Fearless Oil & Gas-Related Predictions for 2014

Well, it’s the end of the year 2013, and everyone and his or her brother is busy compiling a Top Ten Something-or-Other (take your pick: movies, songs, celebrity faux pas, football players, baseball players, basketball dunks, Miley Cyrus embarrassments, etc.)  list for 2013. Turns out I’m too lazy to compile my own Top Ten Energy Stories for […]

2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse

2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed […]

Transition: 2014 In and Out list

    Photo: rore. It’s a sacred duty we take up at the beginning of the new year. Donning our psychic caps and tuning in to the Noosphere we delve deep into what really matters in crafting our annual “In and Out” list. And thank G-O-D that we do. Having again viewed what passes for […]

J. M. Greer: The Song of the Snallygaster

I’ve noticed, over the past few years, a growing lack of enthusiasm in the formerly raucous festivities that once marked the end of one year and the beginning of another. That was certainly in evidence last night in our old red brick mill town here in the eastern end of the Rust Belt. As my […]

The Year of the Dud

Lots of things that should have happened in 2013 did not. We were supposed to have long ago reached “peak oil” and an age of always-higher gas prices. Wind and solar power – and a reduced lifestyle – were our dismal future. But someone or something did not cooperate with gloomy government predictions. After all […]

Orlov: Predictions for 2014

The calendar ticking over into the next year is a traditional occasion to draw some conclusions and make some predictions. Lots of people take this to mean that they should talk about where they think the stock market will go, or how much gold bullion will cost, or what the cost of oil will be. […]

Few Americans understand fracking

Fracking is a buzz word, but few Americans know what it actually means. That is the conclusion of a recent survey published by researchers at Oregon State, George Mason and Yale universities. More than half of the study’s 1,061 respondents reported knowing little or nothing of fracking. And almost 60 percent of those surveyed said […]

7 things everyone knows about energy that just ain’t so

Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And, there are many, many things that the public and policymakers know for sure about energy that just ain’t so. That list is very long indeed and getting longer as […]

Apocalypse 2012: The one-year anniversary of Nothing Happened Day

Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, millions of people felt a growing sense of — I was going to write “relief,” but it might have been “disappointment” — when the world didn’t end on Fake Mayan Prophecy Day. Social media users around the world greeted the non-event with the kind of viral mockery everyone loves these […]

Peak Oil: Jeremy Leggett: The Energy Of Nations

The Energy of Nations — Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance Founder and Chairman, Solarcentury and SolarAid; Chairman, CarbonTracker Key note at WWF Climate Colver Conference 2013, Stockholm, Sweden. November 2013

Overcoming Density-Dependent Regulation

Humans have modified their environment to prevent disease and provide shelter and food, overcoming density-dependent population limits. fig. 1 Measles cases reported in the United States, 1944-2007 The number measles cases, reported as thousands of cases per year, shows a decline after the introduction of the vaccine. The inset shows data for 1983-2007 representing reported […]

Crash on Demand: David Holmgren updates his Future Scenarios

David Holmgren, co-originator of the Permaculture concept, published Future Scenarios in 2007, originally as a website, and then published by Chelsea Green in 2008 as a small book (126 pages). He explores four possible human futures as the two great crises of Peak Oil and Climate Change converge into what he has coined our energy […]

Downloading Responsibility

    An ongoing economic crash that feels like the onset of a deep freeze is far more exhausting than a rapid implosion. As bubbles are reflated and debts accumulate yet again, the system lurches towards its next financial accident. While the global operating system fails, can the exchange of critical goods and services detach […]

Heinberg: Puerto Rico in a world in transition

Richard Heinberg presenting at Universidad Metropolitana (UMET) Puerto Rico. Recorded August 28th 2013. The video has a Spanish intro and then switiches to Richard presenting in English at 3:30 mins. Read Richard’s Puerto Rico trip report Resilience.org

The curious case of the oil and gas engineer who really wasn’t

Every journalist’s nightmare is to use a quote from somebody who is not really who they say they are. And something like that has now come to the fracking debate. The Telegram, a newspaper based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, last week ran a letter from a Syd Peters. He claimed to be an engineer based […]

The curse of slavery, the curse of oil

Chiwetel Ejiofor in the film 12 Years A Slave. Against all odds, a film based on a 150-year-old, almost forgotten book has generated international acclaim and is positioned to sweep multiple Oscars categories. The recently-released film 12 Years A Slave is based on the autobiography of the same name by Solomon Northrup, a free black […]

Post Carbon Institute: The Next 10 Years

by Richard Heinberg During the past decade Post Carbon Institute’s influence has grown markedly, thanks in no small part to all our supporters and allies. And we’re proud of the impressive list of accomplishments we’ve racked up (see this) in that time. Where do we go from here? That depends on what’s needed and what’s […]

John Michael Greer: Great Man is Dead

The satiric faux-journalism of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report was meant as a bit of edged humor at the expense of the overinflated self-image of humanity that’s been fostered by the cult of progress, and I’m glad to say that most of my readers took it as such. I fielded a few […]

6 ways to become more miserable about climate change and peak oil

It’s bad enough that most middle-class people still have to struggle to keep their jobs and homes in today’s Second Great Depression. But if you’re even a little bit awake, then you also have to worry about longer-term threats: climate change, Fukushima, peak oil and the impending collapse of industrial civilization. There’s plenty of reason […]

Heinberg: Snake Oil and the End of Growth

The last newsletter of 2013 brings together an essay, an interview, and a blog post, all with the common theme of the intersection between economic growth and energy. Thank you for your support in 2013, and my very best wishes for the Holidays and the New Year. Richard Preface to the Romanian edition of Snake […]

10 Civilizations You’ve Never Heard Of

10 Civilizations You’ve Never Heard Of Lost languages and mysterious disappearances are just some of the interesting things about these 10 lesser known civilizations.

Collapse: The Post-peak Narrative

A consensus appears to have been reached that the world’s production of conventional oil peaked in recent years. And to many observers, it means that from this time forward the supply of oil and natural gas, along with peaking coal and uranium, will decrease toward zero, leaving global Industrial Culture without the precious energy that […]

The Torture Of Not Knowing

In the age of catastrophic climate change and two years following the horrifying meltdown of reactors at Fukushima’s nuclear power plant, we realize that both phenomena are profoundly impacting our species and the earth community. What we don’t know with certainty is the exact extent of the damage being done. In Alex Smith’s recent Radio […]

The Collapse Series – Part 3

http://www.pamelafarms.com https://www.facebook.com/pamelafarms Debate group: http://www.prepperssoapbox.com

Peak Oil Denial: Nonsense Keeps Rolling Along

[D]enial strategies suppress both facts and emotions, maladaptive coping strategies admit some of the facts and allow some of the emotions, both often in distorted form, and adaptive coping strategies accept the facts and allow the emotions to be felt, thus promoting more positive behaviours. The three groups of coping strategies may be considered to […]

Transform While There’s Still Time

In her book titles Carolyn Baker features such scary words as “demise,” “chaos” and “collapsing,” but her goal is mainly soul building. The stressful outer reality is a provocation. In Baker’s daily digest of challenging news (“Speaking Truth to Power”), she welcomes a whole range of “collapse-aware” writers, including those who predict “near-term extinction.” However, […]

At the Closing of an Age

Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report suggested that the normal aftermath of an age of reason is a return to religion—in Spengler’s terms, a Second Religiosity—as the only effective  bulwark against the nihilistic spiral set in motion by the barbarism of reflection. Yes, I’m aware that that’s a controversial claim, not least because […]

The Third Revolution

Republished lecture from a conference I participated in, in Milan on October 22 -23, 2010, i.e. “The Effects of New Communication Technologies upon Information”. This is the transcript of my lecture, which focuses more than usual on the anthropological underpinnings of p2p relationships. The spoken word nature of the intervention, may make it extra readable […]

Separation, By Charles Eisenstein

The following is excerpted from The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible [1], published by North Atlantic Books. Sometimes I feel nostalgic for the cultural mythology of my youth, a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Super Bowl was important, in which America was bringing democracy to the world, […]

Sheeple: Why You Should Feel Sorry For Them

It is often said there only two kinds of people in this world: those who know, and those who don’t. I would expand on this and say that there are actually three kinds of people: those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t care to know. Members of the last group are […]

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