ABSTRACT This is a response to the two sets of articles written by Sajai Jose on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and on the world’s and India’s hunger crisis. It is…
Collapse is a frightening subject. The question of why collapse occurs is something I have pieced together over many years of study from a number of different sources, which I will attempt…
Strangely enough, the limit we seem to be reaching with respect to fossil fuel extraction comes from low prices. At low prices, the extraction of oil, coal, and natural gas becomes…
We often hear the statement, “When oil supply is lower, oil prices will rise because of scarcity.” Now, we are getting to see firsthand whether oil prices really do rise,…
Most people expect that our signal of an impending reduction in world oil or coal production will be high prices. Looking at historical data (for example, this post and this post), this is…
Almost everyone seems to believe that our energy problems are primarily oil-related. Electricity will save us. I recently gave a talk to a group of IEEE electricity researchers (primarily engineers) about…
In a recent post, Antonio Turiel proposed that the global peak of diesel fuel production was reached three years ago, in 2018. Turiel's idea is especially interesting since it takes…
Ten years ago this week—July 11, 2008 to be exact—the price of a barrel of oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit an intraday high of $147.27, its highest price…
The most prevalent view regarding future oil supply, as well as total energy supply, seems to be fairly closely related to that expressed by Peak Oilers. Future fossil fuel supply…
It is impossible to tell the whole oil story, but perhaps I can offer a few insights regarding where we are today. [1] We already seem to be back to the falling…
It is easy for those of us in the West to overlook how important China has become to the world economy, and also the limits it is reaching. The two…
I was recently asked to give a talk called, “The Approaching US Energy-Economic Crisis.” In other words, how might the United States encounter problems that lead to a crisis? As we…
Most of us are familiar with the Politically Correct (PC) World View. William Deresiewicz describes the view, which he calls the “religion of success,” as follows: There is a right way to…
Could declining world energy result in a turn toward authoritarianism by governments around the world? As we will see, there is no simple answer that applies to all countries. However,…
Economists have given us a model of how prices and quantities of goods are supposed to interact. Figure 1. From Wikipedia: The price P of a product is determined by…
Several years ago, Glen Sweetnam, director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of the Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy (DOE), announced that worldwide oil…
Falling interest rates have huge power. My background is as an actuary, so I am very much aware of the great power of interest rates. But a lot of people…
For a long time, hats were oversized and expensive status symbols more than tools for protecting people's heads. During the past half century or so, they have nearly disappeared. A…
Antonio Turiel keeps what I think is one of the best blogs in the world (perhaps the best) dedicated to energy and fossil fuels: The Oil Crash. Too bad that, despite…
Most people assume that oil prices, and for that matter other energy prices, will rise as we reach limits. This isn’t really the way the system works; oil prices can…
Today is Ambedkar Jayanti. It would be appropriate to take a re-look at Ambedkar's idea of nationalism in the face of virulent Hindutva nationalism in India and also on the…
Today, as the dominant global power, the US roles out its brand of unfettered capitalism across the world. US citizens constitute just five percent of the world’s population but consume 24…
I was asked to give a talk to a committee of actuaries who are concerned about modeling the financial future of programs, such as pension plans, given the energy problems…
Some people would argue that 2016 was the year that the world economy started to come apart, with the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Whether or…
Our economy is a mystery to almost everyone, including economists. Let me explain the way I see the situation: (1) The big thing that pulls the economy forward is the…
So, the USGS comes out with a press release that the media immediately diffuse in terms of a great discovery: 20 billion barrels, somewhere in Texas in a place called…
One of the most compelling charts I have ever seen is the “Growing Gap” chart that used to appear in every ASPO Newsletter. This is the one from the last…
We have been hearing a great deal about IMF concerns recently, after the release of itsOctober 2016 World Economic Outlook and its Annual Meeting October 7-9. The concerns mentioned include the…
What really causes falling productivity growth? The answer seems to be very much energy-related. Human labor by itself does not cause productivity growth. It is human labor, leveraged by various…
In a recent article on the Huffington Post, Stan Sorscher reports the graph above and asks the question of what could have happened in the early 1970s that changed everything.…
The Peak Oil story got some things right. Back in 1998, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère wrote an article published in Scientific American called, “The End of Cheap Oil.” In it they…
Does it make a difference if our models of energy and the economy are overly simple? I would argue that it depends on what we plan to use the models…
Our predicament, as we have just begun to slide down the fossil fuels thermodynamic cliff, similarly requires such a nexus if we are to succeed at a new “energy pool…
I call the process we are in an “Oil Pearl Harbour", taking place in a kind of eerie slow motion. This is no longer retrievable. Within roughly ten years the…
This three-part post was inspired by Ugo Bardi’s recent post concerning “Will Renewables Ever ReplaceFossils?” and recent discussions within Ugo’s discussion group on how is it that “Economists still don't…
Prices of oil, coal, and natural gas tend to rise and fall together–just as we would expect, if they are all responding to the same changes in debt levels, and…
The recent lower oil price predictably stimulates more consumption, but as more consumers will continue to struggle with their balance sheets, they are now more sensitive to considerable increases in…
The world’s coal resources are clearly huge. How could China, or the world in total, reach peak coal in a timeframe that makes a difference? If we look at China’s…
We are fully under the influence of petroleum demand destruction. The global oil market can't function without real oil production price discovery, which doesn't exist in the currently deflationary global…
$50 per barrel oil is clearly less impossible to live with than $30 per barrel oil, because most businesses cannot make a profit with $30 per barrel oil. But is…
For a long time, a common assumption has been that the world will eventually “run out” of oil and other non-renewable resources. Instead, we seem to be running into surpluses…
I approach the subject of the physics of energy and the economy with some trepidation. An economy seems to be a dissipative system, but what does this really mean? There…
The traditional understanding of supply and demand works in some limited cases–will a manufacturer make red dresses or blue dresses? The manufacturer’s choice doesn’t make much difference to the economic…
Usually, we don’t stop to think about how the whole economy works together. A major reason is that we have been lacking data to see long-term relationships. In this post,…
The price of oil is down. How should we expect the economy to perform in 2015 and 2016? Newspapers in the United States seem to emphasize the positive aspects of…
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