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Recent Posts
- Losing the Iran War May Be the Best Outcome for the World
- A New Explanation for Tariffs and Bombings
- Understanding Deglobalization: The Role of Diesel and Jet Fuel
- 2026: Expect a very uneven world economic downturn
- Too many promises; too few future physical goods
- A lack of very cheap oil is leading to debt problems
- What has gone wrong with the economy? Can it be fixed?
- Sierra Club talk that may be of interest
- Why oil prices don’t rise to consistently high levels
- Worrying indications in recently updated world energy data
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Category Archives: Energy policy
What has gone wrong with the economy? Can it be fixed?
I don’t believe that the situation is hopeless. At the end, I discuss where we are now, relative to historical patterns, and some reasons to be optimistic about the future. Continue reading
Posted in Energy policy, Financial Implications, oil shortages
Tagged economic collapse, limits to growth, oil prices, peak oil
1,621 Comments
Why oil prices don’t rise to consistently high levels
The supply and demand model of economists suggests that oil prices might rise to consistently high levels, but this has not happened yet: In my view, the economists’ model of supply and demand is overly simple; its usefulness is limited … Continue reading
Posted in Energy policy, Financial Implications
Tagged oil demand, peak oil, physics of the economy
1,589 Comments
Worrying indications in recently updated world energy data
The Energy Institute recently published its updated energy report, the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, showing data through the year 2024. In this post, I identify trends in the new data that I consider worrying. These trends help explain the strange behaviors that we have been seeing from governments recently. Continue reading
Posted in Alternatives to Oil, Energy policy, Financial Implications
Tagged copper, diesel shortage, nuclear energy
1,300 Comments
How Does the Economy Really Work?
The world economy is an amazingly complex, physics-based, self-organizing system. The three major elements are extracted resources including energy resources, human population, and demand coming through the financial system. All three of these elements tend to increase over time, but both population and extracted resources tend to hit limits because the world is finite. Continue reading
