Kurt Cobb

Latest articles from Kurt

• A Water Crisis Is Looming Over Western United States

  Published 06 February 2023 | viewed 4,449 times

  The most recent poster child for the failure to understand resource limits is the town of Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated part of Maricopa County…

• Between Drought And Flood: California Faces Extreme Weather

  Published 16 January 2023 | viewed 1,442 times

  "Global warming" morphed into "climate change" which now seems inadequate to describe the weather chaos we are experiencing on planet Earth.* The recent "atmospheric rivers"…

• What Options Do Global Industries Have To Lower Fossil Fuel Consumption?

  Published 10 January 2023 | viewed 1,591 times

  Few of us think about heat as an essential ingredient in the products we use every day. And, yet industrial process heat constitutes two-thirds of…

• Can Global Oil Production Climb If The U.S. Shale Boom Is Over?

  Published 01 January 2023 | viewed 26,520 times

  Prior to the pandemic-induced downturn in world oil production, U.S. oil production growth was responsible for 98 percent of the increase in world production in…

• East vs West, 'Stuff' vs 'Finance'

  Published 01 November 2022 | viewed 2,321 times

  As a military conflict rages in Ukraine between Russia and what the Russian government calls "the West" (apparently meaning NATO allies and particularly the United…

• The Dutch Resolve: Will The Netherlands Boost Gas Production?

  Published 24 October 2022 | viewed 4,537 times

  Modern global society is steeped in the idea of trade-offs, the notion that one must suffer losses to obtain desired gains. This prepares the way…

• Can The World Really “Adapt” To Climate Change?

  Published 04 August 2022 | viewed 3,242 times

  Climate change deniers have had to adjust their story in recent years as the effects of climate change have become more and more apparent to…

• Technology vs Scarcity: The Worrying Reality Of Exponential Growth

  Published 17 July 2022 | viewed 9,284 times

  Half of all the oil consumed since the dawn of the modern oil age in 1859 has been consumed from 1998 through 2021 inclusive based…

• U.S. Oil And Gas Exports Are Fueling Higher Domestic Prices

  Published 22 June 2022 | viewed 7,833 times

  The U.S. oil and natural gas industry long fought for and in the last decade finally won release from federal restrictions that limited exports. The…

• Resource Scarcity And Rogue States Are Undermining U.S. Power

  Published 14 March 2022 | viewed 6,717 times

  There is nothing like a sudden decline in available oil supplies to bring out forgiveness in what is dubbed in and around Washington, D.C. as…

• The End Of The Global Economy As We Know It

  Published 10 March 2022 | viewed 33,737 times

  At the beginning of nearly every war, including the current one in Ukraine, there are those who loudly declare that it will be over shortly…

• Rising LNG Exports Are Becoming A Problem For Biden

  Published 08 February 2022 | viewed 8,271 times

  Few people noticed when energy reporters wrote in early January that the United States had become the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG).…

• Has The EIA Massively Overestimated The Potential Of U.S. Shale?

  Published 08 December 2021 | viewed 16,823 times

  Earth scientist David Hughes—who is out with a new skeptical report on the future of U.S. shale oil and gas—has two very important things in common with…

• Why Wireless Charging Is A Waste Of Energy

  Published 13 August 2020 | viewed 2,988 times

  It turns out the cellphone industry believes its customers just can't be bothered with setting their phones in charging cradles or worse yet, actually plugging…

• Wall Street’s Big Coronavirus Mistake

  Published 16 March 2020 | viewed 43,419 times

  Investment professionals on Wall Street spend their days reading financial reports and looking at numbers flash on screens. These numbers record the moment-to-moment changes in…

• The Rise Of Resource Nationalism

  Published 26 February 2020 | viewed 7,267 times

  It wasn't supposed to be this way. The fall of the Berlin Wall was to bring about one, integrated world market where goods and services freely…

• Peak Shale Could Spark An Offshore Drilling Boom

  Published 10 February 2020 | viewed 24,497 times

  John Hess, CEO of Hess Corporation, a large U.S.-based independent oil producer, recently told a Houston audience where he's putting the company's money these days: Offshore…

• The Real Reason The U.S. Is Interested In Iran

  Published 07 January 2020 | viewed 72,952 times

  The American obsession with Iran is about oil and natural gas. If these two resources had been absent, it is hard to imagine such an…

• The Glaring Problem With Ocean Floor Mining

  Published 24 December 2019 | viewed 26,514 times

  A recent article on undersea mining in The Atlantic brought back a detailed childhood memory. When I was in fifth grade, my class put on a sort of…

• The Unintended Consequences Of Qatar’s Outdoor Air Conditioning

  Published 12 November 2019 | viewed 12,589 times

  Qatar is both a country and a peninsula that juts out about 100 miles into the Persian Gulf. It is precisely this geography which makes…