The crash of 2016?

You cannot understand the vulnerable state of the U.S. and global economies — and nervous stock markets — without coming to grips with the crash of “emerging-market” countries. Led by China, these are middle-income countries that, along with the poorest countries, account for 85 percent of the world’s population and 60 percent of the global […]

Peak Oil: Just A Distraction

Remember, peaking in production, by definition, means that you have plenty of oil left. It has nothing to do with running out.…[T]he only people who ever use the phrase ‘running out of oil’ are people who either don’t understand Peak Oil, or people trying to mislead an audience about Peak Oil. Because again, if you […]

Finding hope even through all of the pessimism

In such an era of social media, widespread news and efficient technology, it’s easy to find the world to be a violent place. It’s easy to find evidence of bad things happening every day to good people. It’s easy to hear that cancer and other diseases are killing more and more each day, and that […]

The Waning of the Modern Ages

La longue durée —the long run—was an expression made popular by the Annales School of French historians led by Fernand Braudel, who coined the phrase in 1958. The basic argument of this school is that the proper concern of historians should be the analysis of structures that lie at the base of contemporary events. Underneath short-term events […]

Lines of Separation

This is the fourteenth installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. Our narrator returns from his trip to a tier one county full of doubts about the Lakeland Republic’s prospects, and has those at once challenged and sharpened by a conversation at […]

An age of horrors — and hope

FOR A town whose first claim to fame was as a place where people went to die — it was known for years for its tuberculosis sanatoriums — the Swiss mountain town of Davos can be a surprisingly optimistic place. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which I’ve been privileged to attend for […]

When Trucks Stop Running, So Does Civilization. Energy and the Future of Transportation.

When Trucks Stop Running, So Does Civilization. Energy and the Future of Transportation. January 16, 2016 by Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Also see: When Trucks Stop Running: Table of Contents, Preface, References at www.energyskeptic.com Virtually everything in our homes, everything in our stores, got there on a truck. Prior to that, 90 percent of those items […]

Finding Emotional Resilience in These Times

How do you grapple with bigger, deeper issues like catastrophic climate change? Author Carolyn Baker and video producer Ivey Cone join Janaia in a wide-ranging conversation about keeping our hearts open while witnessing the crumbling of industrial civilization. We discuss tools for holding our center, supporting each other, gratitude, and witnessing the powers of the […]

Save Us from the Tyranny of ‘Settled’ Science

In classrooms across the country, high school students are taught the scientific method. It consists of constructing a doubtful hypothesis and designing a series of experiments to test the hypothesis with the observable facts. After a number of tests prove positive. The student can then take the facts and reach a conclusion. When a conclusion […]

Robert Rapier: My 2016 Energy Predictions

When I made my annual energy predictions a year ago, I noted that I foresaw a “lot of uncertainty in the energy markets” and indicated that “the direction on several fronts is unclear.” That certainly proved to be the case as numerous pundits – including me – missed on oil price predictions. Unfortunately, the market […]

Kunstler: Discovery

It looks like 2016 will be the year that humanfolk learn that the stuff they value was not worth as much as they thought it was. It will be a harrowing process because a great many humans are abandoning ownership of things that are rapidly losing value — e.g. stocks on the Shanghai exchange — […]

A Look to 2016

No doubt a lot of people are happy to see 2015 in the rear view mirror: refugees, their ‘hosts’ in Europe, bond investors, frackers and Brazilians, it is likely that 2016 will bring more of the same, challenges and idiocy … and a ray of light! — Energy deflation to take hold in 2016 Figure […]

Peak Oil And The Death Of Michael C. Ruppert

The brave investigative journalist/independent intelligence analyst, Michael C. Ruppert, did commit suicide, considering that he thought he had contributed as much as he could to the future of humanity. His final piece was a movie,”Collapse,” in which he outlined that we have reached peak oil, which he came to understand from the massive amount of […]

A blistering report that claimed fracking was safe is now being disputed by its own scientists

A blistering report that claimed fracking was safe is now being disputed by its own scientists Martin Shkreli Secures Bail With $45 Million E*Trade Account, Demands Respect From Wu-Tang Clan “The Jihadists Will Attack Europe”: Leaked Phone Call Shows Gaddafi Warned Tony Blair Of Terror Attacks It’s Official: Bitcoin Was The Top Performing Currency Of […]

Kunstler: Pretend to the Bitter End

Forecast 2016 There’s really one supreme element of this story that you must keep in view at all times: a society (i.e. an economy + a polity = a political economy) based on debt that will never be paid back is certain to crack up. Its institutions will stop functioning. Its business activities will seize […]

Collapse 2015 in Words & Pictures

Download the mp3 on Diner Soundcloud Full Transcript for non-native speakers of English Collapse in 2015 is now in the grave, a thing of the past, an artifact of history.  Not to be forgotten though, because of course those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Of course, those who do […]

A powerful cyclone has pushed the North Pole 50 degrees above normal to melting point

A powerful cyclone has pushed the North Pole 50 degrees above normal to melting point And this won’t help:  Massive Los Angeles county gas leak is spewing 110,000 pounds of methane an hour Isis Operative Confesses to Receiving Funding from US (January 2015) Police and soldiers allegedly had an orgy during the Brussels terror lockdown America’s […]

10 Big Stories News Media Ignored in 2015

When Sonoma State University professor Carl Jensen started looking into the new media’s practice of self-censorship in 1976, the Internet was only a dream and most computers were still big mainframes with whirling tape reels and vacuum tubes. He put out an annual list of the 10 biggest stories that the mainstream media ignored, arguing […]

Five energy surprises for 2016: The possible and the improbable

Many energy analysts like to make predictions at the end of the year for the coming year. Instead, I’ll point to five possible surprises in energy–surprises because few people expect them to happen. I am not predicting that any of the following will happen, only that there is an outside chance that one or more […]

How Islam is Taking Over The World

How Islam is Taking Over The World: 50% of world’s population by 2099 Muslim population: rising 10 times faster than rest of society Muslim Europe: the demographics…… PopModal Videos is Americas Political and Pop …

The Top 10 Energy Stories Of 2015

Introduction As I have done for several years now, I like to close out the year by highlighting the top stories in the energy sector. The 2015 list was challenging, because so many of the stories are interrelated. Commodity prices continued to plummet, but oil, natural gas, and coal prices fell for somewhat different reasons. […]

Kunstler: Christmas Present

Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains […]

The Key to Human History: Ultrasociality?

  Peter Turchin’s book deserves to be devoured in a few hours, and that’s what I did. But, I emerged out of it with a sensation of disappointment (*). Possibly it was unavoidable: all the books that attempt to explain everything are destined to fall short in one way or another. But, surely, this is […]

When you’re broke and aimless, the apocalypse can’t come soon enough

The first season of AMC’s Fear The Walking Dead was rarely as strong as its parent show, but it did feature one great scene early on, where a savvy teen named Tobias raided his high school’s pantry, anticipating that the zombie outbreak was about to blow up into a pandemic. In every post-apocalyptic novel, comic, […]

Live Free or Die

Freedom in modern society stands as the ultimate value.  It is the value to which almost all other ones aim, and around which they are organized.  This is most clear in our political and economic ideals, but also visible throughout our moral code or commonly assumed hierarchy of needs.  Equality, for instance, stands as one […]

The Peak Oil Preacher

With an oil price that stands at about USD 50 per barrel, it may be easy to dismiss Peak Oil as a myth. But author and Peak Oil expert Johan Landgren argues that we have to prepare now for an era in which cheap oil will be a part of history. If not, the transition […]

Why we still don’t understand civilization collapse

  Eric Cline  wrote an excellent book on the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean region but, unfortunately, it doesn’t arrive to a definite conclusion about the reasons of the collapse. Cline suggests that “several stressors” worked together to ensure the demise of this civilization. But this is very disappointing, to say the […]

Kunstler: Shining a Light

The just-released movie Spotlight is about a Boston Globe investigative reporting team circa 2001-02 that uncovered and documented a vast network of child sex abuse by priests in the Catholic Church that had been on-going for decades. More to the point, Spotlight revealed the institutional rot at the very top of the Boston Catholic Church […]

Mitchell Rabin & Carolyn Discuss The Global Crisis

This evening’s show looks closely at society’s collapsing institutions and infra-structure, against a backdrop of eco-systemic collapse, extreme weather, massive pollution and Climate Change and how we humans navigate and are to emotionally deal with, adapt to this severe situation of life as we know it changing dramatically before our very eyes. Can we adapt […]

Over 500 institutions pledge to end fossil fuel investment

More than 500 institutions worldwide, with assets totalling more than €3 trillion, have made some form of commitment to divest from fossil fuels, according to campaign groups 350.org and Divest-Invest. They said the latest commitments, some of which are “partial”, represent another coup for the divestment campaign, “showing that investors are reading the writing on […]

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