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Why The Coming Oil Crunch Will Shock The World

July 7, 2018

Anton Balazh/Shutterstock

Why The Coming Oil Crunch Will Shock The World

And why we need a new energy strategy — fast.

My years working in corporate strategy taught me that every strategic framework, no matter how complex (some I worked on were hundreds of pages long), boils down to just two things:

Where do you want to go? (Vision)
How are you going to get there? (Resources)

Vision is the easier one by far. You just dream up a grand idea about where you want the company to be at some target future date, Yes, there’s work in assuring that everybody on the management team truly shares and believes in the vision, but that’s a pretty stratightforward sales job for the CEO.

By the way, this same process applies at the individual level, too, for anyone who wants to achieve a major goal by some point in the future. The easy part of the strategy is deciding you want to be thinner, healthier, richer, or more famous.

But the much harder part, for companies and individuals alike, is figuring out ‘How to get there’. There are always fewer resources than one would prefer.

Corporate strategists always wish for more employees to implement the vision, with better training with better skills. Budgets and useful data are always scarcer than desired, as well.

Similar constraints apply to us individuals. Who couldn’t use more motivation, time and money to pursue their goals?

Put together, the right Vision coupled to a reasonably mapped set of Resources can deliver amazing results. Think of the Apollo Moon missions. You have to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there to succeed. That’s pretty straightforward, right?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End of Growth

June 23, 2018

The End of Growth

Either it ends, or we do.

More and more, I hear that folks are feeling frustrated and betrayed, combined with a sense of loss and despair. I feel this way, too.

As I’ve written recently, I observe this is due more than anything else to a widespread demoralization society is suffering from.

Certainly the statistics reflect this. Suicides in the US are up 30% since the turn of the millennium, obesity is at epidemic proportions, mortality rates are rising especially among white working-class Americans, and our national opioid addiction is now the “epidemic of epidemics.”

To these we can also add falling birthrates and the truly startling shift towards a younger age for the onset of depression; declining from age 30 now to age…14(!)

When an organism gives up on self-care, breeding, or its will to live, it’s suffering from a tremendous amount of strain that is cutting it off from its own life force. A dispirited lion wasting away in a cage has a lot in common with the average American today.

At a deep level, what ails us is not a host of unrelated, intractable problems, but the fact that our model of pursuing eternal economic growth simply isn’t working anymore. It doesn’t work for the planet’s increasingly strained ecosystems, nor does it work for the bottom 99% of folks in society (i.e., the non-elites).

The various health epidemics noted above are merely symptoms of a larger acute spiritual crisis.

But viewed at a certain angle, this may be a good sign.

Why? Because in order to shift from one model to another, the old one first has to become unbearable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Transition Towns Movement … going where?

June 7, 2018

The Transition Towns Movement … going where?

The global predicament cannot be solved other than through a Transition Towns movement, and the emergence of such a movement has been of immense importance. But I fear that the present movement is not going to do what’s needed. Four years ago I circulated reasons for this view. I recently made an effort to get current information from various people in the movement and I fear the case for doubt is even stronger today. Here is a brief indication of my main concerns.

I take it for granted we agree that the global situation requires massive system changes, including scrapping the growth economy, de-growth down to far lower per capita levels of production and consumption than rich countries have today, and the market must be prevented from determining our fate. These things cannot be done unless there is transition to a basic social pattern involving mostly small, highly self sufficient and self governing and collectivist communities that maximise use of local resources to meet local needs … and which are content with very frugal material lifestyles. Only settlements of this general kind can get the per capital resource rates down sufficiently while ensuring ecological sustainability and a high quality of life for all. (Those rates will probably have to go down to 10% of their present levels: For the reasoning see TSW: 2017a.) This does not mean deprivation or hardship or abandoning high tech, universities, sophisticated medical facilities etc. (For the detail TSW 2018a.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weather Impacted Wars & Migrations in Pre-Recorded History

May 24, 2018

Weather Impacted Wars & Migrations in Pre-Recorded History

Archaeologists working in the wetlands of Denmark have uncovered 2,000-year-old human remains are revealing that the Germanic “barbarians” were engaging in warfare in northern Europe against other barbarian tribes which had nothing to do with Rome. The research, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a unique look at how Germanic tribes memorialized their battles. The sheer magnitude of the number of remains demonstrates that the Germanic armies were clearly organized with leadership. There is no recorded history of this people so all we have to go on are the things left behind.

One thing to emerge is that the climate in Northern Europe was turning very cold. Even by 170AD, when the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was battling the Germanic attempts to invade the south most likely due to climate change. He wrote his Mediataions to keep his mind distracted from the cold at night. He sent his children home to Rome to live with their great-great-aunt Matidia because Marcus thought the evening air of the country was far too cold for them. He even asked his friend for “some particularly eloquent reading matter, something of “your own, or Cato, or Cicero, or Sallust or Gracchus—or some poet, for I need distraction, especially in this kind of way, by reading something that will uplift and diffuse my pressing anxieties.” id/ Ad Antoninum Imperator 4.1 (= Haines 1.300ff), qtd. and tr. Birley, Marcus Aurelius, 120.

It appears from this new evidence that as the weather grew colder and colder, barbarians first fought against each other for resources. It appears that after such inter-tribal warfare proved fruitless, this is when the Germanic invasions of Rome begin. The Germanic invasions of Rome began during 113 BC and lasted until they finally conquered Rome by 596 AD.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Introducing Empire Oil: A DeSmog UK Special Investigation

May 16, 2018

Introducing Empire Oil: A DeSmog UK Special Investigation

African Oil Hub

The UK likes to brag about its credentials as a global climate leader. But a new DeSmog UK investigation reveals that beneath the green veneer lies some dirty business.

At the centre of it all is the City of London and its junior stock exchange, the Alternative Investment Market (AIM).

DeSmog UK’s new three-part investigative series Empire Oil: London’s Dirty Secret, lifts the veil on a “boys’ club” that generates wealth for The City from environmentally damaging activities in politically unstable regions.

Through detailed analysis of company activity and market data, it exposes how AIM’s “light touch” regulation and complex offshore company structures create an opaque corporate environment in which conflicts of interest have been shown to thrive.

Part one, ‘Black Gold’: London’s African Oil Hub, maps the London oil companies operating in Africa. It identifies:

How the UK government provides ongoing support for international fossil fuel exploration despite its domestic and international climate change commitments;
12 private and public limited oil and gas companies headquartered in London that have operations in Africa, all of which have ties to tax-havens in British overseas territories and crown dependencies;
The failure of international regulation to tackle issues regarding a lack of transparency for companies operating in unstable markets.

Part two, T aking AIM: London’s Wild West Stock Market, lifts the lid on London’s junior stock exchange, the Alternative Investment Market (AIM). It shows:

A history of scandals and company collapse on AIM, and a lack of public sanction and enforcement;
A “light touch” regulation system behind which companies are rarely named and shamed for abusing the system;
Fundamental problems with AIM’s regulators, known as nomads, that also act as company brokers and can have vested interests in the companies they oversee;
The potential for oil, gas, and mining companies to manipulate information about assets in politically unstable regions, and the obstacles to verification for investors.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New Rare Earth Resources: A Non-Solution For A Non-Problem

May 14, 2018

New Rare Earth Resources: A Non-Solution For A Non-Problem

Above: the report on the “Financial Post” of April 13, 2018. The study that the report describes is not just a bad paper, but something highlighting the shortcomings of our whole society in understanding and managing mineral depletion.

Any report on mineral availability that starts with “a semi-infinite deposit” should be taken with great caution – it reminds of when Julian Simon said that we have oil for “six billion years”. About this report on rare earths, I’d say that calling it “clueless” is way too kind. But there is nothing to do: the term “rare” in the concept of “rare earth minerals” rattles so much inside people’s minds that they imagine both a non-existing crisis and non-existing solutions.

So, what do we have here? A grand claim about rare earth resources that comes from a paper recently published in Nature. Let’s go see it.

The term “tremendous” in the title of a scientific paper should ring more than a few bells in one’s mind, but let’s go to the meat of the paper, what did the authors found, exactly? Basically, that the concentration of rare earths and yttrium (that they call REY) in the mud of some areas at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is larger than the average concentration in the earth’s crust.

So far, so good. Then the authors go on to calculate the total amounts of rare earths that could be found in the large areas examined and conclude that these can be considered as “semi-infinite” resources. (the term is straight from the paper, it is not an invention of the journalist of the “Financial Post.”).

At this point, you would ask at what cost these “semi-infinite” resources could be recovered, but this question is wholly ignored in the paper. The only instance where the term “cost” appears is when they say:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The coming boom in gold prices. . .

April 26, 2018

The coming boom in gold prices. . .

In June 1884, a local farmer named Jan Gerritt Bantjes discovered gold on his property in a quiet corner of the South African Republic.

Though no one had any idea at the time, Bantjes’ farm was located on a vast geological formation known as the Witwatersrand Basin… which just happens to contain the world’s largest known gold reserves.

Within a few months, other local farmers started discovering gold… kicking off a full-fledged gold rush.

Just over a decade later, South Africa became the largest gold producer in the world… and the city of Johannesburg grew from absolutely nothing to a thriving boomtown.

This area is singlehandedly responsible for 40% of all the gold discovered in human history – some 2 billion ounces (or $2.6 trillion of wealth at today’s gold price).

And while the Witwatersrand Basin is still being mined to this day, it’s not as active as it used to be.

Gold production in Witwatersrand peaked in 1970, when miners pulled a whopping 1,000 metric tons of gold out of the ground.

A few decades later in 2016, the same area produced just 166 tonnes– a decline of 83%.

That’s not unusual in the natural resource business.

Whereas it takes nature hundreds of millions of years to deposit minerals deep in the earth’s crust, human beings only require a few decades to pull most of it out.

This creates the constant need for mining companies to explore for more and more major discoveries.

Problem is– that’s not happening. Mining companies aren’t finding anymore vast deposits.

According to Pierre Lassonde, founder of the gold royalty giant Franco-Nevada and former head of Newmont Mining–

If you look back to the 70s, 80s and 90s, in every one of those decades, the industry found at least one 50+ million-ounce gold deposit, at least ten 30+ million ounce deposits, and countless 5 to 10 million ounce deposits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stop and Assess

April 23, 2018

Stop and Assess

America has become Alzheimer Nation. Nothing is remembered for more than a few minutes. The news media, which used to function as a sort of collective brain, is a memory hole that events are shoved down and extinguished in. An attack in Syria, you ask? What was that about? Facebook stole your…what? Four lives snuffed out in a… a what? Something about waffles? Trump said… what? Let’s pause today and make an assessment of where things stand in this country as Winter finally coils into Spring.

As you might expect, a nation overrun with lawyers has litigated itself into a cul-de-sac of charges, arrests, suits, countersuits, and allegations that will rack up billable hours until the Rockies tumble. The best outcome may be that half the lawyers in this land will put the other half in jail, and then, finally, there will be space for the rest of us to re-connect with reality.

What does that reality consist of? Troublingly, an economy that can’t go on as we would like it to: a machine that spews out ever more stuff for ever more people. We really have reached limits for an industrial economy based on cheap, potent energy supplies. The energy, oil especially, isn’t cheap anymore. The fantasy that we can easily replace it with wind turbines, solar panels, and as-yet-unseen science projects is going to leave a lot of people not just disappointed but bereft, floundering, and probably dead, unless we make some pretty severe readjustments in daily life.

We’ve been papering this problem over by borrowing so much money from the future to cover costs today that eventually it will lose its meaning as money — that is, faith that it is worth anything. That’s what happens when money is just a representation of debt that can’t be paid back.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to Find Essential Resources in Your Area (Before You Ever Need to Scavenge)

April 18, 2018

How to Find Essential Resources in Your Area (Before You Ever Need to Scavenge)

What if things really went crazy and you were in a situation in which you needed to scavenge? Would you know where to find the things you might need, like food, drugs, or water? This useful article will help you find and record the essential resources in your area – while the information is still easy to obtain. ~ Editor

You need to know where essential resources in your area are located. During a disaster you never know what you might need, so grab every bit of free information about where you live that might conceivably be useful after the SHTF while you still can.

GPS mapping may or may not be available to you during an emergency so we recommend that you obtain the following addresses on paper, but also in computer files. The maps presented in Part 3 will be very useful in navigating your way to these locations should your GPS not be working.

You should also compile the following lists into computer files and print them out. I recommend you use duckduckgo.com for Internet searching because they don’t track or save your searches. Given that the local telephone book no longer exists you can try yellowpages.com/ for many of these.

Put all the lists in one or more 3 ring binders with tabs as appropriate. Store all the lists and the maps in one place. Also, store these maps and lists on USB flash drives or miniSD cards as appropriate to your needs. See Part 2 of this series for computer storage suggestions. If your phone will allow you to do so, you should also store selected files on your smartphone along with the appropriate app to read them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

John Butman: New World, Inc.

March 27, 2018

Photos.com/Jupiter Images

John Butman: New World, Inc.

From its start, resources have driven America’s fortunes

We all learned in grade school that the Pilgrims sailed to North America to escape religious persecution.

That’s wasn’t necessarily the case, explains author John Butman. At least, it certainly isn’t the whole story.

In fact, the Pilgrim’s voyage to the New World was a seventeenth-century entrepreneurial start-up. It was funded by nearly one hundred investors, who expected a profit on their contributed capital.

This fascinating re-visitation of the origins of America, told in full in Butman’s book New World, Inc., highlights how nearly every human endeavor throughout history has been rooted in gaining or maintaining access to resources.

Of course, back in the days of the Pilgrims, there were only about 0.5 billion humans on the Earth. As we write about on this site, resources are likely to play an even more influential role in the future as the planet goes from 7.5 billion souls today to 10 billion by 2050…

By the 1500s, England’s main export was woolen cloth, mostly to continental Europe. But in 1550, for a number of reasons, the bottom fell out of the market and they weren’t selling enough, The merchants and the leading business people of the day,were very gravely concerned about the economics of the country. Population was on the rise at that point and there was a strong divide between the Gentry and the common people. And as the economics got worse, the social situation got very tricky, and there was really severe social unrest. So there was a real need to find new sources of revenue, new sources of jobs — and so that’s what directed their focus overseas.

After 1600, there were many ventures to America. At first, they’d simply send ships over to America leaving early in the spring, ultimately March or April – the trip would take six to eight weeks. The plan was trade with the Indians for certain commodities like fish, furs and sassafras (which was a very prized herb, it was thought to cure almost everything), and then fill up the hull of their ships, get back, sell the goods in England and on the continent, and make a profit. But they discovered that it was just not sustainable. It was just too risky: on any given trip when sailing over to America, you couldn’t be sure that you would get enough of what you needed to return with.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Economy is a Degenerative System

March 24, 2018

Our Economy is a Degenerative System

Impacts of resource hungry exploitative economies

“What is 120 times the size of London? The answer: the land or ecological footprint required to supply London’s needs.” — Herbert Giradet

Our ecological footprint exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate. A number of useful indicators and frameworks have been developed to measure the ecological impact that humanity and its dominant economic system with its patterns of production, consumption and waste-disposal are having on the planet and its ecosystems. The measure and methodology for ecological footprinting translates the resource use and the generation of waste of a given population (eg: community, city, or nation) into the common denominator of bio-productive land per person, measured in Global Hectares (Gha), that are needed to provide these resources and absorb those wastes.

Much of the educational power of this tool is its capacity to compare between how much bio-productive land exists on the planet with how much bio-productive land would be needed to sustain current levels of consumption. In addition it also helps us to highlight the stark inequalities in ecological impact that exists between different countries.

Source: Global Footprint Network

Ecological Footprinting is basically an accounting tool that compares how much nature we have and how much nature we use. He are currently using about 50% more ecological resources than nature is regenerating naturally every year.

Source: Global Footprint Network

This point of spending more than is coming in every year — or living of the capital rather than the interest — was reached by humanity in the late-1960s. It is called Ecological Overshoot and every year since Earth Overshoot Day — the day when humanity as a whole has already used up the bio-productivity of Earth in that year — is a little earlier. Here is a little video (3:30 min.) to explain the concepts of ecological overshoot and footprint.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Paul Ehrlich: ‘Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades’

March 24, 2018

Paul Ehrlich: ‘Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades’

Fifty years after the publication of his controversial book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge

The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Linh Pham/Getty Images

Ashattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.

In May, it will be 50 years since the eminent biologist published his most famous and controversial book, The Population Bomb. But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever.

Prof Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change.

Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but “the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual ‘world destroyer’ meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen”.

The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne Ehrlich in 1968, predicted “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s – a fate that was avoided by the green revolution in intensive agriculture.

Many details and timings of events were wrong, Paul Ehrlich acknowledges today, but he says the book was correct overall.

“Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.”

Ehrlich has been at Stanford University since 1959 and is also president of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, which works “to reduce the threat of a shattering collapse of civilisation”.

“It is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems,” he says. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF

February 11, 2018

SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF

Are you prepared for the extreme violence that is likely to come your way if the SHTF? No matter what your plan is, it’s entirely probable that at some point, you’ll be the victim of violence or have to perpetrate violence to survive. As always, Selco is our go-to guy on SHTF reality checks and this thought-provoking interview will shake you to your core.

If you don’t know Selco, he’s from Bosnia and he lived through a year in a city that was blockaded with no utilities, no deliveries of supplies, and no services. In his interviews, he shares what the scenarios the rest of us theorize about were REALLY like. He mentioned to me recently that most folks aren’t prepared for the violence that is part and parcel of a collapse, which brings us to today’s interview.

How prevalent was violence when the SHTF in Bosnia?

It was wartime and chaos, from all conflicts in those years in the Balkan region Bosnian conflict was most brutal because of multiple reasons, historical, political and other.

To simplify the explanation why violence was common and very brutal, you need to picture a situation where you are “bombarded” with huge amount of information (propaganda) which instills in you very strong feelings of fear and hate.

Out of fear and hate, violence grows easy and fast, and over the very short period of time you see how people around you (including you) do things that you could not imagine before.

I can say that violence was almost an everyday thing in the whole spectrum of different activities because it was a fight for survival.

Again, whenever (and wherever) you put people in a region without enough resources, you can expect violence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is it possible for everyone to live a good life within our planet’s limits?

February 8, 2018

Is it possible for everyone to live a good life within our planet’s limits?

Imagine a country that met the basic needs of its citizens – one where everyone could expect to live a long, healthy, happy and prosperous life. Now imagine that same country was able to do this while using natural resources at a level that would be sustainable even if every other country in the world did the same.

Such a country does not exist. Nowhere in the world even comes close. In fact, if everyone on Earth were to lead a good life within our planet’s sustainability limits, the level of resources used to meet basic needs would have to be reduced by a factor of two to six times.

These are the sobering findings of research that my colleagues and I have carried out, recently published in the journal Nature Sustainability. In our work, we quantified the national resource use associated with meeting basic needs for a large number of countries, and compared this to what is globally sustainable. We analysed the relationships between seven indicators of national environmental pressure (relative to environmental limits) and 11 indicators of social performance (relative to the requirements for a good life) for over 150 countries.

The thresholds we chose to represent a “good life” are far from extravagant – a life satisfaction rating of 6.5 out of 10, living 65 years in good health, the elimination of poverty below the US$1.90 a day line, and so on.

Nevertheless, we found that the universal achievement of these goals could push humanity past multiple environmental limits. CO₂ emissions are the toughest limit to stay within, while fresh water use is the easiest (ignoring issues of local water scarcity).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Inefficient productivity or productive inefficiency?

February 6, 2018

Inefficient productivity or productive inefficiency?

New research demonstrates – again – how deceptive the concepts of productivity and efficiency are in agriculture. Huge increases in labor productivity and modest increases in land productivity are gained by a massive increase of use of external resources, while natural capital is depleted. Is that efficient?

There is a growing body of research measuring resource flows to better understand the impact of developments. It is argued that only if economic growth can become substantially decoupled from material use, waste, and emissions, it can be sustainable. By measuring total use of resources, the total social metabolism, of the economy and not just measuring one parameter, one can avoid being distracted by the fact that usage of one resource has declined, while others have increased.

A sub set of the metabolism of society is the agrarian metabolism which refers to the exchange of energy and materials between a given society and its agrarian environment. In the article The agrarian metabolism as a tool for assessing agrarian sustainability, and its application to Spanish agriculture (1960-2008) in ECOLOGY AND SOCIETY, January 2018, Gloria I. Guzman (Universidad Pablo de Olavide) and colleagues assess how the metabolism of Spanish agriculture has changed through the increased use of mechanization, irrigation, chemical fertilizers and massive use of imported animal feed, to mention the most important drivers.

We are told again and again that modern agriculture and the Green revolution are wonders of efficiency and productivity. But when one look closer into the Spanish figures they give a different picture.

The researchers studied the use of external inputs such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), carbon (C), and energy flows, as well as the “fund elements” that they sustain such as soil, biodiversity, and woodland. The results show that the growing use of external inputs has broken the equilibrium between land and biomass uses required by traditional farming and broken or made redundant internal loops of energy and nutrients.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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