Rise of mega farms: how the US model of intensive farming is invading the world

nce the days of the wild west frontier, the popular image of American farming has been of cowboys rounding up steers on wide open ranches, to whoops, whips and hollers. Today, the cowboys on their ranches under wide open skies have been replaced by vast sheds, hulking over the plains, housing tens of thousands of […]

A Brighter Future for Electric Cars and the Planet

There is simply no credible way to address climate change without changing the way we get from here to there, meaning cars, trucks, planes and any other gas-guzzling forms of transportation. That is why it is so heartening to see electric cars, considered curios for the rich or eccentric or both not that long ago, […]

Earth’s Economy Glorifies Waste, Exploitation, Debt, Expediency and Magical Thinking

Humanity appears to default to magical thinking when faced with untenable situations that demand systemic change. How would extraterrestrial anthropologists characterize Earth’s dominant socio-economic system? It’s not difficult to imagine their dismaying report: “Earth’s economy glorifies waste. Its economists rejoice when a product is disposed as waste and replaced with a new product. This waste is […]

Electric Vehicles: Imminent Breakout or Breakdown?

The media flavor of the day is “Peak Oil Demand.” It’s being predicted due to plummeting battery costs for electric vehicles, which are on the verge of reaching a point where electric vehicles become competitive with internal combustion vehicles, resulting in a drop in oil consumption.  Bloomberg New Energy Finance believes they will be as cheap as […]

Coal to edge out natural gas in 2017

By a thin margin, coal will be the top source for U.S. power generation in 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s monthly Short Term Energy Outlook released Tuesday. The EIA report projects coal will fuel 31.3 percent of electricity in the U.S. in 2017, compared with 31.1 percent for natural gas. In 2016, […]

OPEC: Can it ride out the storm?

For cartel OPEC — created in 1960 with the aim of supporting a sustainable price on the oil market — it is in some ways a perfect storm. Stocks have surged thanks to the rapid emergence of oil from US shale deposits. And due to the abundant supply, the price of oil now stands at […]

High-speed Hyperloop project ready for key test in Nevada

Engineers will soon conduct a crucial test of a futuristic technology championed by entrepreneur Elon Musk that seeks to revolutionize transportation by sending passengers and cargo packed into pods through an intercity system of vacuum tubes. Hyperloop One, the Los-Angeles-based company developing the technology, is gearing up to send a 28-foot-long (8.5 meter-long) pod gliding […]

Refocus On Four Strategic Issues More Pressing Than ‘Peak Demand’

The concept of “peak oil demand” has been gaining more traction over the last year. While many long-term forecasts have long anticipated some slowing of demand as efficiencies improve and energy intensity falls, recent conversations about the viability of EVs has made peak demand feel more real and more imminent. While Stratas Advisors predicts a […]

Future Of Energy: The Big Picture

Summary Overview of factors involved in determining energy prices. How the various factors influence supply and demaind. Major shifts coming in the energy sector. A low risk, long-term investment in energy. Introduction This is the initial installment of a series I will be writing (at least once weekly until completed) to provide readers with a […]

The Coming ‘Peak Oil Plateau’ And Higher Oil Prices

Summary Oil demand and supply are both in the process of balancing and peaking. Oil supply will fall before oil demand, creating a period of significantly higher priced oil. OPEC and shale will be the main beneficiaries of higher oil prices. According to the EIA, global oil supply and demand are roughly in balance right […]

Are Supermajors Spooked By Peak Oil Demand?

Will the world’s appetite for crude oil ever be sated? For decades, it was widely presumed that demand for petroleum would grow steadily in line with the expansion of the global economy, as more people drove, more cities were built and more energy was needed to fuel industrial expansion. But a number of major energy […]

Oil demand to grow: IEA

Renewed investment in upstream sector key to meeting projected demand growth The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects demand for oil to continue increasing in coming years, a forecast said to be contrary to some other consultants. “We think oil demand will continue to grow in years to come, unlike some others who think oil demand […]

Remember Peak Oil? Demand May Top Out Before Supply Does

When Bob Dudley, chief executive officer of British oil giant BP Plc, was asked at a recent conference when oil demand will peak, he had a precise answer: June 2, 2042. The audience at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum burst into laughter, knowing it’s impossible to predict such an event down to the day. […]

“When The Facts Change”- Oil’s Biggest Cheerleader Capitulates

After years of being oil’s biggest cheerleader, “oil god” Andy Hall, who starting with the OPEC Thanksgiving massacre in 2014 has had several abysmal years, in the process losing the bulk of his AUM, finally threw in the towel last week when in a July 3 letter to investors, he admitted that “the facts have changed” […]

Don’t Count Out Coal Yet

The coal industry has faced headwinds for the past decade. Burdensome regulations and competition from cheap natural gas have taken their toll. Conventional wisdom now suggests the sun is setting on the U.S. coal industry, but the assumptions driving that thinking are far from certainties. Energy experts point to falling costs for renewables and the […]

Fake crude oil news?

Crude oil prices sold off almost 5% on what many people attributed to a story that some unnamed Russian oil company source said that Russia was against a production cut. Today those sources are still unknown, but really the sell-off in oil probably had more to do with the fact that Saudi Arabia cut prices […]

Tesla’s first mass-market electric

Tesla will complete production of its very first Model 3 vehicle today. It won’t be the only mass-market, all-electric, 200-mile sedan on the market — GM grabbed first-mover status in December, when it began selling its 238-mile Chevy Bolt. But the Model 3 will nonetheless be singular: Not only will the car be sleek and […]

Fossil Fuel Empire: A World of Vulnerability

“It’s all about the oil,” many commentators said about the US assault on Iraq in 2003. Attributing a war to a single cause is almost always an oversimplification, but protecting access to the 20th century’s most important energy source has been a priority of US foreign policy since World War II. In part one of […]

The Global Oil Demand Driver That Is Being Ignored

When looking at oil demand, oil market analysts focus overwhelmingly on passenger vehicles. One of the hottest debates today is over the prospect of peak oil demand: whether or not electric vehicles along with general trends towards more fuel efficiency will ultimately lead to a peak and decline of total oil demand worldwide. No doubt […]

American production struggling to tolerate below $50 price

The Oil production in America seems to be having a ‘Deja-vu’. Back in 2015, despite a drop in the price of oil, the production in the United States was rising and it wasn’t until the very end of June that year the production started declining. The oil price dipped below $50 per barrel for the […]

Americans celebrate July 4 with leisure and gluttony

Americans will celebrate Independence Day on Tuesday with fireworks, acts of gluttony and escapes to the beach, even for people in New Jersey where legislators brokered a last-minute deal to reopen state parks. In keeping with tradition, cities across the country will launch fireworks after dark, perhaps the most emblematic way to commemorate July 4, […]

Brace for a devastating oil shock ahead

If Independence Day were about feting the U.S. weaning itself from foreign oil and forging a renewables future, the man behind our call of the day probably wouldn’t be sounding the alarm on a potentially devastating crisis by the end of the decade. But it’s not. And we aren’t. And he is. Yes, according to […]

Central America hit by massive power outages

A huge power outage plunged millions of people across Central America into darkness Saturday, as authorities from Panama to Costa Rica to El Salvador scrambled to restore electrical service. The blackout affected some five million people in Costa Rica alone, where officials largely had managed to restore service after a nationwide power outage lasting about […]

Sustainable Farming Basics and Impacts

Sustainable Farming or Sustainable Agriculture is a way of producing food indefinitely. Some ways of producing food protect the “life support systems” that we depend on – from healthy soil to clean groundwater – while other methods damage them. “Sustainable” food production means using approaches that do not degrade these essential systems but protect and […]

The Fallacy Of Peak Oil Demand

I have seen the handwriting on the wall for the coal industry for more than a decade. Not only is coal the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels, it is also the fuel that has the greatest number of potential replacements. Renewables may ultimately scale to displace a substantial fraction of our coal consumption, but […]

Economist predicts $60 oil “relatively soon”

Oil prices will jump over $60 “relatively soon,” according to Statoil chief economist Eirik Waerness, who spoke to a news media. According to Waerness, $60 barrel is unlikely to happen as soon as tomorrow, but the goal will be met sooner, rather than later, on a 2050 timeline. A series of “surprises” have affected the […]

How sustainable is China’s future energy demand?

A new report by S&P Global’s China Senior Analyst Group*, entitled “China’s Sustainable Energy Future Depends on Efficiency, Economic Transition, And Renewables — Not Slower GDP Growth” finds that China will need to take a radically different path of energy consumption from what developed nations currently follow in order to avoid a spiking oil import bill. Eight […]

Has the oil market reached ‘peak bear’?

Investor bets against the oil price are piling up at breakneck speed, the market is still buckling under the weight of excess supply for a third year in a row, but has bearish sentiment got out of hand? The price of a barrel of oil has dropped nearly 20 percent between January and June and […]

The “Peak Oil” Pig Returns With A New Shade Of Lipstick

Heritage pigs stand in a pen at the Stone Barns farm in Pocantico Hills, New York, U.S., on Friday, April 21, 2017. Photographer: Cole Wilson/Bloomberg Proponents of a new strain of the always-tiresome, never-correct “Peak Oil” theory have returned to the public discourse , this time with a new theory coming from the other side […]

Bankers warn global crash could arrive ‘with a vengeance’

A new financial crisis is brewing in the emerging economies and it could hit “with a vengeance”, an influential group of central bankers has warned. Emerging markets such as China are showing the same signs that their economies are overheating as the US and the UK demonstrated before the financial crisis of 2007-08, according to […]

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