Category: Peak Oil

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s leaders are expected to gather at a closed-door meeting next week to set policy and reform priorities for 2014, sources with government think tanks said, following a party meeting that laid out a bold reform agenda for the next decade. The annual Central Economic Work Conference will bring together top party leaders, ministers and provincial officials to discuss economic targets, including the rate of economic growth, inflation and money supply for the year ahead. Analysts and investors expect the government to spell out detailed reform plans for next year, after a plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee charted the course of sweeping economic and social changes. Top leaders are likely to held a meeting around the same time on urbanization to issue detailed plans on how to proceed with the much debated program without fanning a renewed local spending frenzy, according to the sources. […]

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Jeffery Brown is our Export Land expert and I would never try to match wits with him on world exports. And congratulations to Jeffery for having the Number one post on Resilience.Org. Top 10 Reader’s Favorites – Resilience and Energy Bulletin 1. Peak oil versus peak exports by Jeffrey J. Brown, Samuel Foucher PhD, originally published by ASPO-USA – Oct 2010 All I can do is post the data the EIA, or someone else supplies. And the EIA only has world export data through 2010. But I found even that pretty startling, especially the Non-OPEC data. Anyway here is the World Crude + Condensate exports, 1986 through 2010 in thousand barrels per day. Notice how the increase in World exports go up almost linear. Actually between 1986 and 2010 the increase averaged 3.41 percent per year for 18 years. But for the last seven years world exports have declined by […]

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Page added on December 4, 2013 There is no question that we are at a turning point in world energy. But then we are often at a turning point. Just as everybody gets comfortable with what they expect to happen, a big change comes along that undercuts existing assumptions. Just consider: • Less than three years ago, a ‘‘nuclear renaissance’’ seemed to be unfolding. Now, in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, the renaissance has turned into a ‘‘nuclear patchwork’’  —  moving ahead in some countries, stalled or shut down in others. • Five years ago, the United States was suffering an advanced case of ‘‘peak oil’’ and was going to run out of petroleum. Since then, crude oil output has increased by 56 percent and its net oil imports are down 40 percent. • Four years ago, the cost of solar panels seemed stubbornly high. […]

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DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Opposition fighters have abducted 12 nuns from a predominantly Christian village near Damascus and taken them to a rebel-held town, the mother superior of a Syrian convent said Tuesday. The statement by Febronia Nabhan, Mother Superior at Saidnaya Convent, came as Syria’s state TV reported that a suicide attacker set off his explosive vest in an unspecified government institution in Damascus, killing four and wounding 17. The TV gave no further details about the blast in the central Jisr Abyad neighborhood. Such blasts in Damascus are not uncommon. Some have killed scores of people in the city. Nabhan said Tuesday that the nuns and three other women were taken the day before from another convent in the predominantly Christian village of Maaloula to the nearby town of Yabroud. Syrian rebels captured large parts of Maaloula, some 60 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of the capital, on […]

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By  Tom Athanasiou – Tom Athanasiou is the director of the Earth Island-sponsored project EcoEquity and a member of the Greenhouse Development Rights authors’ group. His interests focus on distributive justice within the global environmental emergency. Is our civilization doomed? I don’t think so, though I’ll admit that the case for doom is a pretty good one. But I wish to be clear on two points. First, it’s not too late to avoid disastrous climate change. We’re in trouble, no doubt about that, but we have the science, the technology, and the money to save ourselves. Second, we simply won’t do so if we give ourselves up to the habits of pessimism. Is “peak oil” a good way to talk about all this? The short answer is No , and this despite the fact that it draws attention to planetary limits, and to the great resource crunch that’s now […]

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Page added on December 2, 2013 [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 be sequential in the sense that moving from the first to the second and the second to the third requires that obstacles be overcome…. Some people who use denial strategies are likely to remain ‘stuck’ there regardless of the evidence. (links/references in the original quote) [1] Those comments were written as part of a study on climate change denial, but their application is easily and accurately extended to peak oil denial and any number of political issues where too many prefer avoiding contemplation of the consequences of ideological […]

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It’s traditional at this time of year to look back at what we have accomplished or how we have blundered, and to look forward at how we might fix things. So far, we should classify this decade of the 2010s as the Age of Denial . People, and Americans in particular, continue to avoid serious thought about human population growth, the predictable effects of global warming, the degradation of the oceans, and even the depletion of top soil in the Midwest. At this moment, our most critical economic and social problem is something called Peak Oil, and it’s not even getting play in the alternative media, much less on the network news.   About a decade ago, I wrote a series of columns on another internet site about the issue of Peak Oil. Basically, it is the observation that there is only so much easily obtainable oil, and the […]

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Team identifies key industries for policy action Researchers from the University of Maryland and a leading university in Spain demonstrate in a new study which sectors could put the entire U.S. economy at risk when global oil production peaks (‘Peak Oil”). This multi-disciplinary team recommends immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce the vulnerability of these sectors. While critics of Peak Oil studies declare that the world has more than enough oil to maintain current national and global standards, these UMD-led researchers say Peak Oil is imminent, if not already here — and is a real threat to national and global economies. Their study is among the first to outline a way of assessing the vulnerabilities of specific economic sectors to this threat, and to identify focal points for action that could strengthen the U.S. economy and make it less vulnerable to disasters. Their work, “Economic […]

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