Category Archives: Corruption & Finance

Corruption concentrates wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the 99% below, and this trend has accelerated the past decades. Corrupt leaders and industries are less likely to ration food and oil as it declines, accelerating collapse. I predict that the higher the level of corruption (see corruption perceptions index at transparency.org) will make collapse faster and harsher than in less corrupt nations.  I hope future historians look at this as a factor in how nations fell during the energy crisis. Though I expect that smaller towns everywhere will do better than large cities, and where local governments are uncorrupted

The 1% have always been with us – even hunter gatherers had inequality

Pringle, H. May 23, 2014. The ancient roots of the 1%. Science 344: 822-825. Don’t blame farming. Inequality got its start among resource-rich hunter-gatherers. In 79 C.E., the year Mount Vesuvius destroyed it, Pompeii was not one city but two. … Continue reading

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Taxpayers are paying for a concentrated solar project — Ivanpah– that doesn’t work

Ivanpah in the news: Dvorsky, G. May 21, 2016. The World’s Largest Solar Plant Just Torched Itself. Gizmodo (Australia). Misaligned mirrors are being blamed for a fire that broke out yesterday at the world’s largest solar power plant, leaving the … Continue reading

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Bankers and Wall Street take cheating to new levels

[ What follows is an excerpt of an interview between behavioral economist Dan Ariely (DA) and Graham Lawton (GL) in New Scientist  16 June 2012 “The Cheating Game“. This is yet another reason another worse crash is inevitable (in addition … Continue reading

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U.S. taxpayers lose billions from Powder River Basin bad lease deals and undervalued coal

According to the Center for American Progress: For decades the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has run a fundamentally noncompetitive leasing program, which has been a boon to industry. Since 1990, 96 of the 107 coal-lease sales held by the … Continue reading

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What if cash were made illegal so your money could be used to bail out too-big-to-fail banks after the next crash?

  Ellen Brown. November 23, 2015. Hang Onto Your Wallets: Negative Interest, the War on Cash and the $10 Trillion Bail-In.  The Web of Debt Blog (Excerpts) By quietly eliminating the possibility of cash withdrawals, banks can make sure the … Continue reading

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Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 1

Book review by Alice Friedemann at energyskeptic of “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment”, by Pedro Prieto and Charles A.S. Hall. 2013. Springer. Conclusion: the EROI of solar photovoltaic is only 2.45, very low despite Spain’s ideal sunny … Continue reading

Posted in Alternative Energy, Charles A. S. Hall, Debt, Electric Grid, Energy Books, EROEI Energy Returned on Energy Invested, Pedro Prieto, Photovoltaic Solar, Solar, Solar EROI | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

Would Tesla, SolarCity or SpaceX exist without $4.9 billion in government subsidies?

[ Tesla has made no new battery breakthroughs. Batteries aren’t much better today than they were 200 years ago.  All Tesla did was build a better battery management system (BMS) by stringing tiny batteries together — thousands of them.  But … Continue reading

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The Banking system is a House of Cards

Lynn Parramore. April 21, 2015. Our Banking System is a Giant House of Cards. Money & Banking. It Could Fall On You. Anat Admati teaches finance and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is co-author of The … Continue reading

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Gail Tverberg The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem

Tverberg, G. March 9, 2015. The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem. ourfiniteworld.com For a long time, there has been a belief that the decline in oil supply will come by way of high oil prices. Demand … Continue reading

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Signs of Peakiness, oil companies are running out of cash

Andrew Nikiforuk, August 29, 2014. A big summer story you missed: Soaring oil debt. The Tyee.  Over 100 of the world’s largest energy companies are running out of cash. Photo of Keystone pipeline in Nebraska by Shannon Ramos. Creative Commons … Continue reading

Posted in Debt, Energy Markets, Peak Oil | 1 Comment