Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 26.9K other subscribersBlog Stats
- 15,758,161 hits
RSS Links
Follow Comments:
Translate
Archives
Creative Commons License
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 26.9K other subscribersBlog Stats
- 15,758,161 hits
Follow Comments:
-
Recent Posts
- The world’s economic myths are hitting limits
- Advanced Economies Will Be Especially Hurt by Energy Limits
- Should the US add more LNG export approvals?
- 2024: Too Many Things Going Wrong
- Ten Things that Change without Fossil Fuels
- Running Short of Tailwinds for the Economy
- Today’s energy bottleneck may bring down major governments
Archives
Academic Articles
- An analysis of China's coal supply and its impact on China's future economic growth
- An Oil Production Forecast for China Considering Economic Limits
- Analysis of resource potential for China's unconventional gas and forecast for its long-term production growth
- China's unconventional oil: A review of its resources and outlook for long-term production
- Financial Issues Affecting Energy Security
- Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis
Creative Commons License
Category Archives: Energy policy
Is the debt bubble supporting the world economy in danger of collapsing?
With an ever-lower cost of debt, the economy has had a hidden tailwind pushing it long between 1981 to 2020. Now that interest rates are again rising, the danger is that a substantial portion of this debt bubble may collapse. My concern is that the economy may be headed for an incredibly hard landing because of the inter-relationship between interest rates and energy prices (Figure 2), and the important role energy plays in powering the economy. Continue reading
Posted in Energy policy, Financial Implications
Tagged economic collapse, interest rates, low oil prices
4,216 Comments
Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer
Wind and solar don’t replace “dispatchable” generation; they provide some temporary electricity supply, but they tend to make the overall electrical system more difficult to operate because of the variability introduced. Renewables are available only part of the time, so other types of electricity suppliers are still needed when supply temporarily isn’t available. In a sense, all they are replacing is part of the fuel required to make electricity. The fixed costs of backup electricity providers are not adequately compensated, nor are the costs of the added complexity introduced into the system. Continue reading
How Energy Transition Models Go Wrong
I have written many posts relating to the fact that we live in a finite world. At some point, our ability to extract resources becomes constrained. At the same time, population keeps increasing. The usual outcome when population is too high for resources is “overshoot and collapse.” But this is not a topic that the politicians or central bankers or oligarchs who attend the World Economic Forum dare to talk about.
Instead, world leaders find a different problem, namely climate change, to emphasize above other problems. Conveniently, climate change seems to have some of the same solutions as “running out of fossil fuels.” So, a person might think that an energy transition designed to try to fix climate change would work equally well to try to fix running out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the way it works.
Posted in Energy policy
Tagged fossil fuels, low oil prices, solar energy, wind energy
3,781 Comments