Tech billionaires are building boltholes in New Zealand because they now fear social collapse or nuclear war

You’re all set — your bags were packed long ago, there’s a dozen solid gold coins stashed inside your belt and a pistol strapped round your waist. There’s no need to say goodbye to the wife and children as they’re already waiting for you 6,000 miles away in New Zealand, having slipped off quietly at […]

Dollar Or Iran? Oil Needs A Serious Catalyst To Breakout

Oil traded in a painfully dull range yet again this week through Thursday ($54.34 / $52.24) after managing just a $4.53 range in January ($55.24 / $50.71.) The market remains caught between preliminary OPEC data which revealed significant production cuts from six members and Russia in January and poor US data which continues to show […]

Low-Eroei Manifesto: A First-person-view of the Nomadic State-of-Being

A First-person-view of the Nomadic State-of-Being 1. THE STAGE FULL OF ANONYMOUS MATERIAL I was born a year before the UN commissioned report Our Common Future more or less defined the term sustainable development 1. There have been scientists ever since the 19th century who have warned about the green house effect caused by extensive […]

How Innovation Could Bring Us to Peak Oil by 2020

Energy companies are grossly underestimating low-carbon advances with a business-as-usual approach says a new report co-authored by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative. The report also points to the falling costs of electric vehicle and solar technology as having the potential to halt the growth in global demand for […]

The world’s tallest vertical garden in Sydney

Inhabitat has a post on Sydney’s coolest green building, Central Park (it’s actually been up for a few years now but the picture gallery is worth a look) – The world’s tallest vertical garden lives and breathes in Sydney. The world’s tallest vertical garden now graces the Sydney skyline in the form of a towering […]

Irreversible Damage – The U.S. Economy Cannot Be Repaired

As I outlined in my article ‘The False Economic Narrative Will Die In 2017’, the mainstream media has been carefully crafting the propaganda meme that the Trump administration is inheriting a global economy in “ascension,” when in fact, the opposite is true. Trump enters office at a time of longstanding decline and will likely witness […]

Electric Cars Could Cause Oil Market Disruption on Par With OPEC

The growth of battery-powered cars could be as disruptive to the oil market as the OPEC market-share war that triggered the price crash of 2014, potentially wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off the value from fossil fuel producers in the next decade. About 2 million barrels a day of oil demand could be displaced […]

The Oil War Is Only Just Getting Started

It’s been a month now that investors and analysts have been closely watching two main drivers for oil prices: how OPEC is doing with the supply-cut deal, and how U.S. shale is responding to fifty-plus-dollar oil with rebounding drilling activity. Those two main factors are largely neutralizing each other, and are putting a floor and […]

End of the “Oilocene”: The Demise of the Global Oil Industry and of the Global Economic System as we know it.

In 1981 I was sitting on an eroded barren hillside in India, where less than 100 years previously there had been dense forest with tigers. It was now effectively a desert and I was watching villagers scavenging for twigs for fuelwood and pondering their future, thinking about rapidly increasing human population and equally rapid degradation […]

BP Forecasts 50-Year Oil Glut

Oil markets mostly ignored the glum forecast from BP that the world is facing a long-term oil glut that won’t disappear for 50 years. Now that is a forecast and as we have seen in the past year, forecasts and commodities do not always make an accurate fit. Figures from Baker Hughes on Friday revealed […]

IEA does not foresee oil demand peaking soon

The International Energy Agency (IEA) does not expect oil demand to peak any time soon due to rising consumption in developing economies, Director Fatih Birol said on Monday. Birol also warned that oil markets could enter a period of high volatility unless companies develop new projects after two years of sharp drops in investments sparked […]

The Coming Era Of Depression Economics

Like it or not, this is where we have been all along and a great many people are just now catching up. No matter what Janet Yellen says about the economy, she is talking out the side of her mouth. Internally, the recovery is gone, and it is never coming back. Externally, we have sub-5% […]

BP: Global Energy Demand to Grow by a Third

Global energy demand will grow by around a third, driven by a burgeoning Asian middle-class, according to BP’s latest energy outlook. “Global demand grows by around a third in the base case, with virtually all of this increase consumed by fast growing emerging economies,” Spencer Dale, BP’s group chief economist, said. In terms of the […]

Energy from Waste, or Waste from Energy?

Biking along the Lake Ontario shoreline one autumn afternoon, I passed the new and just-barely operational Durham-York Energy Centre and a question popped into mind. If this incinerator produces a lot of electricity, where are all the wires? The question was prompted in part by the facility’s location right next to the Darlington Nuclear Generating […]

Oil oversupply double world’s needs for 50 years

The world has access to more than twice as much oil as it will need between now and 2050, which will dampen the long-term outlook for prices, according to BP. There was an “abundance of oil” globally and it was “increasingly likely” that some resources would be left in the ground, Spencer Dale, the oil […]

Global Oil Demand Will Grow into 2040s According to BP Energy Outlook

Global oil demand will continue to grow into the 2040s even as electrical vehicle fleets expand and the low-carbon energy transition gains traction around the world, BP revealed in its annual Energy Outlook, an industry benchmark report forecasting long-term trends and informs the company’s internal strategy. The predictions come as other oil companies such as […]

Supporting “Youngers” in Transition

I was twenty-five years old when I started working for Transition US almost four years ago, and since then one of my strong desires has been to engage more young people in our movement. I’ve seen the energy and passion young people bring to social change work. And as the ones who are inheriting a […]

Michael Lynch: Peak Oil Demand Is Deja Vu All Over Again

The current fashionable theme in energy is ‘peak oil demand’ and the accompanying possible stranding of fossil fuel resources, with the resulting damage to the equity value of producing companies.   This post will discuss reasons to be wary, at least of some of the arguments.  A subsequent post will discuss more realistic rationales—and signposts—towards peak […]

Resources need to grow according to magnitude of population

With India’s population likely to reach 1.6 billion in 20 years,resources have to grow according to the magnitude of future population in the context of the country’s low world ranking in terms of Gross Domestic Product and Human Development Index, Prem Krishna,Chairman of Research Council, Central Building Research Institute, Roorkee, said. Delivering his address at […]

When will oil demand peak?

The two-year oversupply of oil appears to have passed following an agreement by Opec and non-Opec countries to reduce production by 1.8m barrels a day (mb/d). But in the future will we need all the oil which is produced? Slowly, technology is impacting energy consumption patterns and fast growth in renewable energy could disrupt oil […]

The Emerging Markets Consumer

By Karl Desmond Three billion people entering the middle class1 and $30 trillion of annual consumption by 20252 – these are two numbers that summarize the drastic demographic and economic shift currently happening in emerging market countries and what McKinsey & Co. has called, “the biggest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism.” 2 The […]

BP predicts “peak oil” will hit between 2025 and 2040

Oil major BP has outline six main trends which could “shape the future” of energy. The company said energy transitions this year will look at a “dominant fuel” with gas growing faster than any other fossil fuel. It will see a sharp change in price coupled with such agreements like the 2015 Paris agreement which […]

China’s Oil Collapse Is Unintentionally Helping OPEC

OPEC’s campaign to prop up oil prices is getting unlikely support from its biggest customer. China’s production is forecast to fall by as much as 7 percent this year, extending a record decline in 2016, according to analysts at CLSA Ltd., Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. and Nomura Holdings Inc. That’s about the same size […]

How robots will save the economy

When countries around the world face a rapidly ageing workforce, machines will help to fill the gap Image Credit: AP     The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, […]

Energy Independence: Why Bother?

It doesn’t make economic or geopolitical sense. In a global economy where we drive cars built in Japan, work on computers made in China and eat shrimp caught and peeled in Thailand, why do we hesitate to use oil pumped in Saudi Arabia? Do we fear oil shortages or embargoes? We’ve weathered those before. The […]

Neoliberals know the price of everything and the value of nothing

My father likes to say that some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The same could be said of the neoliberals of the world, who–in case you missed my previous piece–are now transcendent in most policy circles across the world. To review, the neoliberal agenda is one of deregulation, unfettered […]

Peak Uranium: the uncertain future of nuclear energy

  Alice Friedmann recently posted on her blog “Energy Skeptic” a summary of the discussion on nuclear energy from my book “Extracted” (Chelsea Green, 2014). It is a well-done summary that I am reproducing here. Note that the text below mixes some of the considerations of the main text (written by me) and of one […]

Oil – Past, Present, And Future King Of Energy

Summary Several articles on Seeking Alpha have recently proclaimed the imminent decline of oil – I disagree. Oil demand is strong and will continue to grow. Numerous research groups agree, oil demand will grow, not decline. Being an avid student of energy and an energy investor, I spend a great deal of time reading and […]

The coming famine: Russia, peak oil and the collapse of cheap food

I’ve gotten a couple emails from people who have asked me what I think the “end game” is in regards to Russia. And, indeed, the government is going into extra innings with this whole Russia vilification project. This is worse than someone who has held on to a grudge for years. The government does that, […]

4 Possible Futures For The Global Food System

Somehow, despite the fact that the global food system produces so many calories that 2.1 billion people are overweight or obese, it also leaves 800 million people without enough to eat. The agriculture sector is responsible for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions, plus a host of environmental problems, from polluted waterways to deforestation. Food waste […]

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