Life on the human planet

A week ago, I wrote an article on the Essentials of Human Life. I concluded that these essentials are “air, water, energy (which includes both heat and light and cooling where necessary), shelter, nature, sustenance (food), transportation, communication, health, cleanliness, community, pleasure, and learning.” These are the things that can make life a pleasure. But […]

Trump Poised to Offer Bridge Loans to Ailing Oil Companies

The Trump administration may announce as soon as Thursday a plan to offer loans to the ailing oil industry possibly in exchange for a financial stake, according to two people familiar with the matter. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette have already briefed President Donald Trump on a plan to provide financial […]

Kunstler Chatting with Charles Hugh Smith from the OfTwoMinds Blog

Charles Hugh Smith founded his blog, Of Two Minds, in 2005 after 17 years of free-lance journalism in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of Two Minds has grown to thousands of posts that have logged tens of millions of page views on his site and many others such as Zero Hedge and Peak Prosperity. He […]

The Decline of the Nation-State

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued something very close to a declaration of independence for the largest U.S. state while speaking on MSNBC earlier this month. Noting that California has been forced in a position of “competing against other states, other nations, against our own government” for badly needed personal protective equipment to fight the coronavirus, […]

On the Far Side of Silence

Over the last few months I’ve been discussing the forgotten (or, rather, systematically ignored) history of American occultism, partly because it’s interesting in its own right and partly because it offers a good functional escape hatch out of the rigidly dualistic vision that has so tight a stranglehold on so many people’s ideas of the […]

(Still) Against Degrowth

Protesters march during a “Youth Strike 4 Climate” protest march on March 6, 2020 in Brussels. … [+] AFP via Getty Images Was anyone smarter than Freeman Dyson? In 1965 a Nobel Prize was awarded to three physicists who developed the field of quantum electrodynamics; but it was Dyson who made these men’s disparate theories […]

This Historic Oil Price Crash Will Create A New Era For Energy

In the last couple of months, the global energy industry has been flipped on its head. As the novel coronavirus pandemic ravaged economies around the world, the energy industry took a particularly brutal hit, made infinitely worse by an oil price war between the leading OPEC+ countries of Saudi Arabia and Russia. In the severe […]

For Oil and Its Dependents, It’s Code Blue

If oil has been laid low by the coronavirus, then the nations whose economies most depend on it might soon be on ventilators. By any prognosis the great oil price collapse of 2020 has pushed the world’s most volatile commodity into Code Blue. No one expects oil, its peddlers or consumers to emerge wealthier or […]

Oil Is Crashing Again. It Could Take Whole Governments Down With It.

The past few years have vindicated many long-ignored prophecies of impending catastrophe (from the political to climatic to epidemiological). But “peak oil” isn’t one of them. Far from running out of that growth-fueling, climate-destroying black gold, humanity has more crude on its hands than it knows what to do with. The world-historic scale of the […]

Reimagine our priorities

Times of crisis stress a culture, and produce shifts in the balance of power within a society. As the Black Plague burned through Europe in the 1300’s, killing many peasants, it created a labor shortage that forcing society to shift from a feudal economy to one based on wages. When the Soviet Union collapsed at […]

Collapse: the way we imagined it, and the way it was.

  Even those of us who could see some kind of collapse coming (the “collapsniks”) were taken by surprise by the form it took. But, as always, for everything that happens there has to be a reason for it to happen. Above: the Seneca Curve. Collapses happen, it is a rule of life, as the […]

Oil Price Collapse –> Next Peak Oil Frenzy?

Guest “oil’s well that ends well” by David Middleton The ChiCom-19 hostage crisis certainly makes strange bedfellows. Over the past few weeks I have been agreeing with Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price on the need to end the hostage crisis now. In the 35 years, Mr. Price has served as a county commissioner, I […]

Kunstler: The Great Conundrum

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, Joni trilled half a century ago. Another song, by CSN, went, it’s been a long time coming, it’s gonna be a long time gone. Boomers. Back in the day – before they invented the hedge fund, glyphosate, and political […]

Saudi Arabia’s pyrrhic oil war triumph

The kingdom may consider it has prevailed over Russia and US shale producers in the short-term, but its longer-term prospects are clouded in uncertainty Riyadh has scored some impressive victories in the month-long oil price war it and Russia unleashed, and which has ended in a three-way truce of sorts, crucially also involving the US. […]

When oil became waste

The magnitude of how damaged the energy industry is came into full view on April 20 when the benchmark price of U.S. oil futures, which had never dropped below $10 a barrel in its nearly 40-year history, plunged to a previously unthinkable minus $38 a barrel. FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed oil pump jack is […]

Coronavirus Pandemic Could Spark Famines Of “Biblical Proportions”

What the head of the UN’s World Food Program just said should be making front page headlines all over the globe.  Because if what he is claiming is true, we are about to see global food shortages on a scale that is absolutely unprecedented in modern history.  Even before COVID-19 arrived, armies of locusts the […]

The Next Chapter of the Oil Crisis: The Industry Shuts Down

Negative oil prices, ships dawdling at sea with unwanted cargoes, and traders getting creative about where to stash oil. The next chapter in the oil crisis is now inevitable: great swathes of the petroleum industry are about to start shutting down. The economic impact of the coronavirus has ripped through the oil industry in dramatic […]

Satellite images reveal huge amounts of methane leaking from U.S. oil fields

Oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin, the largest oil-producing area in the United States, are spewing more than twice the amount of methane emissions into the atmosphere than previously thought — enough wasted energy to power 7 million households in Texas for a year. That’s the result of a new study by researchers […]

Fossil Lobby Demands Massive Deregulation in ‘Crass Attempt to Exploit Global Pandemic’

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) called on the federal government to suspend more than 30 environmental regulations, laws, and policies in response to the coronavirus pandemic, in a 13-page letter issued March 27 and released last week by Environmental Defence. The missive to Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan and seven other cabinet ministers […]

Is this the end of the oil era?

Is the concept of “peak oil” dead? Maybe, but not for long. What is happening now already occurred 25 years ago. We are living through a zombie oil market, a return of the oil era circa 1995, the last time demand was only 70 million barrels per day (bpd). Until this pandemic-induced crash, we were […]

Are We Nearing Peak Oil Supply?

Are we now deep in the abyss? Up to our necks in it, if the oil price is any guide. Brent has now tested sub-U.S.$20 a barrel in this downturn and WTI sub-zero, albeit briefly and in somewhat freakish circumstances. Where are the signs of stress across the oil value chain? And what are the […]

Why Oil at Negative $100 Isn’t a Crazy Bet Anymore

Orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth, the Sentinel-1 satellites are the eyes in the sky that show why U.S. oil prices dropped below zero and why much of the world is likely to follow. The satellite bounces radar signals off the massive metal tanks that store oil and that data is used to calculate […]

Peak Oil, a Specimen Case of Apocalypic Thinking

Prophets of doom held that looming shortages of oil would plunge us back into a Paleolithic standard of living. What’s interesting is why the prophecies were accepted—and whether we’ve learned anything at all from it Photo: Khalid Guerdou/Getty Images Predictions of when we would run out of oil have been around for a century, but […]

What’s Collapsing Can’t Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy

Pulling the sleeve down to hide the tracks doesn’t mean the addict is cured. Just for a change of pace, can we be bluntly honest about the U.S. economy? It’s difficult to do because we’ve chosen to ignore all the realities, much like a family that hides all the addictions, drunkenness and lies in a dysfunctional […]

Insight Conversation: Jeff Currie, Goldman Sachs

With the cuts in capex and crude oil production shut-ins, could we see a sharp rebound at some point? It’s important to emphasize that when you shut in oil production, it’s very different from shutting in, let’s say, a manufacturing process. It’s going to take time to bring it back online. We don’t know what […]

Five threats to US food supply chains

The coronavirus pandemic has upended food supply chains, led to closures of meat producing plants and left Americans with the unsettling experience of seeing empty shelves at supermarkets. Coupled with the run on toilet paper that led to severe shortages, recent events are leading Americans to wonder if the nation’s food supply is secure. Experts […]

Collapse: The Coronavirus is not a Cause, it is a Trigger

“Indeed, the coming crisis might turn out to be so bad to push us back to the Middle Ages. But it is also true that all major epidemics in history have seen a robust rebound after the collapse. Consider that, in the mid-14th century, the “black death” killed perhaps 40% of the population of Europe […]

Explaining Negative Oil Prices

The most simple explanation for negative oil prices is that midstream players are now paying buyers to take oil volumes away as the physical storage limit will be reached. That’s what Rystad Energy’s Oil Market Analyst Louise Dickson said in a statement sent to Rigzone, adding that “top dollar” was being paid. “Pricey shut-ins or […]

Heinberg: How much is a barrel of oil worth?

If you were an oil futures trader wanting to unload a May 1 contract on Monday, April 20, a barrel of oil was worth $-37. That’s right, traders were, in effect, willing to pay someone—anyone—to take ownership of a commodity that powers modern industrial society, and has suddenly become too abundant. The reasons for this […]

A Conversation with Ray Dalio

Bloomberg Editor-at-Large Erik Schatzker talks with famed American investor and Bridgewater Associates Founder, Ray Dalio. Together they discuss the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on markets, bonds, and longer-term implications he sees for inflation, trade, globalization, and fiscal policy.

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