Gail Tverberg is a writer and speaker about energy issues. She is especially known for her work with financial issues associated with peak oil. Prior to getting involved with energy issues, Ms. Tverberg worked as an actuarial consultant. This work involved performing insurance-related analyses and forecasts. Her personal blog is ourfiniteworld.com. She is also an editor of The Oil Drum.
We seem to hear two versions of the story of limited oil supply:1. The economists’ view, saying that the issue is a simple problem of…
We keep hearing about the many benefits of natural gas–how burning it releases less CO2 than oil or coal, and how it burns with few…
Prof. James Hamilton of University of California recently wrote a post called Thresholds in the economic effects of oil prices. In it, he concludesAs U.S.…
Governments and economists around the world have not figured out that what the world economy is suffering from, to varying degrees, is “high-priced fuel syndrome“.High-priced…
The number of jobs available to job-seekers has been a problem for quite a long time now—since 2000 in the United States, and longer than…
The tie between energy supply, population, and the economy goes back to the hunter-gatherer period. Hunter-gatherers managed to multiply their population at least 4-fold, and…
In the beginning, the Master Economist created the Economy. He created businesses large and small, consumers, governments with their regulation, and financial institutions of all…
Strange as it may seem, humans seem to have evolved in a way that we have a need for external energy, such as energy from…
The issue of nuclear electricity is a complex one. In this post, I offer a few insights into the nuclear electric situation based on recent…
We live in a finite world. At this point, we seem to be reaching limits in several different areas:Cheap oil. Our economy runs on cheap…
We talk about the possibility of reducing fossil fuel use by 80% by 2050 and ramping up renewables at the same time, to help prevent…
A few days ago, I showed the close relationship between growth in world oil consumption and growth in world GDP. In this post, I will…
The usual assumption that economists, financial planners, and actuaries make is that future real GDP growth can be expected to be fairly similar to the…
Are lower oil prices good news? Not really, if it means the world is sinking into recession.We know from recent past experience and from common…
The world is clearly reaching many limits. This graphic below shows how I see man interacting with natural systems, back before man discovered fire and…
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently issued a new working paper called “The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology” (free PDF), which should be of…
If we read the financial pages, economic growth seems to be viewed as the “normal” situation to which economies inevitably return. But is it really?If…
Countries trade crude oil and oil products back and forth. When all of these transactions are netted out, is the US close to becoming a…
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released full-year 2011 world oil production data. In this post, I would like show some graphs of recent…
We live in a world with very limited solutions to our sustainability problems. I often hear the view, “If we would just get off fossil…