Petrodollars & US dollar

If this were an economic rewrite of Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Iran would be but one cog in an infernal machine slowly shredding the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Still, it’s the cog that Washington is now focused on. They have regime change on the brain. All that’s needed is a spark to start the fire (in -- one hastens to add -- all sorts of directions that are bound to catch Washington off guard).

- Oil Climbs From Four-Week Low as Iran Warns of Hormuz Supply Disruption
- India to pay for Iran crude in rupees
- Juan Cole: Iran Hype undermined by Obama Administration Admissions
- Iran playing war games, but not in video arcades

M.K. Hubbert: "Our principle constraints are cultural...we have evolved a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth...it behooves us...to begin a serious examination of the...cultural adjustments necessary...before unmanageable crises arise..."

Dmitry Orlov: "Hubbert was right. Again."

The problem is described and solutions are offered.

Wall Street is the best immediate target for a protest against financial inequity and corporate money in politics. Now, as Occupy movements pop up across the globe, Occupiers may be interested to know that big oil companies are as guilty as big banks in buying politicians and squeezing the 99%. And since today's fiat currency is really based on oil, any reform of finance needs to take on energy too.

In the newly revised version of "Reinventing Collapse," first published in 2008 before the financial crisis began later that year, Dmitry Orlov expands on his attempt to convince you that the U.S. is much less prepared for collapse than the Soviet Union ever was. Many of Orlov's forecasts from the previous edition have proven accurate. Orlov's America is a system barely able to sustain itself, ruined by a population bent on a hardened mythology: an iron triangle of home, car and job that is out of touch with the reality of rapidly depleting cheap energy, which made vehicle ownership and suburban home life a gateway to the goal of being middle class. [book review from Canada]

User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it's understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.

In response to the financial crisis, governments and central banks have undertaken a series of extraordinary, dramatic measures. In this section we will focus primarily on the U.S....From Richard Heinberg's upcoming book The End Growth.

- Tertzakian: Look for oil price between $80 to $100 per barrel in 2011
- Analysis - Colombia defies "peak oil" but for how long?
- Andrew McKillop: Black Hole For Oil Price Policy (Petro-Keynsian growth?

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

- Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency: The Return of the Jevons Paradox (Monthly Review)
- China pulls back from US Treasuries; buys hard assets instead
- The end of the world. That is, the end of the world we’ve known since WWII
- A New Economics for the 21st Century

Oil rose to a six-month high of more than $87/barrel as the Federal Reserve embarked on a new round of quantitative easing worth $600bn and Saudi Oil Minister Ali al Naimi raised his target oil price to $70-90 per barrel. Shokri Ghanem, chairman of Libya's National Oil Corporation said the price should be higher still, at around $100/barrel...

This article concisely summarizes most of what has been discussed in Energy Bulletin over the past few months regarding Peak Oil. Reading all this news, I realized we are now actually facing The End of The World (As We Know It). I struggled for awhile with how to write about this. Despair is not the answer.

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

A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Iran

A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Top 10 Stories of 2009
-Prices and production
-Quote of the week
-Briefs