“150 Strong” with Dmitry Orlov

Dmitry Orlov, the author of Reinventing Collapse and many other books, has become a publisher lately and, in his capacity as publisher and publicist, Dmitry and I will be chatting about the new book he just brought out, 150 Strong; A Pathway to a Different Future by Rob O’Grady. 150 Strong is a valuable handbook […]

Peak Oil Research Outline

Image Courtesy: link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory author: en.wikipedia.org description: Hubbert peak theory I. Categorized Documents Outline 1. PEAK OIL (53) 2. OIL PRODUCTION (45) 3. OIL PRICES (31) 4. CRUDE OIL (27) 5. CONVENTIONAL OIL (22) 6. OIL INDUSTRY (20) 7. WORLD OIL (19) 8. GLOBAL OIL (19) 9. OIL RESERVES (17) 10. OIL FIELDS (17) 11. […]

Creating an Island of Sanity in a Sea of Global Chaos

From Deb Ozarko’s website: I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: our world is in a massive state of collapse. As a result, we’re living in very uncertain times. One would have to have their head firmly planted in the sand to not understand how dire things are on all levels: social, cultural, ecological […]

Sustainability & Resilience of Our Food System

Over the past eight years Asher Miller has served as Executive Director of Post Carbon Institute (PCI), a nonprofit think tank that supports the transition to a more resilient, equitable and sustainable world by providing individuals and communities with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated ecological, economic, energy, and equity crises […]

The Myth of Self Reliance

A mass emailing went out a while back from a prominent permaculturist looking for “projects where people are fully self sufficient in providing for their own food, clothing, shelter, energy and community needs. . .” There it was, the myth of “fully self sufficient,” coming from one of the best-known permaculturists in the world. In […]

Collapse Fatigue

When we initially awaken and realize life is not what we were taught, inner alarms scream for our attention. Even though we can sense a danger we didn’t previously perceive, we cannot judge how close it is. There is no scale to measure proximity, only the palpable fear of a real and present danger. Naturally, […]

Robert Rapier: Midyear Prediction Check

In January of this year, as I do every year, I made several energy predictions for the upcoming year. (See My 2016 Energy Predictions). Now that half the year is in the books, I thought it might be a good idea to check in and see how these predictions are tracking. As a reminder, I […]

Why are dystopic visions of the future so popular?

People have been attracted to apocalyptic scenarios throughout history during periods of unsettling change. Marshall McLuhan said that in the future, we will wear our nervous systems on the outside of our bodies. Drugs and overstimulated nervous systems are creating paranoia, but there is some greater and justified collective anxiety that is fueling this phenomenon. […]

Abandoning a fossil fuel powered civilization means abandoning civilization?

  In the 1950s, the Italian anthropologist Fosco Maraini (1912-2004) had a chance to witness the tremendous cultural shock that the Japanese society experienced the defeat of the 2nd world war. He described his experience in the book “Meeting with Japan”, published in 1960. We may expect to go through something similar worldwide as we […]

Some Of The World’s Biggest Problems

What are the biggest social and economic problems the world faces today? And how close are we to ending them? Those are the questions that the U.N. Economic and Social Council aims to answer in its first report on the Sustainable Development Goals, released this past week. The SDGs, as they’re known, are 17 global […]

We’re Apocalypse Pop Culture Junkies

The bearded guy holding a sign that says “The end is nigh” might not be wrong — at least, from Hollywood’s perspective. For decades — actually, centuries — people have been fascinated with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios. But in more recent years, especially since 9/11, it seems our entertainment industry has majored in catastrophe. “Mad […]

The Peak Oil Paradox – Revisited

Back in the mid-noughties the peak oil meme gained significant traction in part due to The Oil Drum blog where I played a prominent role. Sharply rising oil price, OPEC spare capacity falling below 2 Mbpd and the decline of the North Sea were definite signs of scarcity and many believed that peak oil was […]

The limits to society’s attention span: peak oil ten years after the ASPO-6 meeting in Pisa

  The concept of peak oil has gone through a peak, too, about ten years ago, approximately coincident with the sixth meeting of the association for the study of peak oil (ASPO) in Pisa, Italy. Ten years later, peak oil has nearly completely disappeared from the attention of the media and of the public.   […]

what it is ain’t exactly clear

Don’t know if I’m going up or down  -Jimi Hendrix Golden years Shu bop , shu bop – David Bowie Greetings       The big story in American politics seems to be that both parties have lost touch with middle america.    And middle america isn’t happy.   Now they are looking for someone to […]

Some reflections on the Twilight of the Oil Age (Part II)

by Louis Arnoux (Part I here) Part 2 – Enquiring into the appropriateness of the question Let’s acknowledge it, the situation we are in, as depicted summarily in Part 1, is complex. As many commentators like to state, there is still plenty of oil, coal, and gas left “in the ground”. Since 2014, debates have […]

Peak Oil; Climate Change; & System Justification

Research has powerfully illustrated that a lack of knowledge in domains such as energy and the environment can lead to bad decisions and erroneous beliefs that hinder a society’s ability to create change in domains that require it KNOWLEDGE & UNDERSTANDING Rather self-evident, isn’t it? Certainly that observation is not limited to energy and environment, […]

Heinberg: What We as a People Can Do

Ed. note: This is Chapter 10 of Richard Heinberg’s and David Fridley’s new book, Our Renewable Future, now available from Island Press. Post Carbon Institute’s companion website, ourrenewablefuture.org has also just been launched and contains additional content not in the book. Sound national and international climate policies are crucial: without them, it will be impossible […]

The Peak Oil Paradox

Summary In this post, I want to take a look at two different data sets to explore where peak oil stands today. Is it dead and buried forever, or is it lurking in the shadows, waiting to derail the global economy again? Global conventional oil production will peak one day, with unpredictable consequences for the […]

Peak Oil: Half The Story

It’s just not that difficult to understand. But if your interests depend on a narrative contradicted by facts and reality, then telling only part of the story to unsuspecting others is the way to go…. HALF-STORIES TELL HALF THE STORY Last week, yet another in the endless stream of manicured half-stories about the vast amounts […]

The Next Steps Pt 5

It has been a main theme of mine—given the impact peak oil will eventually have on all of us—that small changes here and there, every now and then, by a few of us when we can spare the time, are not the optimal strategies for us to pursue. Conventional crude oil has been in many […]

Self-Awareness And The Apocalypse

Many human supremacists love to talk about the “mirror test” of self-awareness, in which you put a mirror in front of some nonhuman to see if the nonhuman recognizes itself, in which case it is declared to be self-aware (though not as self-aware as we, of course!). Very few nonhumans pass this test, which is […]

The Thin Veneer Of Civilization That We All Take For Granted Is Evaporating

Have you noticed that the world seems to be going a little bit more crazy with each passing month?  Here we are halfway through 2016, and the rot and decay that are eating at the foundations of civilized society seem to be rapidly gaining momentum.  Every single day, all of us take certain things for […]

Population – What Explosion?

Many doomsday predictions are cited to express the urgency of the ‘problem’ of population growth. It is commonly held that reducing the population levels provides a partial solution to poverty, while some environmentalists consider the population problem as one of the most pressing ecological problems. The over-population argument is simple. Global population is 7 billion […]

Kunstler: Out Out, Damned Email!

The mighty Shakespeare in his direst night sweats could not have conjured up the Clinton family in all their sharp angles and dark corners, but we can try to reconstruct the scene last week on Loretta Lynch’s plane out on the Phoenix airport tarmac. Former president Bill steps aboard: Loretta:   What the fuck are you […]

The Scoop On Poop

The Dr. Pooper Papers, Issue #4: If you know of the name Dan Chiras, then you’ve probably heard it in reference to the multitude of books he’s written on alternative energy sources, alternative building methods, and more. But as important as his previous works have been, his latest book, on an alternative food source, is […]

50% of the population will not survive the next great ‘natural selection’ collapse event

(NaturalNews) Humankind has overreached to the point of suicide. Many of the systems that currently perpetuate modern life are entirely unsustainable and doomed to inevitable collapse. These systems include global debt and fraudulent finance, the mass poisoning of the food supply with agricultural chemicals, the destruction of ecosystems, deforestation, soils destruction, the usurpation of individual […]

Peak History

Podcast: Play in new window | Download We live in a country whose citizens — make that residents — are increasingly averse to complicated thought, indifferent to veracity, and reductionist in their thinking (every thing and every thought and every person is and must be either one kind of thing, or another kind of thing, […]

The Crisis Of Civilization

Back in December I posted a trailer for The Crisis of Civilization. Based on the work of security analyst and political scientist Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, this new documentary explores the interconnections between climate change, peak oil, terrorism and our ongoing financial crisis. Mat has also written about Ahmed’s work on the connections between peak […]

Tales We Tell Our Children

“It is difficult to imagine how anyone who encounters these stories as a youth could grow up to have anything other than profound respect for the latent power of the natural world.” On the comments page for a popular environmental radio show a listener asked for suggestions for books or stories on nature themes to […]

Will the ‘Brexit’ mark the end of the age of globalization?

For decades, financial and political leaders have preached the inevitability of globalization, promising nations that by sacrificing some of their sovereignty and dropping national barriers they could reap far greater rewards through economic integration and cooperation. And that turned out to be largely true. But Britain’s surprise vote to leave the European Union signals a […]

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