Sustainability for Whom?

The mission of UPSTREAM (formerly Product Policy Institute) is “sustainable production and consumption and good governance.” Sometimes I feel like we’re swimming against the tide in advocating a role for government action in ensuring sustainable production and consumption. Big brands like Wal-Mart, Nestle, Procter and Gamble can effect rapid, systemic change in their global supply chains when […]

The Paradox of Oil: The Cheaper it is, the More it Costs

There will be oil, but at what price? – Chris Nelder and Gregor Macdonald   1. Introduction   It would be fair to say that the timing of the sudden drop in the price of oil since June 2014 took energy and financial analysts by surprise. After averaging around US$110 per barrel since 2011 (IEA, […]

Who Controls Our Food?

Sympathy with organic food production is at an all-time high. Perhaps ‘It’s a nice idea, when you can afford it’ sums up the approach of many people. But extending these principles of production to the whole food system? It just doesn’t seem practical. There are an awful lot of people to feed in the world […]

Exxon CEO: Get Used to Lower Oil Prices

Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson expects the price of oil to remain low over the next two years because of ample global supplies and relatively weak economic growth. “People need to kinda settle in for a while,” Tillerson said at the company’s annual investor conference in New York. In a presentation to investors outlining its […]

Weaving the Community Resilience and New Economy Movements in the US

Transition US is delighted to be part of the second cohort of national Transition hubs (along with Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and Portugal) to be receiving mentoring and support from Transition Network to bring REconomy to our country. We believe REconomy provides an important complement to the diverse, innovative work to build just and regenerative economies […]

So Much for Hubbert’s Peak Oil Theory: $20 Per Barrel Oil Soon?

All right, the headline might be a tad hasty. Nevertheless, geologist M. King Hubbert famously (and so far) correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. domestic oil production in the lower 48 states would peak around 1970 and begin to decline. In 1969 Hubbert predicted that world oil production would peak around 2000. Hubbert argued that […]

Could Oil Prices Plummet A Second Time?

Are oil prices heading for a double dip? The surge in shale production has produced a temporary glut in supplies causing oil prices to experience a massive bust. After tanking to a low of $44 per barrel in January, falling rig counts and enormous reductions in exploration budgets have fueled speculation that the market will […]

OPEC Puppets and Canada Give Away Their Oil

The world is running out of oil. Peak Oil is a reality, all that is open to debate is how fast production will drop off, and how quickly the world will simply run out of oil. The lack of certainty is due to the fact that (as with everything else) we can’t trust the “official” […]

Pakistan: oil supply chain in a shambles

the PSO has been supplying about 17,000 tons a day to the power sector against current payments..—AFP/File ISLAMABAD: About 45 days after the severe petrol shortage, the furnace oil supply chain is in a shambles owing to problems arising out of sloppy strategic planning, non-payments and adverse weather conditions in the Middle East. “We have […]

Oil and Money

Talking about the “concentration of wealth” is only part of the ”what’s wrong” story. The main part of the story is (1) OVERPOPULATION and (2) the decline in most natural RESOURCES. The world’s POPULATION is 7.2 billion — three times what it was in 1950. According to the UN, the population will rise by at […]

Consumers Hungry for Bundled Energy Services

Smart energy services in the home are already wrapped up with home security settings. Intelligent light bulbs and smart thermostats are standard offerings as part of smart home packages, which are led by security. But people are ready for more, much more, according to new research from Parks Associates released at its Smart Energy Summit […]

Oil Import Dependence Not Aways Economic Disadvantage

According to research by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (Institut der Deutschen Wirtschaft Koeln) energy imports should not be “understood as a threat to the security of energy supply and an economic disadvantage” per se. The study – “Does Dependency Equal Vulnerability? Energy Imports in Germany and Europe” commissioned by UPEI et alia and […]

Role of Wages of the Common Worker in Oil Prices, Collapse

In their book Secular Cycles, Peter Turchin and Surgey Nefedof point out the important role falling wages of the common workers played in early collapses. I got to thinking that this might be an issue with our current situation as well, including the low level of oil prices. I explain this in two presentations. The […]

The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide

I’ve commented more than once in these essays about the cooperative dimension of writing: the way that even the most solitary of writers inevitably takes part in what Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the flow of ideas and insights across the centuries that’s responsible for most of what we call culture. Sometimes […]

Oil: Shocking how vital it still is

The idea is a pretty simple one. Every now and again – amid all the swirling reports and breaking news – it is worth taking a pause and bringing together what we know about the most important resource in the world. As part of the Big Oil Drop project, I was asked a straightforward question. […]

Saudi’s Naimi says oil demand growing as prices stabilise

Saudi Arabia’s Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said on Wednesday that oil demand is growing and markets are calm, in some of his first public comments since the price of crude rebounded from a near six-year low. Oil crashed by 60 percent between June and January to a post-2009 low of $45 a barrel, with losses […]

Are We In The Midst Of An Epic Battle Between Interest Rates And The Oil Price?

What follows are the continuance of my research, discussions, observations and thoughts around the nexus of debts, interest rates and the oil price. I now believe these relations are poorly understood and with total global debt levels at all time highs (and growing), years of low interest rates, which are kept low (by concerted efforts […]

Is Oil Returning To $100 Or Dropping To $10?

If you have been following the price of oil over the last few months, the chances are you’re a little confused. On the one hand you have the likes of A. Gary Shilling who, in this Bloomberg article, loudly trumpets the prospect of oil at $10/Barrel, and on the other there is T. Boone Pickens, who, at […]

Why Was Al Fin Predicting an “Oil Glut” in 2006 At the Height of Peak Oil Hysteria?

A Lot More Energy Where That Came From Global Hydrocarbon Endowment In 2015, at a time of a relative oversupply of and underdemand for oil, it is easy for oil journalists to write about an “oil glut,” as if they had invented the concept. But in the years leading up to 2008, an oil glut […]

Is Oil Becoming Obsolete?

  The big oil price crash is a question that seems to be front and center on the mind of financial markets these past few months, but, not to worry, it’ll come back up, it always does! So goes the reasoning of oil analysts and investors, but what if something other than supply temporarily overriding […]

A Lesson in Oil Pricing

The recent oil-price collapse confirms what we should have learned in 2007-8 about the influence of the last increments of supply and demand on price. This also means that future oil prices should be largely independent of the size of the oil market, even in a decarbonizing world. In 2008, near the peak of a […]

Oil’s Plunge Could Help Send Its Price Back Up

If something is cheaper, people will likely buy more of it. That core principle of economics is proving to be especially true with oil after its recent plunge. Over the past six months, 53% of vehicle purchases in the U.S. were light trucks or sport-utility vehicles, which tend to consume more gas than cars, according […]

One thing we have learnt this week – energy outlook 2035

BP produces two important energy documents a year, the “Statistical Review of World Energy” and the “Energy outlook”.  The energy outlook has just been published looking forward to 2035.  This post will pick out some of the most salient points and make some comments on them. BP see energy demand rising inexorably.  They say that […]

Ireland’s energy crisis

  Energy is not one of Ireland’s strengths: we import almost 90 per cent of our power, we’ve made little progress in renewables, and we’re at the mercy of an unstable global market. Where will Ireland get its energy in years to come? Besides worries about climate change and security of supply, Ireland faces a […]

Nigeria: Will oil ever return to $120 per barrel?

Many events contributed to the increase in oil prices that characterised 2006 to 2009, and those events occurred in quick succession. The events include the PDVSA workers’ strike in Venezuela and the anticipation of war in Iran in 2006, which alone increased the price of oil to a little above $60 per barrel. The bad […]

Why crude prices must go up

It may be difficult to look beyond the current pricing environment for crude oil, but the depletion of low-cost reserves and the increasing inability to find major new discoveries ensures a future of expensive oil. While analyzing the short-term trajectory of oil prices is certainly important, it obscures the fact that over the long-term, oil […]

How short-term thinking hampers long-term economic growth

An alarming take on global economic growth was issued last month by Mc­Kinsey. In the past 50 years, according to a report by the management consultancy, the world has enjoyed a heady expansion, with the global economy expanding sixfold. But growth will slow dramatically, as the world’s population ages. “Even if productivity were to grow […]

The Degrowth Alternative

Both the name and the theory of degrowth aim explicitly to repoliticize environmentalism. Sustainable development and its more recent reincarnation “green growth” depoliticize genuine political antagonisms between alternative visions for the future. They render environmental problems technical, promising win-win solutions and the impossible goal of perpetuating economic growth without harming the environment. Ecologizing society, degrowthers […]

Conflicts in the food, energy, land and water nexus

There is growing concern over future food production and increas­ing competition for resources in the food, energy and water nexus are reflected in a new interest for investment in land and water. “I cannot farm myself out of this water problem,” says Mark Shannon, a farmer who in 2010 had to let his land in […]

What happens if we run out of oil?

It took hundreds of millions of years to create the world’s oil reserves. It took less than a century before oil became the commodity on which world power turned. And it was little more than a century before fears were raised that we would run out of oil. Fifty years further on, it’s less clear […]

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