World Food security at risk

A top U.S. official said on Thursday global food prices could soar again if countries don’t cooperate to increase food production especially in developing countries. Ertharin Cousin, U.S. ambassador to U.N. food agencies in Rome, said factors such as continued use of land for biofuels, and food scarcity, which led to a spike in global […]

Kunstler: Out of Darkness

Among other things, the most forward-looking leaders in the New Urbanist movement now recognize that we have to reorganize the landscape for local food production, because industrial agriculture will be one of the prime victims of our oil predicament. The successful places in the future will be places that have a meaningful relationship with growing […]

UK adjustment to oil production drops is a success story so far

It has also meant that the country is much more tightly connected to international gas markets: both the continental European market – which is heavily influenced by pipeline supplies from Russia, Norway and Algeria – and the global LNG market – which is shaped by demand in the US and Asia. So far, this integration […]

EIA: World Energy Use Up 49% By 2035

Global energy consumption will rise 49% between 2007 and 2035, led by economic growth in developing nations, the US Energy Information Administration said Tuesday. While use of renewable fuels will grow rapidly in the period, “fossil fuels are still set to meet more than three-fourths of total energy needs in 2035, assuming current policies are […]

New Urbanism for the Apocalypse

Agrarian urbanism, he explained, is different from both “urban agriculture” (“cities that are retrofitted to grow food”) and “agricultural urbanism” (“when an intentional community is built that is associated with a farm).” He was thinking bigger: “Agrarian urbanism is a society involved with the growing of food.” America abounds with intentional communities, he pointed out […]

Food in the Land of Peak Oil

Believe it or not, Cuba’s perhaps the world’s leading model of the agricultural system of the future. When the USSR fell, Cuba entered what they call the “Special Period.” But it wasn’t special in a good way. Between 1990-1994, Cubans lost a lot of weight and babies born in those years still show signs of […]

Kuwait: Global oil demand to increase by five million bpd

Global oil demand will increase by five million barrels per day in the next five years, and China and India will lead the growth in emerging markets, the Kuwaiti oil minister said at the opening ceremony of the 18th Middle East Oil and Gas Conference here Monday. “The fastest growth will be in Asia, where […]

What Insiders Don’t Want You to Know About “Peak Oil”

At the world’s largest energy forum in Cancun, Mexico on March 30-31, the power brokers of the oil industry saw the future. And it isn’t pretty. The biennial International Energy Forum (IEF) drew ministers from 64 countries, members of the International Energy Agency (IEA), OPEC, and other dignitaries. In short, all the heavy hitters on […]

India’s Govt doubles price of nat gas

The government has doubled the price of natural gas produced by ONGC and Oil India from nomination blocks that will make the fuel used in automobiles and households in Mumbai and National Capital Region. “The price of compressed natural gas (CNG) may increase by 20%, but will depend from city to city,” said joint secretary […]

How Would You Spend Your Daily 100 watts?

Using this handy-dandy calculator I learned that mindless Watt-for-Watt replacement will cost me approximately 13 years worth of electric bills. That suggests that the cost of one year’s electric bills would supply approximately 1/20th of my current usage! If my math is correct, that works out to 200 Watts during the daylight hours or 100 […]

Peak oil crisis just ain’t sexy enough

The question of why climate change is sexy and peak oil is not, is an interesting one. You may all have your own ideas, but today I’ll put down what I think the difference is. I believe the answer lies in the above observation about newsworthiness. Climate change is undoubtedly a wild card. Nobody really […]

Richard Sears: Planning for the end of oil

As the world’s attention focuses on the perils of oil exploration, we present Richard Sears’ talk from early February 2010. Sears, an expert in developing new energy resources, talks about our inevitable and necessary move away from oil. Toward … what? About Richard Sears Richard Sears thinks hard about the post-oil world. He’s a visiting […]

The status quo of electric cars: better batteries, same range

The Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, two electric cars to be introduced on the market in 2010, have exactly the same range as the 1908 Fritchle Model A Victoria: 100 miles (160 kilometres) on a single charge. The “100-mile Fritchle” was a progressive engineering feat for its time, but it was not the only […]

Gas prices rise but don’t always fall ‎

There is absolutely no reason why prices of crude oil and gasoline should be moving in opposite directions this much for this long. If anything, economic trends should be bringing these two prices closer together. For one thing, supplies are plentiful. According to The Wall Street Journal, crude inventories have hit a record high at […]

Can the world be fed?

Above all else, Pettigrew said technology will play a significant role in the world’s ability to meet expanding food needs. In the past 30 years, agriculture has managed to double food production, and it is important to recognize that it did not just magically happen. Agriculture made it happen, and we have a responsibility to […]

China looking to make more loan-for-oil deals

China’s stockpile of forex reserves, the world’s largest, is estimated to be roughly two-thirds invested in dollar-denominated assets and the government has been attempting to gradually diversify its holdings. Chinese banks have already issued about $60 billion in loan-for-oil deals since the start of 2009. The cash for these loans was obtained through the foreign […]

MIT Team Unveils Airplane that Uses 70 Percent Less Fuel

NASA is calling this government-funded initiative the “N+3″, signifying that the planes are meant to revolutionize the aircraft industry in three generations. MIT, Boeing, GE Aviation and Northrop Grumman were given the task of rethinking the subsonic commercial aircraft market while teams from Boeing and Lockheed-Martin were entrusted with creating supersonic commercial aircraft — passenger […]

IEA trims 2010 oil demand growth forecast

Global oil demand growth in 2010 will be slightly slower than previously expected, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Wednesday, lowering its forecast, in contrast to two other key forecasters. The agency revised its global oil demand growth forecast by 50,000 barrels per day to 1.62 million bpd from its estimate last month. David […]

Saudi, Algeria Oil Ministers See Consumption Rising This Year

“Oil demand is very good, it is going to increase this year,” Saudi Arabia’s Ali al-Naimi said to Bloomberg in Doha yesterday. Consumption will grow in China, India and the Middle East, as those countries “are not affected by what’s happening in Greece,” Algeria’s Chakib Khelil said in an interview. Ministers from Arab oil-producing nations […]

Overpopulation, Are We Flucked?

Overpopulation occurs when a population’s density exceeds the capacity of the environment to supply the health requirements for the individuals Here are some links for you : More on exponential growth and doubling time (first out of 8 vids) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iFES… “Science Summit” on world population: http://dieoff.org/page75.htm PRB’s World Population Data Sheet (statistics, charts and other […]

Gulf Arab states unfazed by oil price slump

“I am never worried,” Ali al-Naimi, oil minister of OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia, told reporters when asked if he was concerned about the sharp dip in oil prices last week. “OPEC is not standing still. OPEC is always in movement,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the Arab Energy Conference which began on Sunday […]

Will Peak Oil Turn Flying Into Something Only Rich People Can Afford?

“At $150 dollars a barrel, the air industry is barely viable,” Romm said. “At $200 a barrel, it’s going to revert to the way it used to be, which is something that only rich people do.” The glory age of the airline industry may be coming to an end. The institutional challenges the aviation industry […]

India’s Govt gets to control nat gas prices

Bernstein Research said in the longer term the key point is that the government will become the de facto regulator of both onshore and offshore gas prices. “This is important because we believe that RIL needs prices higher than $4.2 per mBtu to develop the next phase of its deepwater gas fields. Assuming the government […]

U.S. Food Inflation Spiraling Out of Control

Some of the startling food price increases on a year-over-year basis include, fresh and dry vegetables up 56.1%, fresh fruits and melons up 28.8%, eggs for fresh use up 33.6%, pork up 19.1%, beef and veal up 10.7% and dairy products up 9.7%. On October 30th, 2009, NIA predicted that inflation would appear next in […]

China Misses 2010 Energy Goals

With less than eight months left, China’s chance to cut energy intensity by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010 seems rather slim at best. After a hard-won decline of 14.38 percent in energy consumption per unit of GDP between 2006-2009, China saw a 3.2 percent rebound in energy intensity in the first quarter of this […]

Perhaps We’ll See Peak Bunker Oil, Too

Even low-grade oil used to fuel cargo ships is likely to become precious in the age of peak oil. Today, things are looking up. Shipping has increased by a third since last year, and the amount of cargo coming into the U.S. is predicted to grow by nearly 20 percent this year, which would bring […]

Richard Heinberg: China’s Coal Bubble …and how it will deflate U.S. efforts to develop “clean coal”

The conventional wisdom in energy-and-environment circles is that China’s economy, which is growing at a rate of eight percent or more per year, is mostly coal powered today and will continue to be so for decades to come. Coal is cheap and abundant, and China uses far more of it than any other nation. The […]

Of the issue of peak demand and the consequent casualties

Crude world has undergone massive transformation in recent months. Gone are the days when the issue of “peak oil” was dominating headlines. That has receded into the background. The very issue of peak demand is now getting on to the centre stage and is starting to impact things all around. Demand has already peaked in […]

Pickens: To compete with China, U.S. must tap natural gas

This is a tale of two countries — and two energy futures. In spite of promises to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, the United States continues to import nearly two-thirds of its daily oil requirements. Meanwhile, China has quietly and effectively been locking in long-term oil supplies to make certain that its internal needs […]

Food as instrument of economic security

I struck up a conversation in Mama Jean’s Market over some turnips last year. There were three patrons there, and each had their own reasons for buying local. I fell into the carbon camp fretting over the miles racked up by my long-haul tomatoes or grapes. A woman shopping for hormone-free meats did it for […]

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