Are You Crazy To Continue Believing In Collapse?

It’s nerve-wracking to live in the historical moment of an epic turning point, especially when the great groaning garbage barge of late industrial civilization doesn’t turn quickly where you know it must, and you are left feeling naked and ashamed with your dark worldview, your careful preparations for a difficult future, and your scornful or […]

A Century of Challenges Peak Oil & Economic Crisis

Nicole M. Foss is co-editor of The Automatic Earth, where she writes under the name Stoneleigh. Nicole Foss – How I Prepared My Home for Peak Oil and Economic Uncertainty videos..

The Energy Crisis

Like many others who preceded us, our “civilisation” faces an Energy Crisis of megawattic proportions, which threatens to bring an end to our brief joyride. But our dirty little secret is seldom mentioned in the news, let alone connected to economic instability or to environmental effects on our planet. It falls to Robert Foster to […]

The energy transition tipping point is here

The economic foundations supporting fossil fuels investments are collapsing quickly, as the business case for renewables such as solar and wind finds a new center of balance. I have waited a long time—decades, really—for a tipping point in the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables beyond which there can be no turning back. Fresh […]

Keeping local communities alive

As energy becomes harder and more expensive to produce, societies will increasingly become unable to afford its usage. The cheap energy upon which modern societies were built will become a thing if the past and only the highest return, and most essential, uses will be able to consume the increasingly expensive energy. In addition, as […]

German economy a process of brutal exploitation

Around the world, dissatisfaction is growing with the Anglo-American economic model, which presents itself as a system of free markets and free trade. There is also growing dissatisfaction with the extreme disparities of individual income this model has created. Not surprisingly, many observers have seen an attractive alternative in the German social market economy, featuring […]

Apocalypses Everywhere

Is There Any Hope in an Era Filled with Gloom and Doom?  Wherever we Americans look, the threat of apocalypse stares back at us. Two clouds of genuine doom still darken our world: nuclear extermination and environmental extinction. If they got the urgent action they deserve, they would be at the top of our political priority list. But […]

Peak oil and the ignorance of crowds

As our civilization proceeds down the slope of the post-peak-oil curve, global trade will become more and more expensive, so our economies will naturally localize. The energy-efficiency benefits of localized economies are obvious to us, but there are also social and even psycho-social benefits that aren’t often contemplated. I had the good fortune to work […]

In the face of collapse, neither polyanna nor doomer

Carolyn Baker writes with passion, insight and courage about a topic that most people turn away from – the emotional, psychological and spiritual aspect of what she and many others call “collapse.” Collapse is the convergence in our times of economic unraveling, resource depletion and human created climate instability that could bring the destruction of […]

Global Citizenship Key to World Peace

Nobel Laureate Betty Williams started her speech to a peace forum at the U.N. headquarters Friday with perhaps the last thing the audience would expect her to say. From left: H.E. Mr. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations; Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative; and Ms. […]

Poverty Rises Amidst Gold

Natural reserves such as gold, copper, nickel, gas and timber are being extracted in the western Pacific island states of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands to feed the soaring economies of East and South East Asia. But despite these Pacific nations recording economic growth rates of 6-11 percent over the past seven years, opportunities […]

Empire: Four Horsemen

The modern day Four Horsemen continue to ride roughshod over the people who can least afford it. Crises are converging when governments, religion and mainstream economists have stalled. 23 international thinkers come together and break their silence about how the world really works and why there is still hope in re-establishing a moral and just […]

EROEI: A Useful Measure or a Distraction?

EROEI = Usable Acquired Energy / Energy Expended It seems so simple. If the amount of energy produced relative to the amount of energy utilized in producing that energy tends to decline, at some point as the ratio approaches 1.0 (or perhaps even becomes a fraction less than 1.0) there is little if any return […]

Math Models Predicted Global Uprisings

Just over a year ago, complex systems theorists at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned that if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe. Sure enough, we’re seeing them now. The paper’s author, Yaneer Bar-Yam, charted the rise in the FAO food price […]

Navy SEALs On Power Grid Attack: ‘A Carbon Copy’ of How We Would Do It

The threat of a breakdown of our national power infrastructure has been a growing concern for the last decade. With the invention of “Super EMP” electro-magnetic pulse weapons, the possibility of Carrington-class solar flares, and the potential for cyber attackers to remotely compromise our interconnected computer systems, there may come a time in our country’s future when our entire way […]

The Future Looks Dull From Here

I remember talking to a historian shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. I envy your generation, she said. The grip of history is tightening around you, even if you don’t know it yet. She was right. In short succession, the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan, then Iraq. It began to torture captives from those […]

Orlov: The Good Life: Mobility, Anonymity, Freedom

The recent advanced in networked mobile computing has made it rather unnecessary for a large class of people—ones who use computers for work—to maintain a fixed abode: it is now possible to do all the same things, via the Internet, from any place in the world that has a wifi signal. If your work involves […]

The Growing Value of Sandy Countries

Many centuries ago wealth mostly flowed from land, especially good agricultural land.  For Malthusian reasons the Earth’s population increased to roughly the maximum level that could be fed with existing technology and existing political institutions.  Most people lived in Eurasia, especially China, India and Europe. Sandy countries were not very important. Because of improvements in […]

“Peak is dead” and the future of oil supply

Peak Oil Review Commentary:  Interview with Richard G. Miller Dr. Richard G. Miller, trained as a geologist, joined BP as a geochemist in 1985. He studied peak oil matters since 1991, when BP asked him the following year to devise a wholly new way to estimate global oil resources.  In 2000, he was tasked with […]

The rampage of the top predators

I tend to think that much of what’s happening around us nowadays can be explained if you see the social system as an ecosystem. We known that ecosystems have “food chains” or “trophic cascades”. In a previous post, I argued that governments are behaving as top predators in the socio-economic system. A problem with top […]

20 Signs That The Global Economic Crisis Is Starting To Catch Fire

If you have been waiting for the “global economic crisis” to begin, just open up your eyes and look around.  I know that most Americans tend to ignore what happens in the rest of the world because they consider it to be “irrelevant” to their daily lives, but the truth is that the massive economic […]

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 […]

Should we be worried about ‘peak oil’?

Every now and then, in reading about global warming and other environmental issues, I come across a reference to ‘peak oil’, usually as yet another example of how humans blindly pursue their own short-term interests, scarcely heeding the crisis that is waiting for them ahead. And of course we humans do have a tendency to […]

Peak Oil Denial: Nonsense Keeps Rolling Along # 8

At the risk of starting a cat fight where truth may too quickly become a casualty, why don’t we more forcefully challenge those who deny peak oil (and global warming) and who do so for reasons that generally ignore reality in favor of narrowly-defined interests? Those motivations will ultimately do nothing but promote more eventual […]

Remembering where we live: Physics vs. biology

It is awe-inspiring to view images of galaxies and nebulas brought to us by high-powered, space-based telescopes. And, it is even more amazing to see depictions of such phenomena as if we, the viewers, are suspended in space a long, long way from Earth. In fact, in modern science fiction movies and television shows we […]

Peak Oil Denial: Nonsense Keeps Rolling Along # 7

At the risk of starting a cat fight where truth may too quickly become a casualty, why don’t we more forcefully challenge those who deny peak oil (and global warming) and who do so for reasons that generally ignore reality in favor of narrowly-defined interests? Those motivations will ultimately do nothing but promote more eventual […]

Orlov: How To Time Collapses

Over the past half a decade I’ve made a number of detailed predictions about collapse: how it is likely to unfold, what its various manifestations are likely to be, and how it will affect various groups and categories of people. But I have remained purposefully vague about the timing of collapse and its various stages, […]

Why a “one world” economic structure is fragile and dangerous

Bilderberg 2013 The dangers of a single global economy very well articulated from the gates of Bilderberg. If anyone can tell me who this man is I would like to know.

Economic Crisis Made Simple

Jenna Orkin, author of “The Moron’s Guide to Global Collapse” (http://www.amazon.com/The-Morons-Guid…), explains in seven minutes the core problem underlying our current economic mess.

Peak Oil vs. Peak Chocolate Chip Cookies

Peak Oil is a controversial concept. Some people actually think that the production of oil in nature is continuous (which is a tiny bit, but hardly at all, true) so we can keep pumping oil out of the ground and it will just keep being produced by tiny microbes. But aside from that particular, and […]

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