Playing Whack-a-Mole with Pro-Growth Bias

MP3•Episode home•Series home•Public Feed By World Population Balance. Discovered by Player FM and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Player FM, and audio streamed directly from their servers. Dropping birth rates are good news, not a “slump” we should hope is temporary. Yet news reports, headlines and commentaries about this are […]

Why Humans are Unfit to Live on This Planet

Cassandra’s legacy Let it be known that you are lofty as the heavens! Let it be known that you are broad as the earth! Let it be known that you destroy the rebel lands! Let it be known that you roar at the foreign lands! Let it be known that you crush heads! Let it […]

When the World Stops Growing

For most of human history, the world population has been much smaller than it currently is — the population has grown substantially only in the last two centuries, as technological and medicinal advances increased life expectancy. Social scientists now say that this growth will end within this century, according to a recent article in The […]

Flaring, or Why So Much Gas Is Going Up in Flames

If you take a drive along the well-worn highways of West Texas, orange flames will punctuate your journey. Those are gas flares, and they’re lighting up the skies above West Texas oilfields like never before as drillers produce crude faster than pipes can be laid to haul the attendant natural gas away. Oil drillers say […]

USA Oil Production

The Real Reason Why US Oil Production Has Peaked Raymond James recently estimated that over the last three years the U.S. decline rate for oil has doubled from 1.6 to 3.2 million barrels per day. The drilled but uncompleted well inventory (“DUC”) is back to normal, so the number of wells being drilled and the […]

Trump EPA Attempts to Erase Methane Rules for Oil and Gas Industry

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency released its proposed rule to completely eliminate regulations for methane emissions from the oil and gas industry across the entire supply chain and to remove all federal rules – for both methane and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – for facilities in the transportation and storage segment of the supply chain. […]

The CIA’s Dark Prince Doesn’t Want War With Iran

Two comments last week highlight the dangerous security impasse in which Iran and the U.S. find themselves. The first was from Iran’s spiritual leader, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, that maritime security will remain at risk if its oil exports continue to be compromised. The second was from U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, that […]

Permian Basin Scenarios

Seems we don’t know what future completion rates will be in the Permian basin or anywhere.  There are many different opinions on whether the completion rate might increase, decrease or stay the same.  In my view, the conservative assumption is to assume they will not go up or down, but that the completion rate will […]

Heinberg: Two Arguments for Localism

Dear faithful readers, My essay this month was written in response to a piece by Brian Tokar on the subject of local-versus-global action. Great Transition Network, which invited these essays, also published contributions from Helena Norberg Hodge, David Bollier and others. You can read the whole discussion here. Meanwhile, my book project is advancing by […]

Aramco IPO Could be Heading to Asia

Grand scale (ad)ventures or Mega Projects have been making headlines for decades, while looking at Dubai, Doha or Riyadh. Still, the Aramco IPO story, proponed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, beats them all. The battle for a stake in the oil world’s largest cookie-jar, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company Saudi Aramco, keeps fueling […]

The Real Reason the Climate Movement Has Failed

My new book, Abolish Oil Now, will talk about why the climate movement has failed and what we can do instead to win. If you think that climate change is turning out to be worse than anyone had thought, it’s not hard to find people who agree with you. Just check out some recent headlines: […]

A math equation that predicts the end of humanity

The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the “doomsday argument,” a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years. The doomsday argument doesn’t tell what’s going to kill […]

Kunstler: Lost at Sea

In these horse latitudes of late summer, with the seas becalmed and the riggings a’creak, the Resistance’s ship-of-the-line (a.k.a. the Democratic Party) drifts ever further out of sight of land. Even so, a few of its crew members have jumped ship: New York’s mayor, stowaway Bill de Blasio, may have been shoved overboard. Former Colorado […]

Half of Venezuela’s Oil Rigs May Shut Down If US Waivers Lapse

A looming U.S. sanctions deadline is threatening to clobber Venezuela’s dwindling oil-rig fleet and hamper energy production in the nation with the world’s largest crude reserves. Almost half the rigs operating in Venezuela will shut down by Oct. 25 if the Trump administration doesn’t extend a 90-day waiver from its sanctions, according to data compiled […]

Trying to get a grip on actual oil demand

The current quarter will be key in shaping the oil supply-demand balances for 2019, according to the latest outlooks from the world’s three major oil-forecasting agencies. If the big inventory draws they expect fail to materialise, Opec’s goal of pulling down excess stockpiles will be delayed again. The International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information […]

China’s Very Ambitious Transportation Revolution

The proverb goes that when China coughs, the world catches the flu. The unprecedented economic development of the world’s most populous country has led to a steep increase in national and personal wealth. An obvious beneficiary of economic growth is the automotive industry. Car ownership has grown to almost 58 per 1000 citizens and, currently, […]

Prophets of doom: Is the end of the world near?

Armageddon didn’t happen in 1982 as predicted by American evangelist Pat Robertson (born in 1930). Then, he prophesied again and again, and flopped again and again. Even in predicting the end of the world, Americans and Russians were rivals. Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916), a Russian mystic who was assassinated in 1916, prophesied that fire would extinguish […]

US To “Drown The World” In Oil

The U.S. could “drown the world in oil” over the next decade, which, according to Global Witness, would “spell disaster” for the world’s attempts to address climate change. The U.S. is set to account for 61 percent of all new oil and gas production over the next decade. A recent report from this organization says […]

Jeff Rubin on Peak Oil

Jeff Rubin waxes philosophical on the need for a major paradigm shift in our attitudes, and suggests that we can have the world we want if we are willing to let go of the world we have.

Kunstler: There Is No Normal

The wheel of time rolls forward, never retracing its path, but because it is a wheel, and we are riding in it, a persistent illusion persuades us that the landscape is recognizably the same, and that our doings within the regular turning of the seasons seem comfortably normal. There is no normal. There is for […]

Iran Warns US Against Seizing Oil Tanker

Iran warned the U.S. against apprehending a supertanker carrying the Middle East country’s oil, leaving the fate of the vessel uncertain as it sailed east into the Mediterranean Sea from Gibraltar, where it been detained since last month. The tanker, formerly called the Grace 1 and now known as the Adrian Darya 1, was signaling […]

PetroChina Suspends Venezuelan Oil Imports In Huge Blow To Maduro

Even if China continues to thwart US sanctions on Iran, in the case of Venezuela Trump appears to be gaining the upper hand. Bloomberg reported Friday that China National Petroleum Corp. (parent company of oil giant PetroChina Ltd) — the country’s biggest energy company — is for the first time in over a decade backing away from Vezenuelan crude, canceling shipments […]

What’s Wrong With the Global Economy?

Global markets were seized by fear last week that trade wars were slowing growth in Germany, China and the United States. But the story here is bigger than President Trump and his tariffs. The postwar miracle is over. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the world economy has been struggling against four headwinds: deglobalization of […]

World Futures Institute: Energy – Part One

Many columns ago a list of 18 areas was identified affecting the future of humanity and the earth. Among the sublevels identified were energy storage (especially long term), energy conversion, energy system efficiency and energy distribution. As human beings we use energy. At the simplest of levels we use the energy contained in food to […]

Yemen Rebel Drone Attack Targets Remote Saudi Oil Field

Drones launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels attacked a massive oil and gas field deep inside of Saudi Arabia’s sprawling desert on Saturday, causing what the kingdom described as a “limited fire” in the second-such recent attack on its crucial energy industry. The attack on the Shaybah oil field, which produces some 1 million barrels of […]

OPEC July Production Data

All data below, unless otherwise specified are from the latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report. All data is through July and is thousand barrels per day. OPEC crude oil production was down 246,000 barrels per day in July’ There is often a difference between what secondary sources say OPEC produces and what the countries themselves […]

Overpopulation threatens the world’s food supply

That was the front-page headline in the New York Times last Thursday, August 8th, announcing a new report from the IPCC, “Climate Change and Land.” I’m kidding, of course. The actual headline read “Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns,” and the article did not mention population once. A young girl stands […]

The Gas Field Next Door

More Americans than previously estimated live within a city block of aged, underground natural gas storage wells, some more than a century old and most of them lacking modern designs to prevent major leaks, according to researchers from Harvard University. Using satellite imaging, researchers estimate that 20,000 homes and about 53,000 people across six states […]

Fossil Fuel Free: A Plan to Phase Out China’s ICEVs

The Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation (iCET), a leading U.S. and China based think tank focusing on Chinese environmental policy, published a report in May 2019 detailing the structure and feasibility of China’s ambitious goal to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) in favor of new energy vehicles (NEVs) by 2050. The report […]

Get Ready for $2 Gas

The summer of 2019 is starting to look like the summer of 2016. That year, gasoline prices started below $2 a gallon in winter. They rallied slightly into the summer but hugged the $2 line for most of the next nine months. U.S. gas prices dropped 13 cents this month, compared to July, and the […]

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