U.S. electricity blackouts skyrocketing

Experts on the nation’s electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers. During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent — up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota. In […]

Airports handled fewer passengers worldwide in 2009

Air traffic worldwide fell 1.8% last year to 4.8 billion arriving and departing passengers, according to a report last week by the Airports Council International. The decline was more pronounced in North America (down 5.2%) and Europe (down 5.4%). But the emerging markets in the Middle East (up 7.7%), Asia-Pacific (up 4.9%) and Latin America-Caribbean […]

What’s Really Driving The Price Of Oil?

The Internet tends to be a Wild West of opinions on investing, but I think some of the best work actually documenting and comparing the various sources of information on energy and petroleum is over at The Oil Drum. Now, to be clear, they don’t claim to be an unbiased news source; their bent is pretty […]

Without Matt Simmons: Has Peak Oil, Well, Peaked?

Matt Simmons, the maverick investment banker who championed the concept of peak oil, died of a heart attack in a hot tub in Maine. He was 67. Simmons is best known for raising the alarm, in books, in lectures, television interviews and to anyone who would listen, that the world’s oil reserves had peaked. The […]

Matt Simmons dies of heart attack

Matt Simmons, founder and former head of Simmons & Co. International, died on Aug. 8 at his home in Maine of an apparent heart attack. Simmons earned the respect of his peers with his successful energy investment bank, as well as a name for himself with his fearless and brazen predictions on the future of […]

Can Gas ‘Fracking’ Pollute Groundwater? Unlikely.

Can hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells pollute groundwater? The anti-drilling crowd wants you to think so, and has convinced the Environmental Protection Agency to launch an investigation into fracking. Don’t believe them. The fracking process basically consists of injecting millions of gallons of water mixed with a wee amount of chemicals and tiny […]

President Obama backs U.S. Lithium developers

Gulf of Mexico spill can usher in a new era of eco-vehicles The environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has served as an unnerving wake-up call for the industrialized world to confront its addiction to fossilized fuels. And it’s now providing President Obama and other G20 leaders with all the political impetus they need […]

Global warming heats up a nuclear energy renaissance

Christian Science Monitor Global warming and the BP oil spill have helped rehabilitate nuclear energy in the eyes of the public – and some environmentalists. Mineral, VA. As a young engineer in the mid-1970s, Eugene Grecheck worked on plans to construct four reactors at a new nuclear power plant in central Virginia’s rolling countryside – […]

India: End to Fuel Subsidies Brings Damaging Diversions

On Jun. 25 the government bit the bullet and totally deregulated petrol prices, resulting in a 6.7 percent jump in the price of the prime automotive fuel. The price of diesel was raised by five percent — though deregulation was deferred to a future date on the consideration that it drives tractors and irrigation pumps […]

Peak Oil? Yes! Peak Food? I Don’t Think So!

Earlier today, Michael C. Ruppert, former editor and publisher of the newsletter and web site From The Wilderness and currently publisher of the web site collapse.net, put a video clip called “Global and US Food Price Alert” online. I found it on Facebook and it is also on You Tube. Doubtless, it is other places […]

Guardian: Modern cargo ships slow to the speed of the sailing clippers

The world’s largest cargo ships are travelling at lower speeds today than sailing clippers such as the Cutty Sark did more than 130 years ago. A combination of the recession and growing awareness in the shipping industry about climate change emissions encouraged many ship owners to adopt “slow steaming” to save fuel two years ago. […]

Zero Hedge: U.S. Distillate Demand Falling off a Cliff

(I don’t usually post investment stories but this analysis is pretty interesting. Pops) By Dian L. Chu, Economic Forecasts & Opinions Zero Hedge Crude Oil had a breakout this week as the risk trade was put on, it benefitted from the short the dollar, and go long commodities play. Plus equities have been testing the higher […]

Oil spill to have long term impact

Marine conservationist Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska scientist said it is too early to conjecture the real impact of the spill. The success, according to experts, has come a bit too late though. Lot of harm, economic, environmental and ecological, has already been done by the oil. Large portions of Louisiana’s flimsy coastal […]

Can the Wealthy Have A Separate Peace? – Revisited

I normally don’t mix with millionaires, but through “6 degrees of separation” circumstances I found myself in an extensive and personal conversation with a wealthy and highly connected person. He knew that I was “preparing” for economic decline, including skills in household self-reliance. As the conversation evolved and took various twists and turns, he eventually […]

The New York Times Slays the “Peak Oil” Dinosaur

Well there you have it in the opening sentence of an eye-opening article in this Sunday’s New York Times, Tracing Oil Reserves to Their Tiny Origins: “If you believe petroleum came from dinosaurs, think again and look toward the seas.” Here, in the Science section, the Times tells us that the emphasis these many years […]

Seven Dangerous Side Effects of the U.S. Dependency on Foreign Oil

Our fate has long been tied to the oil issue. But now we’re near the threshold at which our addiction will completely break us. We are quickly approaching what is called “peak oil”—the point at which world oil production will reach its maximum point and then begin to decline because of supply limitations. Even the […]

Internal Combustion Engines Are Still 85% Inefficient

You might be surprised to hear, that after all this time, with so many compelling reasons to make vehicles more energy efficient, that the internal combustion engine still only uses 15% of the energy it receives from gasoline. I sure was. A century ago, when the internal combustion engine was invented, climate change and peak […]

When Truth is Unbelievable

By Megan Quinn Bachman As a college junior I frequented a website (www.dieoff.org) where prognosticators observed that with accelerating rates of environmental destruction, overpopulation and fossil fuel depletion, modern civilization was on the verge of collapse. Despite the alarmist tone, these writings were not pseudo-scientific rants, but well-researched articles by eminent authors spelling doom. And […]

Cloudy times for Florida’s solar energy future

In a remote field awash with 90,000 solar panels, President Barack Obama praised the launch last year of the country’s largest solar plant in secluded Arcadia as a watershed moment for Florida’s emerging green economy. Roughly 10 months later, Florida’s time in the sun has darkened, with a smattering of renewable energy programs in place […]

How to feed a hungry world

Producing enough food for the world’s population in 2050 will be easy. But doing it at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices. With the world’s population expected to grow from 6.8 billion today to 9.1 billion by 2050, a certain Malthusian alarmism […]

Richard Heinberg talks about planning for peak oil

Richard Heinberg, co-editor of The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, talks about what was behind recent price spikes in oil production and the effect of those spikes on the US economy.

Peak Generation: Different takes on peak oil, same result – price spikes

Two must-read interviews with energy market investors both point to a coming demand-driven spike in oil prices, despite professing differing views on peak oil. Rick Rule, founder of Global Resource Investments, Ltd., speaks of “sharply higher world oil prices in the next 5 years,” and Charles Maxwell, senior energy analyst for Weeden & Co. that […]

Scenario Planning and Dynamic Cities

The global economic recession, collapsing of the credit bubble and housing bubble, combines with peak oil and climate change to create a set of future scenarios for which careful planning is needed. In this on point 25-minute presentation, Bryn Davidson, of the Dynamic Cities project, explains how scenario planning can be used to minimize risk, […]

Peak coal could happen by 2011

A multi-Hubbert analysis of coal production by Tadeusz Patzek at The University of Texas at Austin and Gregory Croft at the University of California, Berkeley concludes that the global peak of coal production from existing coalfields will occur close to the year 2011. The HHV of global production is likely to peak in 2011 at […]

Russia bans grain exports

Russia, the world’s third wheat exporter, Thursday banned grain exports for the next four-and-a-half months due to a record drought that has destroyed millions of hectares (acres) of its land. Wheat futures shot up to new two-year highs on commodities markets after the sudden announcement from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin raised concerns about global grain […]

Gulf oil spill: Wasted reputations

Stopping the flow from the Macondo well is not the end of the Deepwater Horizon affair. Along with BP, environmentalists and the US government must rebuild credibility that has been lacking in the aftermath of the accident Imaging the outrage in Western capitals if it had happened in Russia. Imagine that before any due legal […]

Peak Oil: How Supply Crunch Can Lead to Lower Prices (for a while!)

There seems to be an on-going debate among peak oilers and many economists as to which came first, the chicken (peak supply flow) or the egg (peak demand). The first is attributed to the classical peak oil theory that when about half of the oil in the ground is pumped out, extraction rates start to […]

Treehugger: Reducing Global Shipping’s Fuel Consumption?

If we’re going to start this great transition off of oil we really need to start thinking hard about how we’re going to move ourselves and our goods around the globe. Part of that is thinking conceptually about it–how to change our habits and usage patterns for long-distance travel. The other part is how technology […]

NYT: N.Y. Senate Approves Fracking Moratorium

The New York State Senate voted 48 to 9 Tuesday night to issue a temporary moratorium on a type of natural gas exploration that combines hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling and the injection of millions of gallons of chemically treated water underground. The aim of the measure is to ensure an adequate review of safety […]

Biofuels industry’s hazy environmental footprint

OTTAWA – The biofuels industry leaves behind a hazy ecological footprint because each facility measures its environmental performance differently, says a new report. This makes it difficult for the government to gauge how ethanol and biodiesel affect the environment. A study done for Environment Canada earlier this year found gaps in the way biofuels plants […]

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