July 17, 2011
One of the things behavioral economics does teach us is that we value short-term gain over long-term profit. It’s hard-wired into our DNA and it’s all about our immediate survival, but take a look at this headline from Treehugger and you will soon realize that it’s at the root of...
February 5, 2011
If you're a food manufacturer, a restaurant chain or just an average consumer in the US and especially the developing world, the above graph has to have you worried. Not only does it show the recent rapid increase in the costs of both food and oil, but it shows the closeness of the relationship...
January 19, 2011
The price of fuel has a massive impact on certain businesses and in the shipping business, the high price of marine fuel is causing all kinds of concern. Ships are on a go slow, to save fuel and money. "The largest ships burn 320 tons of fuel a day when traveling at full
speed, according to Soren...
October 18, 2008
Artist Donny Miller is using advertising to attack oil companies, who seem to be everyone's enemy these days, despite the recent decline in gas prices.Mr. Miller has created his own ads and posts them up around the gas stations belonging to oil companies. Obviously, these posters aren't going...
July 1, 2008
There's a provocative piece by George Monbiot in today's Guardian, where he talks about the failure of politicians to grasp the concept that there are either higher energy costs from renewable sources or no energy at all. People are still thinking about alternative energy as alternative to oil, but...
June 12, 2008
Randomly surfing news channels yesterday, I saw an economic analyst from a leading investment bank talk about his thoughts on surging oil prices. Like a detective he pulled apart pieces of the story. He believed US demand for oil is in decline because people are cutting back on car usage. His...
May 25, 2008
This graph from WTRG Economics, shows the history of crude oil prices since 1947 and shows our current situation in context. The knock on impact of this in obviously considerable with most industries finding little place to to hide from the impact and effects.The significance of this cannot be...
November 4, 2007
The price of oil appears to be going through the roof and it’s clearly being driven by increased demand from China and India, but also by increasing global prosperity.While few politicians appear ready to acknowledge the startling fact, many industry observers believe we are now over the...
October 14, 2007
The nature of the global energy challenge is hard to grasp because it's hard to relate to see through the measurement jargon and understand the scale of the problem.Thanks to some work by SRI International (Hewitt Crane and Ed Kinderman to distill annual global oil production into a new unit of...














