Highly Motivating Facts About Resource Depletion

Coal production in Britain peaked in 1913. World War I began the very next year. This is also when the Reserve Currency status of the British Pound Sterling began to fade as the world began to prefer the US Dollar. This is also around the time that the Federal Reserve was created and the US […]

John Michael Greer: In a Handful of Dust

All things considered, it’s a good time to think about how much we can know about the future in advance. A hundred years ago last Saturday, as all my European readers know and a few of my American readers might have heard, a young Bosnian man named Gavrilo Prinzip lunged out of a crowd in […]

Collapse and Survival

Systemic collapse, the coming crash, overshoot, the die-off, the tribulation, the coming anarchy, resource wars — there are many names, and they do not all correspond to exactly the same thing, but there is a widespread belief that something immense is happening. This event has about ten elements, each with a somewhat causal relationship to […]

Transcending Collapse

Imagine, if you will, what it would be like to live in a society that had no word for ‘love’. How do you think the inability to express this crucial idea with a single, simple word would have on your relationships, on your life? What effect do you think it would have on your view of […]

The Next Global Meltdown Is Baked In: Connecting The Dots Between Oil, Debt, Interest Rates And Risk

The bottom line is the Fed can only keep the machine duct-taped together by suppressing the market’s pricing of risk. One of the Grand Narratives of our era is the substitution of debt for income: as earned income and disposable income have stagnated for 40 years, the gap between the rising cost of living and stagnant […]

Peak Oil: A Staggering Challenge to “Business As Usual”

A very clever animated documentary from Incubate Pictures, that lays out the challenges to “business as usual” that society faces over the next century. The decisions that we make within the next 50 years will seal the fate of the human race. This movie was an enormous undertaking, and the authors should be congratulated for […]

Talking Peak Oil with James Howard Kunstler

Talking Peak Oil with James Howard Kunstler

Peak Oil & Peak Everything Lecture at Cornell

Peak Oil & Peak Everything Lecture at Cornell

James Howard Kunstler: Peak Oil and Our Financial Decline

James Howard Kunstler: Peak Oil and Our Financial Decline

Michael Lynch: Peak Oil 2 The True Believers

One of the interesting facets about the peak oil debate is the nature of the many believers in peak oil.  The article that moved the debate into the public view appeared in Scientific American (1998) and included an old photo of M. King Hubbert at a blackboard.  Very scientific.  And the authors, Colin Campbell and […]

How A Country Dies

A country dies slowly. Those living during the decline of Rome were likely unaware that anything was happening. The decline took over a couple of hundred years. Anyone living during the decline only saw a small part of what was happening and likely never noticed it as anything other than ordinary. Countries don’t have genetically determined life spans. […]

Peak Oil: This One Is On Us # 2

Mason Inman recently posted an excellent 2012 interview he conducted with James Schlesinger, our nation’s first Secretary of Energy, who passed away shortly before that posting. This is the second part [first here] of my observations on what Mr. Schlesinger had to say about peak oil and related energy-supply considerations. [Quotes here are from that […]

The Next 20 Years Will Not Be Like the Last 20 Years

The Status Quo is not sustainable. Here are some resources on the many reasons why. Coming to the understanding that the Status Quo is not sustainable is often a crooked path of overcoming programming, propaganda, denial and fear. My colleagues at peakprosperity.com (where I am a contributing writer) have summarized why the Status Quo is not sustainable in […]

Heinberg: Bottom Up, Top Down

Those of us who have some grasp of the urgent dilemmas posed by climate change and peak oil face a terrible conundrum. The whole system of industrial civilization is moving toward collapse. How can we reverse course to avert an unprecedented series of crises that might entail massive human mortality and the more or less […]

Peak Oil: This One Is On Us # 1

Mason Inman recently posted an excellent 2012 interview he conducted with James Schlesinger, our nation’s first Secretary of Energy, who passed away shortly before that posting. [Quotes here are from that interview.] There are some lessons available to all of us. Mr. Schlesinger was a bit more direct than I and others have been in […]

Mike Ruppert’s Story Part 54 – Q and A

   A couple of emails came in from a colleague of Mike’s who’s versed in his work going back to the nineties.  They raise valid points which force me to articulate the thinking behind this account, a useful exercise in itself.   Email 1:  On Rosebud, I wonder if you go too far. Although I suppose at this point, […]

Systems Thinking and Complexity 101

This is a synopsis of a talk and mini-workshop I gave recently in Vancouver. It introduces a model for identifying and dealing with both the complicated and complex aspects of issues we face in our own lives, in our organizations and in the world, and presents an elementary method of thinking about and diagramming systems […]

Fourth Turning Accelerating

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. […]

I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are

This is my 3,000th column. I’ve learned a tremendous amount in writing about investing and the economy. Here are a few of the big lessons. I’ve learned that changing your mind is one of the most difficult things we do. It is far easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake. I’ve […]

Mike Ruppert’s Story Part 48 SHTF

February 17, 2007 From Mike to his psychiatrist:    1. I have not gone for the blood levels yet. I will go Monday after fasting from 9 PM Sunday. Thursday night I was so upset over the stolen $10,000 I woke up at 3 AM and chugged about a pint of OJ and then realized what I […]

Peak Oil Replaced by Oil Abundance

“Peak oil” has vanished from public discourse, replaced by news about the North American surge of unconventional petroleum liquids produced from oil sands, shales and tight formations. Unconventional oils, we read repeatedly, are a”game changer” that will render North America “energy independent,” will offset declining production elsewhere in the world, and will prevent oil prices […]

Morris A. Adelman Dies at 96; Saw Oil as Inexhaustible

Morris A. Adelman, an energy economist who marshaled free-market principles and hard data in arguing that the world’s oil supply was not running out, died May 8 at his home in Newton, Mass. He was 96. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught and researched for 65 years, announced the death on May 15. […]

Peak Oil: Facts To Keep In Mind

Good news sells, and doesn’t rock any boats, but policy makers and politicians comforted by rosy forecasts are unable to understand the risks and properly prepare the country for long-term energy sustainability…. A more prudent, conservative US oil forecast would look very different. It would consider that, although surprises are always possible, the most productive […]

Endless Layers Of Delusion

Obvious Delusions We are used to treating the ‘bought and paid for’ politicians and ideological front groups of the rich and powerful[1] [2] [3] [4] [5], or the Christian fundamentalist folks who believe in a cartoon history called Creationism[6] [7], as groups that are either serving or trapped in deep delusional denial. Then there are […]

Farewell Michael Ruppert, and Thank You

Michael C. Ruppert was a peak oil analyst, investigative journalist, and activist. Many readers may know Mike as author of Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, or as the subject of the 2009 documentary Collapse, based on his book A Presidential Energy Policy. After […]

Peak Oil: Peeking Behind A Curtain

In recent months, Gail Tverberg in particular, along with Steven Kopits and Ron Patterson, have examined both the financial and production details as they pertain to the various shale formations now serving as the fossil fuel industry’s current energy supply and production savior. They provide us all with invaluable information about the prospects for maintaining […]

Peak Oil: Is This Approach The Only Option?

The roster of Fellows at the Post Carbon Institute hardly strikes any reasonable person as a collection of bug-eyed extremists out to strike fear into the hearts of mere mortals everywhere. Disagree if one must with the conclusions they draw, but this think tank has shared with the public a variety of thoroughly-research, fact-based reports […]

Mike Ruppert’s Story Part 36: Bellevue 2

  This account is different from the previous post on Bellevue.  I remember some of the scenes in both but not when they took place.  I think there were two visits to Bellevue but it’s possible that my notes were simply written at two different times.   December 31 2006 10:30 PM Back from Bellevue, […]

Mike Ruppert’s Story Part 35 – Bonding

“When I was about ten and had just moved to a new school, we had rope-climbing in gym. I’d never climbed a rope and I sucked. I became a champion rope-climber after that. ‘Another time, also when I was ten, the kids were changing in the locker room at the pool, I was uncircumcised so I made […]

Mike Ruppert’s Story Part 32 – Therapy

Yesterday’s post prompted an unusual crop of expansive and informed comments, among them, that people would either love the post or hate it.  This was surprising because I had thought it more of a holding pattern, filling in details of Mike’s daily life and preoccupations but providing no revelations.  Perhaps that particular commenter thought that some […]

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