Richard Heinberg: End Of Cheap Energy Era

Richard Heinberg explaining why growth in the world economy is coming to an end. CCTVMay 2012

Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed The Environmental Point Of No Return?

Remember how Wile E. Coyote, in his obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, would fall off a cliff? The hapless predator ran straight out off the edge, stopped in midair as only an animated character could, looked beneath him in an eye-popping moment of truth, and plummeted straight down into a puff of dust. Splat! Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of such a possible course for human civilization in the 21st century. In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global industrial system has so much inertia that it cannot readily correct course in response to signals of planetary stress. But unless economic growth skidded to a halt before reaching the edge, they warned, society was headed for overshoot—and a splat that could kill ...

U.S. Hard Line in Failed Iran Talks Driven by Israel

Negotiations between Iran and the United States and other members of the P5+1 group in Baghdad ended in fundamental disagreement Thursday over the position of the P5+1 offering no relief from sanctions against Iran. The two sides agreed to meet again in Moscow Jun. 18 and 19, but only after Iran had threatened not to schedule another meeting, because the P5+1 had originally failed to respond properly to its five-point plan. The prospects for agreement are not likely to improve before that meeting, however, mainly because of an inflexible U.S. diplomatic posture that reflects President Barack Obama's need to bow to the demands of Israel and the U.S. Congress on Iran policy. The U.S. hard line in the Baghdad talks and the failure to set the stage for an early agreement with Iran means that Iran will not only increase but accelerate its ...

Is Natural Gas a Deflation Catalyst?

We have a ton of it sitting in the ground waiting to be consumed, the price is right (super cheap) and even T Boone Pickens loves it; so why aren’t we using more natural gas? Over the last 2 years or so I have been examining alternative energy scenarios that would help solve our thirst for crude oil and gasoline, which not only drives both of those prices higher, but makes the U.S. dependent on foreign countries, who in turn capitalize and grow stronger on our weakness. Many of these oil producing nations do have our best interests in mind. 70% of our crude oil consumption is driven (pun intended) by our transportation needs, ground transport accounts for a large part of that. What’s interesting to me is that even though diesel is “less refined” than traditional gasoline, it is more expensive. What’s ...

A Guided Tour of Catastrophe

The pop environmentalist polemic follows a rigid formula. From its best-selling beginnings, with angry screeds like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1962) and Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" (1968), the genre has mobilized generations of activists by inducing nightmares of planetary destruction. The Earth's future is "in the balance," we are but a few generations from environmental collapse, and nature, as writer Bill McKibben declared, has effectively ended. For reasons only psychoanalysts properly understand, Malthusianism sells. Lay readers face the unenviable task of disentangling political activism from the complicated scientific record that most haven't the interest, time or academic training to assess. So Andrew Blackwell, a journalist and self-described "sensitive, eco-friendly liberal," deserves praise for producing an environmentalist book that avoids the usual hyperventilation, upending stubborn myths with prosaic facts. In "Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted ...

To Tap Arctic Oil, Russia Partners With Exxon Mobil

Russia is still the world's largest producer of oil and gas, but growth has ...

The rise of re-use

Last week I read that the glitzy world of virtual reality created instant multi-millionaires ...

Operators Admit Fukushima Radiation Levels Exceed 2 1/2 Times Announced

Fukushima plant operators are now admitting that the Fukushima radiation levels emitted from the disaster exceeds almost two ...

Drill, Baby, Drill! More drilling doesn’t necessarily mean more oil

The United States has a problem. An oil problem. No matter how many wells ...