Improved job creation data in the US along with strong Asian demand led to a run on oil prices this week taking the price of a barrel beyond $87 and out of the 'goldilocks' $70-$80 territory of re

This is a case study in which you are invited to answer the question, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?"

When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric's grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed.

One of the world’s foremost educators on Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, in an exclusive interview for MMNews: “We are currently seeing the end of economic growth as we have known it.” Further on, he talks about the financial / economic crisis, monetary changes vis-à-vis a shrinking energy supply, and the Century of Declines: “Peak Everything.”

A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Droughts
-Eruption in Kyrgzstan

A group of social and natural scientists and scholars in the humanities is starting the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). The admittedly ambitious aim is to change human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization.

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Some of the species of life that share this planet really want to be our friends, and have gone to great evolutionary lengths to prove it.

In Europe and North America, eating fresh perishable produce out of season usually means hauling it in refrigerated containers from regions where it’s in season, or growing i

For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts – acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation – spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.

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During the pre-recession years of the 21st century, we experienced wide-ranging nonrenewable natural resource (NNR) scarcity on a global scale for the first time.

When I began writing about peak oil professionally in 2006, it was generally considered a tinfoil hat theory. The notion that oil production might peak around 2012, plus or minus, was only taken seriously by a few analysts who were considered extremely pessimistic.

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During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around.

I was very struck by a piece by Steve Randy Waldmann at Interfluidity yesterday, entitled Capital Can't be Measured.  He is basically arguing that modern financial institutions are sufficiently complex that the concept of their "capital" is subject to measurement errors of the same order of magnitude as the capital itself.

Last month in “Forty Shades of… Less Brown?,” I described the principle of increasing marginal brownness.

A weekly review including:
- Production and prices
- China shifts on Iran
- A busy week in Washington
- World Energy Conference
- Quote of the Week