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 […]

Max Keiser Interviews Michael Ruppert

BP Oil Disaster a Symptom of Peak Oil

The Resilient Household

Every day brings further evidence of economic and financial fragility. The International Energy Agency reports that global oil production has peaked, which combined with a looming peak in energy obtained from coal means an end to economic growth. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is creating $600 billion of new money to purchase US government debt, driving […]

New protests erupt in Yemen

Dozens of activists calling for the ouster of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president, have clashed with government supporters in Sanaa, the country’s capital. Plainclothes police also attacked the demonstrators, who marched to the Egyptian embassy in Sanaa on Saturday chanting “Ali, leave leave” and “Tunisia left, Egypt after it and Yemen in the coming future”. The […]

Egypt: 73 dead; 2,000 injured

AT least 73 people have been killed across Egypt and thousands injured in anti-government riots since Friday, according to medical officials. At least 62 people were killed on Friday and 11 yesterday, and thousands injured in clashes between protesters and police, in unprecedented rallies demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Medical and security officials […]

Jeff Rubin: Triple Digit Oil This Quarter

Jeff Rubin was the first mainstream economist that I recall warning us that $100 oil was only a few years away. That was shortly after the year 2000 when talk of $100 oil made everyone think that you wore a tinfoil hat around your house. Of course Rubin was correct. He had discovered the writing […]

Abu Dhabi will convert 500 taxis, public vehicles to natural gas

Abu Dhabi Media company’s English publication, reports that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) aims to convert over 500 government vehicles and taxis, including luxury models like the Infiniti G37 sedan, to natural gas by the end of 2012. To date, 177 vehicles have undergone the CNG conversion. ADNOC intends to eventually offer the […]

Global Population Pressures

One of Obama’s first acts upon assuming office in 2009 was the restoration of funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). George W. Bush had withheld some $244 million in aid to the UNFPA over the previous seven years. UNFPA works with developing countries around the world to “reduce poverty and to ensure that […]

Max Kaiser interviews James Howard Kunstler

Max’s guest for this edition of Press TV’s On the Edge with Max Kaiser is James Howard Kunstler from kunstler.com. The focus of the program is on peak oil story where James defines as the time when you have just reached the maximum amount of production that you are ever going to get to and […]

USA Secretly Backs Egyptian uprising

The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police. On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow […]

An Export Land Model Analysis for the USA-Part 1

This is particularly important in the period after peak oil, when oil production begins to decline from the exporting countries and but the domestic consumption rate may still be increasing. The Export Land Model shows that the rate of decline in oil exports will be even faster than the decline in production if there is […]

A Tangled Mess – Why Oil Mixes With Gold

Considerably higher oil prices are coming to the world at the worst possible time. Not only is the world far from being ready with oil alternatives when demand is on the brink of surpassing production, but this is happening at a time when the world economy is in danger of implosion caused by massive debts. […]

China warns of pressure on food supply in next 5 yrs

China faces great pressure in securing its food supply in the next five years due to accelerating domestic demand, a senior official was quoted as saying in local media on Saturday. Chen Xiaohua, a vice agricultural minister, said he expected China’s consumption of grains to grow by 4 billion kgs a year between 2011 to […]

Cold fusion: reality or utopia?

Italian physicists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi have invented a cold fusion reactor which fits on a table and requires no unprocurable components. According to the authors, such a device installed at a factory has been warming up water day and night over the last two years, producing 12,400 watts of heat with an input […]

Oil and Food Prices

Several years ago National Geographic magazine published an article on oil that included a stunning photo of mature steer and the barrels of oil needed to grow an animal to that size. I recently went looking for that picture, found it, and post it here because it hasn’t lost its impact or relevance one bit. […]

John Michael Greer : The power that remains

The passing of fitness icon Jack Lalanne, who died last Sunday at the age of 96, called up a modest flurry of tributes and retrospectives in the media, and a great many of these made a point I don’t think their authors had in mind. If I’d tried to dream up an imaginary example of […]

A Brief History of Oil: The Titan

More than any other man, John D. Rockefeller changed the face of American business. His focus on cost cutting, cash flow and balance sheet strength, combined with his unbridled ambition to control not only every level of oil production at his company, but indeed the entire oil industry itself, wrote the playbook by which all […]

A New Look At Peak Oil’s Impact: Everyday Toiletries

So let’s take a look at another of post-peak oil’s impacts … a much more mundane example inside the home. (I promise that before too long there will be some logical continuity to all of this. For now, I think it’s important to just a sampling of how Peak Oil is going to cut across […]

Where the oil is: 6 huge untapped fields

Alarms about peak oil are still sounding in certain circles, but the world, for now, is still awash in petroleum. There are many oil reserves around the globe that remain untapped, and explorers continue to discover new fields deep beneath the earth’s surface. Depending on how the controversy surrounding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge turns […]

James Howard Kunstler: Peak Oil and Our Financial Decline

In this fifth video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, author, blogger and social critic James Howard Kunstler opens up on two circumstances he sees running neck and neck “that are going to put us out of business as an advanced industrial civilization”—the “fiasco” […]

Four Reasons Why “Progress” Isn’t Always Progress

From the time we were children, we’ve been taught that “progress”—as defined by capitalist American culture—is a good thing. Progress is manifest destiny. Progress is civilizing the uncivilized, elevating the inhabitants of the third world and taming the “savages” that lived off the land. Progress is taming nature, not being at its mercy. Progress means […]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Is It Time To Abandon the Idea of Phasing Out Oil and Gas?
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