News from September 2011

China To North America: Send Us Your Oil

As Americans quarrel over whether fossil fuels belong in their future, Asian countries are taking a powerful message to Washington Thursday: Ship your oil and gas to us. The case for the establishment of a transpacific energy market involving the United States and Canada as exporters, and Asian countries including China, Japan and Korea as [...]

Food Prices Still Elevated

It’s been a few months since I checked the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index. The above shows the latest data (through August). As you can see, food prices, after rising very sharply in 2010, have stabilized near their recent peak level. Presumably this has been aided in part by the slowdown in the global [...]

Climate change, peak oil – the video game

The global economy is headed toward collapse, revolutions are breaking out across the Middle East, famine is ravaging Africa and the world is approaching a peak oil crisis. No, these are not headlines ripped from the news; these are the challenges facing Windows and Mac gamers in Fate of the World: Tipping Point from Red [...]

Richard Heinberg: why end of growth can mean more happiness

Richard Heinberg- whose latest book describes The End of Growth- isn’t looking for when the recession will end and we’ll get back to “normal”. He believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to [...]

Deepwater GOM: Reserves versus Production – Part 1: Thunder Horse & Mars-Ursa

The world oil and gas 2P cumulative discoveries can be modelled with 3 cycles [NE: 2P discoveries represent those resources are proven as reserves plus those that probably shall become reserves; more details here]. For crude excluding extra-heavy oil, the first cycle corresponds to surface exploration (1900-1950); the second cycle to seismic exploration starting in 1930 [...]

Jeff Rubin: Governments powerless to prevent another recession

The more you hear about the extraordinary efforts that governments around the world are taking to promote economic growth, the less confident you can be in the result. With the clock ticking on a Greek default, members of the European Monetary Union are considering sweetening their bail out pot for a second time since the [...]

Alexander Cockburn: Forget peak oil – America has a glut of the black stuff

I’VE NEVER believed in ‘peak oil’, the notion held with religious conviction by many on the left here that world production is topping out and will soon slide, plunging the world into economic chaos. There’s plenty of oil, with the constraints as always being the cost of recovery, as witness the vast new North Dakota [...]

Yergin Interview: Forget about peak oil

According to Pulitzer-winner Daniel Yergin, the fossil-fuel tipping point is a myth. He explains what that means Remember summer 2008? OK, maybe you’d rather not. It was a rough time for American drivers. An oil crisis had shot gas prices up to a wincing all-time high of $4.11 per gallon, squeezing our wallets and causing [...]

Is a world population of seven billion sustainable?

On the eve of the world’s population reaching 7 billion, leading minds discuss what the future holds for our increasingly crowded planet The world’s population is expected to hit 7 billion in October – growing to seven times the estimated one billion population of the early 1800s. As part of the University of Cambridge’s Festival of [...]

Gail Tverberg: Is Yergin Correct about Oil Supply?

On Monday after the WSJ ran Daniel Yergin’s essay, There Will Be Oil, I submitted this rebuttal. They ask to have the exclusive right to any submission for 10 days. At this point, they have neither printed it nor responded back, so it seems OK for me to post it here instead. Saturday, September 17, [...]