Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Le Monde Diplomatique, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions.
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…
"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"…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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).…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 American obsession with Iran is about oil and natural gas. If these two resources had been absent, it is hard to imagine such an…
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…
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…