We’ve Been Incorrectly Predicting Peak Oil For Over a Century

Expand When the residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma buried a car in 1957 as part of an enormous time capsule, they included containers of gasoline. The good people of Tulsa reasoned that the folks of 2007 might not have any gas left to fill up the Plymouth Belvedere that they were interring for a fifty year […]

Dark Age America: The Sharp Edge of the Shell

One of the interesting features of blogging about the twilight of science and technology these days is that there’s rarely any need to wait long for a cogent example. One that came my way not long ago via a reader of this blog—tip of the archdruidical hat to Eric S.—shows that not even a science […]

Nigeria: Before the oil runs dry

Following the steady decline in oil prices, we deem it fit to revise this report as the arguments herein still remain germane to the need for Nigeria to urgently address its dependence on oil revenues. This report was originally released in December 2010, following the approval for an increase in Nigeria’s minimum wage and its […]

The worst possible world?

That the world is an evil place seems self-evident to many people.  They demonstrate it by simply pointing to the latest headlines of war, crime, disaster, racism, and worsening test scores. Pundits warn us ominously that America is running higeldy pigeldy down the road to Hell. But is this negative perception, fueled by endless news […]

Supply or Demand? Richard Heinberg and James Hamilton

Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at The Post Carbon Institute, tells Erin how this particular boom bust cycle – with a tremendous surge in US domestic oil pro. Our lead story: This week Stanford said that it would divest all of its investments in coal-mining companies, becoming the wealthiest US university to pledge. Recorded February 25th, […]

OPEC shows U.S. oil producers who’s boss

To paraphrase Mark Twain: Rumors of OPEC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Breathless coverage of the rise in U.S. oil production in the last few years has led some to declare that OPEC’s power in the oil market is now becoming irrelevant as America supposedly moves toward energy independence. This coverage, however, has obscured the […]

Dark Age America: The Fragmentation of Technology

It was probably inevitable that last week’s discussion of the way that contemporary science is offering itself up as a sacrifice on the altar of corporate greed and institutional arrogance would field me a flurry of responses that insisted that I must hate science. This is all the more ironic in that the shoddy logic […]

Peak Oil: What Does Any Of This Mean?

Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize (for his book The Quest) has earned him a fair amount of street cred, judging by how often his opinions are solicited on the state of fossil fuel supply and production. I haven’t read the book, but I’d be lying if I said that anyone worthy of a Pulitzer Prize doesn’t […]

Is OPEC A Toothless Tiger?

OPEC MET THIS WEEK and decided not to cut the oil production quotas of its members. Petroleum prices took a hit. But don’t be deceived. OPEC’s impact on prices is grossly exaggerated. Speculators believed OPEC would magically pull a rabbit out of the hat. But OPEC doesn’t even have a hat, much less a rabbit. […]

Nuclear war: A forgotten threat to human sustainability

The possibility of a new Cold War between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies brings with it the spectre of nuclear war, an all-but-forgotten threat since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Even as the number of nuclear weapons has declined through mutually agreed reductions from a worldwide total of […]

John Michael Greer: Facts, Values, and Dark Beer

Over the last eight and a half years, since I first began writing essays on The Archdruid Report, I’ve fielded a great many questions about what motivates this blog’s project. Some of those questions have been abusive, and some of them have been clueless; some of them have been thoughtful enough to deserve an answer, […]

Peak Oil: So How Do We Prepare?

  The economic effects of peak oil are as obvious as they are frightening. The most immediate effect is to increase oil prices, and this has its own effect of slowing the economy down. There was a period in which Saudi Arabia could modulate the world’s rate of oil production by turning up the flow, […]

The peak oil theater

I am a little late for the talk at the peak oil conference. Fortunately, it seems that I didn’t lose much: the speaker must have started just a few minutes before I arrived and I only missed the introduction by the chairman. So, I relax in my seat as the speaker goes on with his […]

The Olduvai cliff: are the lights going out already?

  Image from Li and Li, “international journal of remote sensing.” h/t Colonel Cassad“. The image shows the nighttime light pattern in Syria three years ago (a) and today (b). Those among us who are diehard catastrophists surely remember the “Olduvai Scenario” proposed by Richard Duncan in 1989. The theory is a version of the […]

Watching the Watchdogs: 10 Years of the IEA World Energy Outlook

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the energy watchdog of the industrial world. The developed nations of the world were caught off guard by the oil crisis of 1973. They then realized energy resources are so fundamental to all of civilization, and recognized how vulnerable we are to supply disruptions. Forty years ago in 1974, […]

Dark Age America: The Hoard of the Nibelungs

Of all the differences that separate the feudal economy sketched out in last week’s post from the market economy most of us inhabit today, the one that tends to throw people for a loop most effectively is the near-total absence of money in everyday medieval life. Money is so central to current notions of economics […]

Peak Oil: A New Paradigm Suggested Pt 2

  The economic paradigm we are currently engaged in must change in order to end our oil obsessed economy simply because no alternative energy resource will yield equal energy outputs. A realistic shared vision of what global prosperity might look like in an age of depleting resources is required to align economic and social aspirations, and […]

US Government Oil Forecasts “Wildly Optimistic”

We would do well to pause, and ponder both the data and implications presented in the Post Carbon Institute’s latest report, released a few days before Halloween, “Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check On U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom”. The PCI’s new report exposes current oil industry & Energy […]

If Everything Is Just Fine, Why Are So Many Really Smart People Forecasting Economic Disaster?

The parallels between the false prosperity of 2007 and the false prosperity of 2014 are rather striking.  If we go back and look at the numbers in the fall of 2007, we find that the Dow set an all-time high in October, margin debt on Wall Street had spiked to record levels, the unemployment rate […]

The Plot to Control and Reduce the Population

In the continuing saga of Dr.Richard Day’s 1969 explicit depiction of how the world’s population would be controlled and reduced, bear in mind that these are not the ramblings of a singular lunatic but the conspiracy imposed upon us by the rich and famous in an effort to have more of the Earth’s resources at their disposal. As […]

Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy

One of the factors that makes it difficult to think through the economic consequences of the end of the industrial age is that we’ve all grown up in a world where every form of economic activity has been channeled through certain familiar forms for so long that very few people remember that things could be […]

The Trouble With Mass Delusions

Excerpted from Paul Singer’s Elliott Management letter to investors, MASS DELUSIONS The trouble with mass delusions is that they are recognized as such only when they are over – when the dazzling absurdity of certain widely held beliefs is unmasked by subsequent events. Interestingly, many delusions relate to war. At the beginning of World War […]

Peak Oil – Adapting for Big Changes Ahead

Peak Moment 155: With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great […]

Peak Oil: A New Paradigm Suggested

‘[P]eak oil’ is a global issue resulting from dependency on finite oil resources and associated vulnerability to changes in supply. The global economy must engage in changes and these changes must start with our misperceptions of prosperity as synonymous with capital. If we can transition to a paradigm in which equitable distribution of resources, social […]

Kunstler: Signs and Wonders

“Holy smokes,” Janet Yellen must have barked last week when Japan stepped up to plug the liquidity hole left by the US Federal Reserve’s final taper trot to the zero finish line of Quantitative Easing 3. The gallant samurai Haruhiko Kuroda of Japan’s central bank announced that his grateful nation had accepted the gift of […]

About that Shale Oil ‘Miracle’…

Our work here at Peak Prosperity largely centers on trying to use facts and data to shift people’s actions towards the more positive and sustainable things that we not only can do, but should do. There’s nothing preventing us from behaving in ways that increase the Earth’s abundance rather than deplete it, but generally speaking […]

Peak Oil Derp

Paul Krugman (remember him?) has been taking about what he called  inflation “derp,” meaning an opinion held in contravention of all evidence, and posts this handy chart: As I recall, runaway inflation has been a standard prediction of much of the Peak Oil blogosphere over the past several years as well. This was also combined […]

Why Resilience?

While it is clear that the pace and pattern of global economic growth is unsustainable, we are slow in responding to this challenge. Sustainability advocates offer visions of a utopian future in which human needs are fulfilled and resource consumption is balanced with planetary capacity. But, in a turbulent world, the future seems increasingly unpredictable. […]

Dark Age America: Involuntary Simplicity

The political transformations that have occupied the last four posts in this sequence can also be traced in detail in the economic sphere. A strong case could be made, in fact, that the economic dimension is the more important of the two, and the political struggles that pit the elites of a failing civilization against […]

Peak Oil: Same Nonsense, Different Day Pt 2

This is a follow-up to my most recent post, in which I offered a few observations on commentary attempting to debunk the concept of peak oil courtesy of this recent article by John Kemp. [Quotes here are from the Kemp article unless noted otherwise.]  Economist James Hamilton, a professor at the University of California, recently […]

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