Category: Peak Oil

Peak Oil will change the way the world works and our long-held assumptions about the world around us is going to be overturned. Peak oil will render millions of people jobless. Those who depend on food made thousands of kms away from where they stay will find food very expensive. That includes all of us who stay in big cities. So the future is a bit rocky. What should our response be? The intuitive thing that people think when confronted with the problem of oil depletion is that the answer lies in oil conservation. Oil conservation is a good idea but of little help when it comes to tackling the systemic changes that peak oil brings. Why is peak oil missed by the mainstream? I see two reasons. One is human nature which likes to avoid bad news and always believes in the magical power of science and technology. […]

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We live in an era of limited resources—peak oil, peak phosphorous, peak everything. With the world population at nearly 7.4 billion and people living increasingly energy-intensive lifestyles, there has never been a more pressing need to conserve natural resources and develop renewable energy sources. A recent report from James Hansen and 16 other leading climate experts found that the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible. To make matters even worse, as 2015 shapes up to be the hottest year on record , scientists warn the world is set to pass the 1°C point this year. The icing on the cake? We won’t even have wine, coffee, tequila or chocolate to cope with runaway climate change .

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That’s one dark perfect storm. Oil rig photo via Shutterstock. Economists, an irrational tribe of short-sighted mathematicians, are now calling Canada’s declining economic fortunes "a perfect storm." It seems to be the only weather that complex market economies generate these days, or maybe such things are just another face of globalization. In any case, economists now lament that low oil prices have upended the nation’s trade balance: "Canada has posted trade deficits every month this year, and the cumulative 2015 total of $13.6 billion is a record, exceeding the next highest, in 2009, of $2.95 billion." But this unique perfect storm gets darker. China, which Harperites eagerly embraced as the globe’s autocratic growth locomotive , has run out of steam. As the country’s notorious industrial revolution unwinds, China’s stock market has imploded. Communist party cadres are now putting their money in foreign housing markets in places like Vancouver. Throughout […]

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The global financial and political scene is now undergoing a transition that goes largely unnoticed and escapes general comprehension. Many facts and indicators provide mounting evidence that the status of the US dollar as international reserve currency is being seriously threatened by the BRICS economic block and that alternative arrangements for international trade and commerce, planned two or three years ago, are being systematically implemented via the Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank and the Shanghai Gold Exchange. It might seem puzzling to some why any change would be necessary. The only logical explanation is that the super-elite group of bankers and royal families that secretly control global affairs have come to realize what’s threatening the world’s future prosperity today. Even though governments are not discussing this, statistics that apply the correct accounting and forecasting methods show that we reached peak oil in 2014. Many industry experts contend that 2015 […]

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Why are commodity prices, including oil prices, lagging? Ultimately, it comes back to the question, “ Why isn’t the world economy making very many of the end products that use these commodities? ” If workers were getting rich enough to buy new homes and cars, demand for these products would be raising the prices of commodities used to build and operate cars, including the price of oil. If governments were rich enough to build an increasing number of roads and more public housing, there would be demand for the commodities used to build roads and public housing. It looks to me as though we are heading into a deflationary depression, because prices of commodities are falling below the cost of extraction. We need rapidly rising wages and debt if commodity prices are to rise back to 2011 levels or higher. This isn’t happening. Instead, Janet Yellen is talking about […]

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Many believe we have a teetering world economy, even without Greece as an indicator. Now Greece is looming ever larger as a critical if unknown actor. It is mostly considered a bad one, for the entire European, and even the worldwide, financial system and economy. The Greek economy is approaching an almost unprecedented standstill. For clear reasons it probably will never get back to a "normal" or desirable level of consumption. When stepping back from witnessing the daily crisis, it would appear timely to ask what are the real factors in the big picture? Was the crisis brought on just by second-rate policies combined with inefficiency, corruption, and oppression? Or have longer-term characteristics of industrialism and Western Civilization’s relentless, aggressive growth caught up with us to undermine our future as a species? If so, the discussion about what’s wrong and how to deal with it has to change, and […]

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Amazon subsidiary looks to wind power to meet energy needs of cloud-based subsidiary in North Carolina. File Photo by UPI/Pat Benic SEATTLE, July 15 (UPI) — The first utility-scale wind farm in North Carolina is part of a broader effort to reduce the carbon footprint, an arm of online retailer Amazon announced. The technology infrastructure division of the retailer, Amazon Web Services, announced it contracted Iberdrola Renewables to help build and operate a 208 megawatt wind farm in North Carolina . Dubbed Amazon Wind Farm U.S. East, the facility will generate about 670,000 megawatt hours of electricity and be the state’s first utility-scale wind farm once up and running by December 2016. The Amazon subsidiary in November committed to getting 100 percent of its electricity needs from renewable resources, with the aim of meeting 40 percent of that goal by the end of 2016. Jerry Hunter, a vice president […]

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The EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook came out a few days ago. That is where they try to guess the future production and price for oil, for the USA as well as the world. As of late they seem to be getting a little timid with their predictions. They are saying not much growth is happening until the fourth quarter of 2016, and only a slight bump then. (Click to enlarge) This chart is Non-OPEC Total Liquids in million barrels per day. Production of N.O Liquids surged upwards from September of 2012 until December 2014, gaining 6.38 million barrels per day in those 27 months. That’s an average increase of 236,000 barrels per day per month. But then in January 2015 there was a drop of 800,000 bpd. Non-OPEC total liquids still have not reached that December high again but the EIA thinks they will by August. I have my […]

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