Category: Peak Oil

The sharp drop in oil prices will benefit American consumers, many of the nation’s businesses and the economy as a whole. So why are stock market investors behaving as though oil under $50 a barrel and gasoline prices hovering around $2 a gallon are bad news? The overall market’s recent decline reflects more than just the free fall in oil prices. Overseas economies are struggling; last week, the World Bank cut its forecast for global growth to 3 percent from 3.4 percent. But fears about losses emanating from a devastated oil patch have weighed heavily on broad stock indexes, investment strategists say. This response appears to be a case of investors seizing on the industry’s highly visible losers while ignoring the far larger number of winners. “The stock market has reacted negatively, and some of that comes down to the fact that you can see what the impact is […]

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Renewable Resources Reach Their Limits thumbnail Can the world continue expanding its use of renewable resources at an increasing rate? Most likely not. Using a data set of over 25 resources researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Yale University and Michigan State University demonstrate that several key resources have recently passed, at around the same time, their “peak-rate year” — the maximum increase year. A potential implication is that as substitution becomes arduous, global society’s expanding needs will be harder to fill. They explain this in an article published in the latest issue of the international journal Ecology and Society, and featured in the journal Nature’s Research Highlights this week. Landscape ecologists Prof. Dr. Ralf Seppelt, Dr. Ameur M. Manceur and plant ecologist Dr. Stefan Klotz from the UFZ analyzed the production and extraction rates of 27 global renewable and non-renewable resources together with economist Dr. […]

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Population: Not Leveling Off thumbnail When it comes to the party that is planet Earth, we might need to plan for a few extra guests, according to scientists. A new statistical projection concludes that the world population is unlikely to level off during the 21st century, leaving the planet to deal with as many as 13 billion human inhabitants—4 billion of those in Africa—by 2100. The analysis, formulated by U.N. and University of Washington (UW), Seattle, researchers, is the first of its kind to use modern statistical methods rather than expert opinions to estimate future birth rates, one of the determining factors in population forecasts. “The U.N. in the past has been criticized for not doing complete statistics on their data and now they’ve done it exactly right,” says demography researcher John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council in New York City, who was not involved in the […]

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. producer prices in December recorded their biggest fall in more than three years on tumbling energy costs while underlying inflation pressures were tame, a cautionary note for the Federal Reserve as it ponders its next step on monetary policy. The Labor Department said on Thursday its producer price index for final demand declined 0.3 percent, the biggest drop since October 2011, after falling 0.2 percent in November. "That makes the Fed’s job more difficult," said Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. "We expect inflation to slow … the Fed needs to be more cautious about raising interest rates." In the 12 months through December, prices at the factory gate increased 1.1 percent, the smallest gain since November 2013, after rising 1.4 percent in November. A broader measure of underlying producer inflation pressures that excludes food, energy and trade services edged […]

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Crude oil prices plunged to a six-year low Tuesday in a potentially painful threat to oil-exporting nations that rely on crude to power their economies. The drop brings some welcome relief to countries that have been struggling with economic headwinds, but brings a mixed bag for others, like the United States, that are both big producers and consumers of oil. Oil prices are still looking for a floor, in part because the persistent mismatch between global supply and demand continues even as big oil producers inside OPEC keep spooking the market by refusing to countenance any voluntary production cut. The energy minister for the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, Jan. 13, dismissed the idea that OPEC would cut production to boost prices and said it was up to other oil suppliers, such as the United States, to blink first. “Those who are producing the most expensive oil — the […]

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Cheaper oil is  good for the economy — it’s basically the equivalent of a tax cut. Unless it’s bad for the economy, which can be the case if falling prices spur deflation Continue Reading

DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach said on Tuesday there is a possibility of a “true collapse” in U.S. capital expenditures and hiring if the price of oil stays at its current Continue Reading

ENLARGE The discovery of oil from shale rocks means that U.S. output is faster paced. Drilling and hydraulically fracturing a well takes weeks, not years. Minneapolis Star Tribune/Zuma Press A surge of oil from outside of the Middle East flooded global energy markets. The world-wide thirst for crude didn’t keep up. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries stood by and watched as oil prices fell and then fell more. Welcome to the world of oil in 2015—a repeat in surprising ways of the story 30 years ago. Between November 1985 and March 1986, the price of crude plunged by 67%. Between June 2014 and today, crude prices have fallen by 57% and could well head lower. After the mid-1980s bust, it took nearly two decades for oil prices to rebound to pre-bust levels and remain there. Energy executives are now haunted by the question: Will it take as […]

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Turning tide image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission. From an oil chill in the financial world to the recent U.S.-China agreement on climate change, recent developments are raising a question that might once have been considered unthinkable: Could this be the beginning of a long, steady decline for the oil and coal industries? Boom may be turning to bust for fossil fuels. Market forces are combining with the prospect of new limits on carbon emissions from major economies such as China and the United States to prick the carbon bubble. Many analysts are now suggesting that — with prices falling and production costs rising — the coming year could be the moment when investors realize the game is up for the coal and oil industries. Nations found it hard to make progress at UN climate negotiations in Lima last year, making many observers skeptical of the prospects […]

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 When talking about the perils of climate change or resource depletion, soil degradation or fisheries collapse, water pollution or nuclear waste–how annoying it is to have one listener respond dismissively, "They’ll figure something out. They always have." It’s a nonsense rejoinder and yet, it often gains the assent of many–as if this assertion were a self-evident truth that only an enemy of progress would question. And, that’s where we’ll start examining the central contradiction in the modern outlook–with a statement that is offered as if it were a scientific fact, when, in truth, it is nothing more than a piece of dogma enunciated by the religion we call modernism. At first glance, the statement seems backward-looking because it asserts that we humans have always averted catastrophe through our ingenuity. But, of course, this is complete hogwash. History is replete with civilizations that have risen and then fallen, crumbling for […]

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