Year: 2011

Geometric progressions: What you *will* learn from an oil shock

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What we have learned from past oil shocks (which few people outside the peak oil community have chosen to recognize) is pretty clear and simple – that the effect of oil on the economy, on individual lives, on the world as a whole is dramatically greater than can be expected by a direct arithmetical progression – that is, the effect of oil on whole systems is something like a geometric progression, increasing in complexity and impact well beyond what one would intuitively expect.

Oil – Democracy’s black straightjacket

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Göran Persson, Sweden’s prime minister from 1996 to 2006, coined the expression, “Those who are in debt are not free”. At that time he was talking about the nation’s debt levels but the expression can be applied more widely to also include oil.

New comments feature

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Energy Bulletin today introduces a comments section for individual articles. We hope you’ll find it easy to use and a meaningful addition. The aim is to encourage a community engaged with solution-oriented responses to the triple challenges of peak oil, climate change and economic contraction.

Beyond Affluenza and into the “New Normal”: Carolyn Baker interviews David Wann

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We should shoot for health and wellness rather than wealth and “hellness,” and agree to move, together, away from a lifestyle of deadlines and dying species and toward lifelines and living wealth…The big picture is that production and consumption will no longer be the defining characteristics of the emerging era – cultural richness, efficiency, cooperation, expression, ecological design, and biological restoration will be.

Spare capacity theory

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In truth, the spare capacity that the world cares about — that the oil futures market cares about — is not the inventory level. But rather, actual production capacity that can be brought on immediately. You can see the problem, from a price standpoint. If the world loses Libya’s 1.5 mbpd production for 90-120 days, and starts drawing down above-ground inventories, this only makes the inventory cushion that much thinner for any new supply disruptions. The question on the mind of the oil market therefore is not Mr. Fyfe’s 1.6 billion barrels of crude, but whether countries like Kuwait, the U.A.E. and especially Saudi Arabia or even Russia can lift supply. Immediately.

Wisconsin: The first stop in an American uprising?

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“We demand that before the hard-working, tax-paying families of this country are once again forced to sacrifice, the corporations who have so richly profited from our labor, our patronage, and our bailouts be compelled to pay their taxes and contribute their fair share to the continued prosperity of our nation. We will organize, we will mobilize, and we will NOT be quiet!”

Announcing Dark Mountain: Issue 2

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The point here is not to say “we were right” but simply to underline the central observation with which we launched this project: the world we live in is being turned upside down by a series of converging crises. This process has not finished: it has only just begun, and it’s likely to get faster, deeper, harder. We can choose how to react to it, but there’s no going back.