Is Sustainable Development an Oxymoron?

“Better is the enemy of more.”   We love Eleanor Roosevelt. And Eleanor Roosevelt loved the United Nations. While it does not necessarily follow that we too love the United Nations, we have always felt that the central idea of a United Nations was a good one, in fact it is really the only one […]

T Boone Pickens sees $100 oil

Legendary business magnate and oil tycoon T Boone Pickens believes oil will return to $100 in 12 to 18 months due to a recovery in demand for the commodity. Pickens was speaking to the Fox Business Network Thursday, just after oil dropped to a 5 ½ year low of $48.98. The BP Capital Management’s Chairman […]

Peak Oil and the socio-economic impact of depleting fossil fuel resources

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist who speaks and writes frequently on peak oil, energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to The Christian Science Monitor and has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen. Kurt’s writings have been featured on Resilience, The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Investing.com, Peak Oil […]

US Gasoline Demand Is Surging

As oil prices have plunged, US gas demand has soared, something that seemed unlikely just a few years ago. According to Morgan Downey, CEO of Money.net, “A few years ago people were saying that US oil demand had peaked and would never recover — some called it ‘peak demand.’” In an email to Business Insider, Downey said […]

The Limits Of A Finite World In 2015-16

The price of oil is down. How should we expect the economy to perform in 2015 and 2016? Newspapers in the United States seem to emphasize the positive aspects of the drop in prices. I have written Ten Reasons Why High Oil Prices are a Problem. If our only problem were high oil prices, then low […]

How $50 Oil Changes Almost Everything

The plummeting price of oil means no more trout ice cream. Coromoto, a parlor in Merida, Venezuela, famous for its 900 flavors, closed during its busiest season in November because of a milk shortage caused by the country’s 64 percent inflation rate, the world’s fastest. That’s the plight of an oil-producing nation. At the same […]

Cheap oil will fuel global economy

The slump in oil prices is set to boost the global economy, with crude-importing countries expected to substantially benefit, says the World Bank. A 10 per cent drop in oil prices would increase gross domestic product in oil-importing countries by 0.1 percentage points to 0.5 percentage points, World Bank research said. Oil has slipped more […]

The Day When Change Will Come

A man of the Co Tu nation prepares to fish in a river that likely supported humans long before historical records began. But this might be one of the last times. Small-scale, high-pollution gold mining is spreading across the lands of the Co Tu, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, as well as larger corporate […]

Cheap oil is killing my job

Marcus Benson moved 1,500 miles from his home in Philadelphia to North Dakota for the shale boom. He made the lengthy drive — with no job and nowhere to live — in April 2012 after hearing on the news that the state had the lowest unemployment rate in the country. “I felt like it was […]

How The Price Of Oil Could Fall To Just $20 A Barrel

Oil prices are plunging even lower today. WTI crude is down below $50 per barrel for the first time since 2009. That’s already down by more than half since the beginning of 2014, a development almost no one saw coming. It begs the question: What is the lowest possible low for oil right now? One […]

Welcome To Peak Car

It’s looking increasingly likely that we’ve reached peak car, the point at which overall automobile usage tops out. The U.S. and Europe appear to be at that point now; the rest of the world may follow within a decade. You’d think that would spell trouble for the privately owned car—a future of waning use and […]

Top Five Factors Affecting Oil Prices In 2015

As we ring in the New Year, let’s take stock of where we are at with the oil markets. 2014 proved to be a momentous one for the oil markets, having seen prices cut in half in just six months. The big question is what oil prices will do in 2015. Oil prices are unsustainably […]

A Stick in the Stocking: Santa’s Supply Shock

It’s déjà vu all over again: another oil “supply shock.” Seems like we’ve had one every few weeks for the past few months. Santa stuck another one in the Christmas stocking, and by New Year’s Eve crude oil prices fell to Great Recession levels. Frankly, though, an oil supply shock is hardly . . . […]

Toyota’s Jim Lentz Predicts Peak Oil by 2020

Toyota’s Jim Lentz Predicts Peak Oil by 2020 Commonwealth Club – The Commonwealth Club of California Though the auto industry seemed on the brink of collapse, the recent Cash for Clunkers program arguably helped to jump-start the car economy and get wheels moving again. But what does this really mean for cars and drivers today?During […]

Sustainable Ways to Feed the World are Subverted by Corporations

Humans’ relationship to food is one of the most fundamentally shaping aspects of our societies. The sole fact that the majority of the world’s population now lives in urban centers is the direct result of a process that began approximately 10,000 years ago. This process was the switch from nomadic hunting-gathering societies to urban sedentary […]

The plunge in oil will hurt these people most

From oil workers to big-money men Getty Images Slide 1 ofOil prices plunged around 50% from their June peak by the end of 2014, the fastest collapse since the dark days of 2008. This time around, supply is seen as the biggest culprit as the world deals with a glut of oil. Overall, the drop […]

The Oil Plunge: The Facts & Why We Should Care

According to The Wall Street Journal four of the five worst stocks in 2014 were oil/energy related and the fifth was Avon.  Gas prices were cheaper and women were opting for more expensive cosmetics? I’m guessing that’s probably not the case. TRANSOCEAN LTD. – DOWN 62% DENBURY RESOURCES INC. – DOWN 50% NOBLE CORP. – […]

Peak Oil From The Demand Side: A Prophetic New Model

The most attention-grabbing attempts to predict oil futures have come from geologists and environmental activists, who tend to look solely at production. An overlooked doctoral thesis by Christophe McGlade, Uncertainties in the outlook for oil and gas, in contrast, focuses on how both supply and demand might be constrained in the coming decades. Peak oil […]

Occam’s Oil

As my colleague Joe Calhoun continually reminds us, everything that happens has happened before. The ongoing “struggle” to define what is driving crude oil prices lower is perhaps another instance of a past “cycle” being reborn. With oil prices now heading much closer to the $40’s than the $60’s, consistent commentary is increasingly swept aside. […]

Saudi Arabia’s Half-Off Sale On Crude Oil

Saudi Arabia’s Half-Off Sale on Crude Oil. Global Demand Strong Despite Weakness in OECD. Supply Issues Remain in the Hands of Saudi Aramco. Why would anyone sell seven widgets for $50 a widget (total revenue: $350) when they could sell six of the widgets for $100 per widget (total revenue: $600) and just keep the […]

Oil at $14 a barrel? Here’s how it could happen

No one really saw 2014’s dramatic plunge in oil price coming, so it’s probably fair to say that any predictions about where it’s going from here fall somewhere between educated guesses and picking a number out of a hat. In that light, it’s less than shocking to see one analyst making a case—albeit in a […]

Think you know how oil prices work?

Since Harold Hotelling developed his classic model of exhaustible resource extraction in 1931, economists have modeled the optimal extraction of a fixed stock of an exhaustible resource under the assumption that resource owners can reallocate extraction across different periods without constraint. In “Hotelling Under Pressure” (NBER Working Paper No. 20280), Soren T. Anderson, Ryan Kellogg […]

Why Oil Will Probably Stay Cheap in 2015

Making predictions about the price of oil is sort of foolish. Remember peak oil? Or all the people, myself included, who thought it was impossible for the U.S. to drill its way to lower prices? But since it’s the end of the year, which is nothing else if not a time to make assertions that […]

Saudi Arabia’s 2015 Budget Assumes Oil Prices At $80

 The global prices for crude oil have been falling since their peak in July this year. The commodity is currently trading at just over $54. A new report suggests that Saudi Arabia, a major producer, may be expecting the commodity price to rebound to $80 in 2015. Revenues from oil sales form a major portion […]

Where Our Power Comes From

Flip the switch and the light comes on. Plug in your smart phone to charge. Put your slice of bread in the toaster and a minute later it pops up nicely browned. Where does the electricity come from that makes our lives so easy? Let’s take a look. Across New England there are more than […]

Is U.S. in an oil price nirvana?

  Dallas economist Bud Weinstein prays every night for $60 oil — give or take five bucks a barrel. That’s the sweet spot, he says, where the U.S. economy gets a boost without putting the brakes on oil-producing states such as Texas. Lately, West Texas Intermediate crude has been fluctuating at the lower end of […]

Saudi Arabia Ready For $20, $30, $40 Oil

Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) fell 2 and 3.3 percent respectively to start the week and Saudi Arabia is prepared to go much lower in a bid to trim the fat. Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said as much in an interview with the Middle East Economic Survey on Monday. Naimi defended the Saudi […]

Saudi Arabia’s Oil Pricing Power Makes It The Country To Watch In 2015

2014 was the year of the great oil crash. The price of a barrel of crude, which was higher than $90 in January, fell under $55 in December, a five-year low. While the crashing oil prices severely hurt many oil-producing nations, consumers in the U.S. benefited from gas prices that had not been this low […]

Oil and Gas Prices Are Manipulated Once Again

OPEC will not cut output even at $20 a barrel … OPEC will not cut oil production even if the price drops to $20 a barrel and it is unfair to expect the cartel to reduce output if non-members do not, Saudi Arabia said. “Whether it goes down to $20 a barrel, $40, $50, $60, […]

China needing more energy

Efforts by the Chinese government to encourage sustainable growth have led to an increase in oil demand, government data released Wednesday show. Analysis of government data from Platts found Chinese apparent oil demand, a reflection of how much oil goes into domestic refineries combined with net oil product imports, increased in November by 3.5 percent […]

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