News from January 2011

An era of cheap food may be drawing to a close

U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year, according to a Reuters poll, the latest sign that the era of cheap food has come to an end. U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat prices — which surged by as much has 50 percent last year and hit their highest levels since mid-2008 — will dip [...]

A New Look At Peak Oil’s Impact: Family Visits

My parents live approximately one hundred miles from me. A drive to their home is at most only ninety minutes, given that each of us lives fairly close to highways that quickly take us to opposite ends of the cross-state Massachusetts Turnpike. If I didn’t own or have access to a car and had to [...]

Recovering Lost Knowledge About Exhaustion of the Earth’s Resources

Here we have an excerpt from a 1975 book that tells us more about Peak Oil than a typical dozen posts on most peak oil websites. It’s an example of expert knowledge effectively lost to society by the proliferation of mental chass. At the end are links to more on this subject. The short version, the [...]

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Political risk has returned with a vengeance. The first food revolutions of our Malthusian era have exposed the weak grip of authoritarian regimes in poor countries that import grain, whether in North Africa today or parts of Asia tomorrow. If you insist on joining the emerging market party at this stage of the agflation blow-off, [...]

What’s Happening in Egypt?

Events are moving very quickly in Egypt. The Egyptian government has expelled Al Jazeera. Fighter jets flew low over Cairo. However, Al Jazeera just said that the commander of the army tanks in downtown Cairo told protest leader that the army would take no action so long as the protests were peaceful. Al Jazeera also [...]

Sudan police clash with protesters

Sudanese police have beaten and arrested students as protests broke out throughout Khartoum demanding the government resign, inspired by a popular uprising in neighbouring Egypt. Hundreds of armed riot police broke on Sunday up groups of young Sudanese demonstrating in central Khartoum and surrounded the entrances of four universities in the capital, firing teargas and [...]

Kurt Kobb: Razor blades and the limits of complexity

A friend of mine once remarked that if current trends continue, razor cartridges will have at least 100 blades each by the end of the century. The razor blade wars are among the most visible absurdities illustrating how the limits of complexity clash with our blind faith in the idea that more complexity will always [...]

Protests Spread To Saudi Arabia

While the biggest threat to the Middle East region is the possibility that the population of Saudi Arabia may try to imitate what has been happening in the area, thereby bringing total chaos to the established regional geopolitical and more importantly, energy, structure, the first protests in the Saudi Arabia city of Jeddah are already [...]

Reason for hope in Iraq: Oil, and lots of it

On a bleak stretch of desert near the Iraq-Kuwait border – half a world away from the Gulf of Mexico and last year’s nightmarish blowout – BP is riding high, rapidly developing one of the world’s richest oil fields. The British energy giant plans to drill 3,000 new wells here over the next 10 years [...]

Post-Growth Progress

Via a perceptive summary at Bristling Badger, Jared Diamond addresses the Tobis tautology: China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent. If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If [...]