The retreat of ‘peak oil’

The recent OPEC meeting provides an opportunity to understand the mysteries of the global oil market. As expected, OPEC decided not to cut its oil production. Barring unanticipated developments, prices will drop, says oil analyst Larry Goldstein. Potential oil supply, including drawdowns from bloated inventories, exceeds demand. Goldstein rightly cautions, however, that no one knows […]

Energy Crunch – tectonic shifts

Three things you shouldn’t miss this week Chart: Is the global economy becoming less energy intensive? Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015 Article: Fossil fuel divestment is rational, says former Shell chairman – Mark Moody-Stuart is also worried about the lack of industry progress in addressing climate change. Article: BP sees ‘tectonic shift’ in world energy production – Energy […]

Global Oil Shortage Before Year’s End?

Now that OPEC has left its production quota unchanged, the world will continue to see a glut in supplies, right? Some analysts aren’t so sure. Sanford C. Bernstein predicts that by the end of the year global demand will outstrip supply by an estimated 1.5 million barrels per day. That flies in the face of […]

EIA, OPEC, IEA Influencing Oil Prices

Oil is more or less flat in the Asian session, Brent oil is trading at 64.95 and WTI is at 60.56 as traders are more focused on equities and currencies.  Oil dipped yesterday with U.S. crude retreating further from a one-month peak of almost $62 a barrel earlier this week, after Saudi Arabia said it […]

America’s Next Economic Boom Could Be Lying Underground

There’s a serious problem in the American economy: Big corporations are doing well, but real household income for average Americans has been falling over the past decade — down 9 percent, according to census data. “That’s not good for America,” says Harvard economist Michael Porter. “That’s not good for America’s standard of living. That’s not […]

Oh US gas demand, where art thou?

In the United States, natural gas is having quite a year. Year-to-date, Platts unit Bentek Energy data shows natural gas production has averaged 72.4 Bcf/d, a 5.2 Bcf/d, or almost an 8% increase, from a year ago. This growth is impressive itself, but what makes it even more impressive is the growth has come while […]

Why EIA, IEA, And BP Oil Forecasts Are Too High

When forecasting how much oil will be available in future years, a standard approach seems to be the following: Figure out how much GDP growth the researcher hopes to have in the future. “Work backward” to see how much oil is needed, based on how much oil was used for a given level of GDP […]

The Transition Will Not Be Smooth Sailing

Michel Bauwens is one of the pioneers of the peer-to-peer movement. Theoretician, activist, and public speaker, he founded the P2P Foundation in 2005. His work, both rich and complex, is built around the concepts of networks and commons, and lays the conceptual foundations of a production system that would serve as an alternative to industrial […]

Building Hope in Times of Crisis

‘There is a big need for the solidarity movement in Greece. It started in late 2011 and has nearly doubled now to around 400 groups – even more if you add the more loosely networked ones,’ Christos Giovanopoulos says. We sit in the central Athens office of Solidarity for All, a project that aims to […]

Can We Decouple Living Standards from Energy Consumption?

Highlights Reductions in energy intensity is arguably our most important tool to achieve a sustainable energy future Developed nations have reduced energy consumption since the financial crisis and the US has seen continued GDP growth However, household income (proxy for living standard) has declined with energy consumption in the US This trend poses serious questions […]

Albert Bates: The Road to Paris

“These talks are not just about streamlining a text; they are about realizing, at a deeper level, the scope of the problem and the required scale for any response.”    Newspaper reporting legend Ross Gelbspan once said, lifestyle change is essential, but lifestyle change won’t get us out of this climate mess. We need change […]

Are We Measuring Energy Use All Wrong?

We measure energy use with a commodity-based approach — monitoring electrons, therms and gallons. But is there a better way to gauge the efficiency of the economy? Energy economist Skip Laitner has been exploring a new method based on measuring “exergy,” which shows that America’s economy is only 14 percent efficient. And he says it’s […]

Russia to Start Iran Crude Imports

Russia may start importing crude from Iran next week as part of an oil-for-goods agreement, Iranian Energy Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said. “We hope that next week” Russia will take its first imports, Zanganeh told reporters on board a plane from Vienna late on Friday, after attending a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting […]

The Future History of Political Economy

Ecological Economics and its corollary, Steady State Economic thinking, represent a step forward for the discipline of economics and also a return to how it was practiced in the past. In the nineteenth century, economics was a part of a larger enterprise: political economy, the integrated treatment of morals and economics, ultimate ends and efficient […]

The Era of Breakdown

The fourth of the stages in the sequence of collapse we’ve been discussing is the era of breakdown. (For those who haven’t been keeping track, the first three phases are the eras of pretense, impact, and response; the final phase, which we’ll be discussing next week, is the era of dissolution.) The era of breakdown […]

China is hoarding cheap oil in a fleet of supertankers

As Middle East oil producers drive prices lower and make life difficult for the U.S. fracking industry, one clear winner is emerging: China The world’s second-largest economy become the top oil importer in April. The key reason? China is taking advantage of cheap oil to boost its strategic reserves. “They’ve been building out strategic storage. […]

Natural Gas Will Chop Away at Oil’s Dominance as Transportation Fuel

A new study by IHS forecasts significant growth and value in the market for natural gas as a fuel in the heavy-duty transportation sector. The report, “LNG in Transportation: Challenging Oil’s Grip,” says that the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel could displace more than 1.5 million barrels per day (mbd) of oil […]

Will Demand for Oil Peak by 2035?

Many are familiar with peak oil theory — the idea that global oil production will hit a ceiling and then decline — yet the concept of peak oil demand, where demand will plateau before supply, appears to be replacing this controversial hypothesis. Amy Myers Jaffe, Executive Director of Energy and Sustainability at UC Davis, recently […]

Iraq, Venezuela See $75-80 As ‘Fair’ Price For Oil

The top oil officials of Iraq, Venezuela and Angola said on Wednesday that $75 to $80 a barrel was now a “fair” price for oil, reflecting an emerging consensus on a possible new equilibrium for volatile markets. “The equitable price will be between $75 and $80,” Iraqi oil minister Adel Abdel Mahdi told an OPEC […]

Forget the Noise: Oil Prices Won’t Crash Again

Oil rising to $60/bbl is displeasing some people, particularly the shorts. Some of the more extreme –those calling for oil in the $20’s – have wisely fallen silent. Others, like Goldman Sachs, who a few months ago had set their flag in the 30’s, have unfortunately not gone so silent. They recently moved their flag […]

Dinner in 2050

What will our dinner plate look like in 2050? As Yogi Berra commented, there is nothing more difficult to predict than the future, except that dinner for most people is likely to be different than it is today. Several realities will play out: the number of mouths to be fed will increase from about 7 […]

Doubtful We’ll Ever Again See Sustained $100+ Oil Prices

Harvard University professor Meghan O’Sullivan doubts that the price of oil will ever climb to its previous heights, CBC News last week reported. “Will prices be sustained over $100? Doubtful,” the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, and former special assistant to U.S. President George Bush said during the Energy […]

Sustainable development: achievable or just a dream?

It is possible that some readers are not aware that the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) earlier this year. It may have slipped the minds of others that the SDGs replaced the MDGs – the Millennium Development Goals. And it is barely conceivable that some are so cynically disposed that they might […]

The Apex of Industrialism: Manufactured Fake Shit

A factory for the production of ammonia (NH3) The Dr. Pooper Papers, Issue #2: While it would be nice to think that in times before the industrial era that farming was a wholly benevolent practice, the truth of the matter is that similar to today, agriculture actually began with annual monocultures. Nonetheless, there did emerge […]

4 reasons oil will stay this cheap for years

Producers around the world—from embattled drillers in war-torn Iraq, to shale concerns in the U.S.—aren’t being scared off by cheap prices. Leaders from some of the world’s most productive oil-exporting nations will meet this week in Vienna, just as oil prices have begun to stabilize at around $60 per barrel. As we near peak summer […]

Natural Gas is Killing Coal

There’s no denying that natural gas is revolutionizing our energy economy, but few believed it could deal such a swift death blow to coal, the commodity that brought us into the Industrial Revolution and has been our backbone ever since. But the signs are irrefutable. Here’s what you need to know. A historic battle Coal […]

Survive the Coming Collapse

Modern industrial civilization is based on fossil fuels; we have been burning about 30 billion barrels of petroleum every year. Fossil fuels make possible our manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, mining, and electricity. The problem is ”peak oil”: the world’s supply of usable, recoverable oil is on a long and bumpy plateau that will become less horizontal […]

Gas prices reach 2015 high

Families planning summer road trips can count on cheaper gas prices this year — almost a dollar less per gallon — even though pump prices have been on the rise in recent weeks. The national average price of regular unleaded is $2.74 — 91 cents below last summer’s price, according to AAA Mid-Atlantic. “We believe that […]

Is Peak Oil Behind Economic Disintegration?

Something is wrong with the economy. No kidding, you might reply, but what is the underlying cause? Is it Peak Oil? Or is capitalism just a system that doesn’t work and is destined to failure? Are we just stuck with inevitable deterioration in living standards for the majority, or is there at least theoretically something […]

The Crash of 2015: Going Global

Just in the past week, the headlines have been coming like triphammer blows: in Bloomberg News, “Something has gone wrong with the global consumer,” (according to JP Morgan); in International Business Times, “G7 Finance Ministers to address faltering global growth;” in London’s Telegraph, “HSBC fears world recession with no lifeboats left;” in OilPrice.com, “Clock running […]

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