Item of General Interest
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Tag Archives: commodity prices
Energy limits: Why we see rising wealth disparity and low prices
Last week, I gave a fairly wide-ranging presentation at the 2016 Biophysical Economics Conference called Complexity: The Connection Between Fossil Fuel EROI, Human Energy EROI, and Debt (pdf). In this post, I discuss the portion of the talk that explains several … Continue reading
Posted in Financial Implications
Tagged coal prices, commodity prices, debt levels, oil prices, peak coal
1,725 Comments
Why Globalization Reaches Limits
We have been living in a world of rapid globalization, but this is not a condition that we can expect to continue indefinitely. Each time imported goods and services start to surge as a percentage of GDP, these imports seem … Continue reading
Posted in Financial Implications
Tagged commodity prices, demand growth, economic growth, exports, globalization, imports, oil prices
1,263 Comments
The Physics of Energy and the Economy
I approach the subject of the physics of energy and the economy with some trepidation. An economy seems to be a dissipative system, but what does this really mean? There are not many people who understand dissipative systems, and very … Continue reading
How our energy problem leads to a debt collapse problem
Usually, we don’t stop to think about how the whole economy works together. A major reason is that we have been lacking data to see long-term relationships. In this post, I show some longer-term time series relating to energy growth, … Continue reading
Posted in Financial Implications
Tagged commodity prices, Debt, debt bubble, demand growth, economic growth, GDP growth, oil prices
1,447 Comments
How Economic Growth Fails
We all know generally how today’s economy works: Our economy is a networked system. I have illustrated it as being similar to a child’s building toy. Ever-larger structures can be built by adding more businesses and consumers, and by using … Continue reading
Posted in Financial Implications
Tagged commodity prices, economic growth, energy consumption, low oil price, low wages, recession
1,045 Comments
