinking about water in a new way. They’re asking, what do we really need the water for, and can we meet that need with less? The upshot of this shift in thinking is a new movement […]

Chinese Demand For Coal Grows

Coal prices in China are resuming their climb as China’s store are depleting. China is the world’s largest user and producer of the or. A drought lasting nearly six months in southwestern China has cut water available for hydropower generation. This has caused an increased demand for coal fired electricity, and has caused China to […]

The Coming Clash Between Water and Energy

Plug your iPhone into the wall, and about half a liter of water must flow through kilometers of pipes, pumps, and the heat exchangers of a power plant. That’s a lot of money and machinery just so you can get a 6–watt-hour charge for your flashy little phone. Now, add up all the half-liters of […]

Peak Wood: Nature Does Impose Limits

Civilization continued its march westward in search of wood. In the poet Hesiod’s time timber grew throughout Greece. Some 300 years later Plato reminisced how in an earlier period “there was an abundance of wood in the mountains” but “now they only afford sustenance to bees.” So the Greeks, with their ships and bronze axes, […]

A Growing Network Preparing for the World’s End

“A ‘shit hit the fan’ scenario happens to just about everyone sometime in their life,” he says. “Preparing and having a ‘prepper’ mindset will lessen the impact of whatever disaster it may be that you might experience in your life.” Fair enough. But is it really necessary to spend hundreds of dollars on packaged emergency […]

Things You Didn’t Know Were Made of Oil

A partial list of products made from Petroleum (144 of 6000 items) One 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline. The rest (over half) is used to make things like: Solvents Diesel fuel Motor Oil Bearing Grease Ink Floor Wax Ballpoint Pens Football Cleats Upholstery Sweaters Boats Insecticides Bicycle Tires Sports Car Bodies […]

How much oil does the world need?

So what does an ordinary schmuck do facing odds like this? Buy a hybrid? Fine, if you can afford it. Take a bus to work? Not a bad idea, but not many people are doing it in Cranbrook. Ride a bicycle or walk to work? Great idea from a health and fitness point of view […]

The Beginning of the End of Our Oil Addiction



The electric vehicle is here – and its mass deployment in the US has just begun. On Thursday, both the House and the Senate introduced bi-partisan legislation to scale up the use of electric vehicles in the US. The legislation would provide incentives for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles in select “communities” around the […]

Peak Phosphorous

Forget peak oil. The next big crisis is peak phosphorous–a shortage of mined phosphorous for fertilizer. The problem is so bad that supply won’t be able to meet agricultural demand within the next 30 to 40 years. But a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-backed startup called Ostara thinks it might have the solution: a system that […]

China to crack down on vegetable hoarding

China’s top economic planner urged local governments to step up efforts to strengthen market monitoring and clamp down on speculators who force up the prices of vegetables including green beans and garlic. Profiteers’ illicit earnings will be confiscated and they may face fines of up to one million yuan (US$146,000), the commission said in a […]

Accounting for increasing energy use by the US food system

What we eat matters. Non-essential foods — alcoholic beverages, baked goods, snack foods, and pet foods — accounted for the biggest component of the increase observed between 1997 and 2002. The amount of energy used to get fresh fruits and vegetables to our plates also increased as we opted for pre-cut portions and convenience packaging. […]

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