Peak Oil >>

If you’re anything like me, your laundry list of things to do gets a little crazy about this time of year. ...

New studies in Science and Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) find that glaciers in the Amundsen Sea region of the great Antarctic ice sheet have begun the process of irreversible collapse. ...

We used to live in a world where money was the thing that enabled things to happen. But with dollars becoming more and more scarce, success will only come if we develop a myriad of alternative economies to empower our work. ...

The stunning success of the fossil fuel divestment movement has caught many of us off-guard. ...

Researchers develop novel supercapacitor architecture that provides 2 times more energy and power compared to supercapacitors commercially available today Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a novel nanometer scale ruthenium oxide anchored nanocarbon graphene foam architecture that improves the performance of supercapacitors, a development that could mean faster acceleration...

Bourbon lovers, you’d better stock up. A day of reckoning is quickly approaching, warns Buffalo Trace, one of the oldest distilleries in the country. A whiskey shortage may soon be upon us. While bourbon producers have seen this problem coming for more than a year, its impacts are just now beginning to hit the market and will likely only […]...

The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that looms over the whole region: the growing scarcity of water. And the situation will get worse before it gets better — if it ever does get better. Years of war, careless water supply management, unchecked population growth, ill-advised […]...

Earlier this year, researchers in Iceland found a new way to transform the heat generated by volcanic magma into electricity. ...

This is where the sharing economy becomes valuable. It starts to make tangible—even desirable—the notion that shared ownership can be a good thing. ...

A weekly review including Oil and the Global Economy, The Middle East & North Africa, China, Ukraine, Quote of the Week, The Briefs ...

The mainstream media may have long forgotten about the Fukushima tragedy (as it certainly goes against the far more popular and palatable meme of a Japan “recovery” courtesy of Abenomics) but that does not mean it is fixed or even contained. Quite the contrary. As a rare update from Japan’s Jiji news agency reminds us, […]...

F unny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It’s especially funny in a time when phones have become a prosthetic extension of every human hand and pretty much the […]...

By that date, the world population is predicted to increase from 7 billion to 9 billion people, a nearly 30 percent increase. To feed all those hungry people, agricultural scientists are look-ing to biotechnology to find ways to boost crop yields and improve the nutritional value of the food farmers in Nebraska and elsewhere raise. […]...

A wide-ranging discussion with some particularly well-informed and thoughtful commentators....

The European Union is pressing the Obama administration to expand U.S. fracking, offshore oil drilling and natural gas exploration under the terms of a secret negotiation text obtained by The Huffington Post. The controversial document is an early draft of energy policies that EU negotiators hope to see adopted under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment […]...

Most people don’t have time to sit around and contemplate the commons, says Leland Maschmeyer—an award-winning creative director and author of The Triumph of the Commons—because they’re busy with the “practical and pressing” stuff of life Can we fault them? No, of course not. The commons as a worldview and set of practices can appear […]...

From Mike 11-27-2006: Ray –    I left with [a lawyer], [the] employee file [of the female employee who was suing Mike for sexual harassment] with the information that it contained large amounts of exculpatory evidence. X has reported that she has filed a sexual harrassment complaint with the Dept. of Labor but we do […]...

Two interesting things we can glean from this report in the WSJ into the economics of the oil business. The first being that some people can be a little confused about the economics of pricing, the second being that markets really do work. For the first one we have an assurance that oil prices aren’t […]...

Something is stirring in northern California and it feels a lot like the future... ...

Mathematical models may be a lot of fun, but when you use them to project the future of our civilization the results may be a bit unpleasant, to say the least. ...