A downturn may be in the cards before the decade is out Some advice for President Barack Obama’s successor: bring a plan to fight the next recession. That’s one conclusion drawn from a survey of economists Sept. 4-9, where the median forecast of 31 respondents has the next downturn occurring in 2018. Assuming the collective
This article made me smile! Although an increasing number of people are adapting to the realities of more expensive and declining energy, and a permanently depressed economy, many are still… shall we say, circumspect, about their activities. They may have been driven underground after encountering ridicule or denial from friends and family, or perhaps are
It pretty much does what it says on the tin… “Peak oil” is starting to pop up in the media more and more these days. Everybody from Glenn Beck to the Sierra Club says that the world is running out of cheap oil and that this could be, well, inconvenient, for the global economy. But
No the game changer is not the 2015 Tesla Model S in the picture above. It’s the white device shaped like a medieval-shield that is blending into the wall behind it. It is a wall-mounted lithium-ion home battery system designed to store energy from rooftop solar panels. It can hold up to 10 kilowatt-hours of
The ‘fracking revolution’ has transformed the economics of oil production globally, with the US becoming a bigger producer than Saudi Arabia and – after decades of dependency on oil imports – even being able to export some of its surplus production. US shale oil is unusual, too, in being privately owned: most of the world’s
Both the stock market and oil prices have been plunging. Is this “just another cycle,” or is it something much worse? I think it is something much worse. Back in January, I wrote a post called Oil and the Economy: Where are We Headed in 2015-16? In it, I said that persistent very low prices
The characteristic feeling of the post-2008 world has been one of anxiety. Occasionally, that anxiety breaks out into fear as it did in the last two weeks when stock markets around the world swooned and middle class and wealthy investors had a sudden visitation from Pan, the god from whose name we get the word
The business world is finally waking up If you hear a lot of noise about climate policies and climate action over the next few months in the lead up to the Paris climate conference, it is because there is a lot at stake. According to Citigroup analysts: $US100 trillion of potential stranded assets in the
A thought-provoking view (from 2012) I spend much of my life making the case for changing one’s life (and not just one’s life – for supporting political and social change that is associated with it) in fairly radical ways, very quickly. I spend a lot of my time writing about this, and periodically I get
Let’s hope one day schemes like this get to the UK Energy provider Ergon Retail is running a trial, with support from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), in 33 Queensland homes in Toowoomba in the south of the state and Townsville and Cannonvale in the north. In recent months, about 30 country householders have
