An even more cassandric podcast by Ugo Bardi

Part II of a series of three from “The Doomstead Diner”

Blame the Economists . . .

Lately, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time with economists. This past month, I have been at several dinners (party of 8) with them, spent time in the woods of Maine chatting them up, listened to their debates on economic policy, even spent time in a canoe fishing with them. Propriety — and […]

Sincere thanks to all who worked with The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Kjell Aleklett, Professor of Physics at the Global Energy Systems Group of Uppsala University Sweden. and President of ASPO International At the end of August, The Oil Drum website will change from an active blog into a static archive for many extremely good articles on, primarily, the history and […]

Ivan Illich and the contemporary commons movement

For the past three days I’ve been attending a fantastic conference, “After the Crisis:  The Thought of Ivan Illich today,” in Oakland, California, at the Oakland School for the Arts.  Illich was an iconoclastic social critic, Jesuit priest, radical Christian, historian, scientist and public intellectual who was especially famous in the 1970s and 1980s for […]

Industrial Civilization’s Psychotic Break

The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, [it] is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost […]

James Howard Kunstler Describes the Social Changes to Expect in the Long Emergency

Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in ‘The Long Emergency’ Reality does not have an ideology After the second novel in my World Made By Hand series (The Witch of Hebron) came out in 2010, I was beset by indignant reviews and angry letters from female readers over my depiction of gender and class relations […]

Peak Oil, EROEI and the Muffled Drum

An interesting thing happened last month.  The Oil Drum, a well-regarded website + blog, announced it was ceasing operations and archiving itself for posterity.  Well, everything has its day – we can all list blogs that were thriving a few years back but are no longer with us. Some have suggested it was the extraordinary […]

Peak Oil and the New Carbon Boom

This essay is adapted from the afterword to the paperback edition of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, out next month from Verso Books. We’ll have more on energy and the environment later this week in anticipation of our Summer 2013 issue, out on Monday, with a special section on environmentalism. Click here to subscribe. In the past […]

What is “Business as Usual” in terms of now to 2030 ? 2050 ?

  A small blog listed Nextbigfuture among three optimistic future related blogs (Singularity Hub and KurzweilAI are the two others). He lists six blogs that are pessimistic about the future. One of the pessimistic blogs is collapse of industrial civilization which has a sample article that proposes that a collapse will be well underway by […]

The Oil Drum Bites the Bag

It’s been a while since I last checked the PO situation, but I did a bit of browsing recently, and it seems that PO has, well, gone down the toilet. I first started following peak oil in August 2004, and when I first heard the hype, I immediately thought “here we go, this is Y2K […]

Commodity supercycle in rude health despite shale

The Oil Drum is closing down after eight years, giving up the long struggle to alert us all to “peak oil” and the dangers of an energy crunch. Readers have been drifting away. The theme has gone out of fashion, eclipsed by shale and fracking in the US. The demise of Britain’s leading website for […]

George P Mitchell known as ‘father of fracking’ dies

Billionaire Texas oilman, developer and philanthropist George P Mitchell, considered the father of the oil and gas production technique commonly known as fracking, has died at his home aged 94, his family said. Mr Mitchell, the son of a Greek immigrant, became one of the wealthiest men in the US. His dogged pursuit of the […]

Different Peak Oil Denial Nonsense Is Still Nonsense [Pt 7]

I began the first post in this series* with this observation: “Some day (soon, I hope) audiences for whom peak oil denial nonsense is intended will ask themselves: what are the reasons—and supporting evidence—for these kinds of assertions?” *[Links below] Earlier this year, I made this observation: We certainly respect that the vast majority of […]

Interview with Martin Payne — Is Peak Oil Dead?

Q: The industry deserves major kudos for the largest year-over-year increase in US oil production during 2012. What’s your sense for how long that type of gain might continue? A: Both the Bakken and Eagle Ford are wonderful and economic shale oil plays. It doesn’t mean they don’t have uneconomic wells that may be drilled […]

Orlov provides a survivor’s toolkit

Author Dmitry Orlov says that if financial, commercial, and political collapse are met with appropriate responses, the more extreme aspects of social and cultural collapse could be prevented  The City of Detroit’s bankruptcy filing made big headlines, but the city’s decline has been underway for decades. The Associated Press observed that the “Arsenal of Democracy” […]

Collapse And The Changing Face of Suicide, By Gary Stamper

We have a winner: According to the American Journal of Public Health, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death by injury between 2008 and 2009. However, that dubious distinction has been replaced by a disturbing new cause: Today, the form of death by injury that takes more American lives than any other is […]

The end of the world as we know it.

Ever wondered how our world may really end? Are we going to run out of food as our population reaches 9 Billion people…. or can we expect another Pandemic with millions dying from a virus outbreak? Leeds University in the UK which says food prices are going to soar as the world population booms to […]

Reports of the Death of Peak Oil Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

A week or so ago, there was a mini-flurry of blog posts announcing that peak oil was dead. Thanks to shale oil, tar sands, heavy oil, deepwater oil, and all the other kinds of oil that the peakists didn’t know about, the world was now practically drowning in the stuff. The whole thing was very strange […]

A Buzzfeed attack on Peak Oil deserves a Buzzfeed response

  Like everyone else, I love Buzzfeed. My facebook feed is full of clever GIF-filled Buzzlead links with catchy headlines. That’s really the “point” of Buzzfeed – catchy headlines, highly linkable and sharable posts that bring in as many clicks, tweets, and eyeballs as possible. So while I was a little surprised to see a […]

Richard Heinberg 2013 BCEA keynot

Richard Heinberg of The Post Carbon Institute giving a very impressive keynote. May 2013

Who Rules The World?

From the Hellfire Club to the Illuminati, from the Freemasons to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (i.e., Knights Templar) – to that list add the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, and you develop a persistent delusion (yes, a delusion, or maybe fantasy or wishful thinking) that the super-rich are […]

The Oil Drum: To Forbes – a gentle cough of correction at TOD’s end

Forbes recently issued a commentary on the closing of The Oil Drum, which deserves some rebuttal, since, as with many stories on the “Peak Oil” topic, it conveys too many incorrect statements and false assumptions. Just over eight years ago I became irritated by several articles in the Main Stream Media that were clearly technically […]

Peak Oil: Simple Truths

An observation worth noting … and pondering, from Michael T. Klare. In energy terms, we are now entering a world whose grim nature has yet to be fully grasped.  This pivotal shift has been brought about by the disappearance of relatively accessible and inexpensive petroleum — ‘easy oil,’ in the parlance of industry analysts; in […]

Is Peak Oil Dead or Just Postponed?

Several months ago, I wondered if the media’s fascination with peak oil, which crested in the mid-2000s, had ended. A big concern of many in the energy/sustainability nexus had found expression in popular culture and in visuals like this: But now the zeitgeist has flipped, from crude awakening to crude abundance, thanks to advances in […]

Is Economics a Science or a Religion?

Is economics a science or a religion? Its practitioners like to think of it as akin to the former. The blind faith with which many do so suggests it has become too much like the latter, with potentially dire consequences for the real people the discipline is intended to help. The idea of economics as […]

The fall of reason: How to protect your sanity in an insane world

I’m reaching out to you all with words of assurance as I write this story. By now, I think we all are overwhelmingly convinced that we live in an insane world. I call it the “post-reason era.” It’s a world full of irrational people, criminal corporations, deceptive government, the abandonment of law and even the […]

As Fracking Rises, Peak Oil Theory Slowly Dies

On July 3, the administrators of The Oil Drum, a blog/discussion forum site dedicated to and frequented by those who advocate for “Peak Oil” theory, announced the site would close at the end of July, marking an end to an eight-year existence.  During that period of time, “Peak Oil” theory has basically gone the way […]

The danger in wishful thinking on oil

James Howard Kunstler knows a lot of people think he’s a fool right about now. He’s OK with that. Just wait, he says. Back in 2005 Kunstler published “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.” Such a brief description is inadequate, but rode the “peak oil” wave that argued that humanity […]

Peak Oil Peters Out: Neo-Malthusian Cult Website The Oil Drum Shuts Down

Neo-Malthusian group’s website ‘The Oil Drum’ shuts down The Oil Drum (TOD) was founded and frequented by believers in the theory of peak oil, the hypothetical point at which the world’s oil supplies go into irreversible decline. Peak oil devotees typically predict that apocalyptic economic consequences would follow hard on falling crude supplies. In a […]

Can We Really Walk Away From Empire?

I recently had the opportunity to engage in conversation with Guy McPherson about a number of topics and subsequently began reading his book Walking Away From Empire, Guy’s personal journey of leaving a tenured professorship to radically alter his living arrangements in preparation for the collapse of industrial civilization. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this touching, inspiring, […]

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