The Automatic Earth

Bob Sandberg "Commuters on train platform, Park Forest, Illinois." July 1954 At a time when perceptions of the real state of economies and markets seem to diverge ever more, ranging from the boundless optimism nearly all mass media now attempt to radiate, to the stark warnings from major investors, like here via Tyler Durden or here via John Mauldin, that the stock market is on the verge of a very substantial move down, the ways numbers are used to influence

Artwork: Ilargi The UK is set to embark on its second dash for gas. The first, beginning in the early 1990s, occurred when gas was first permitted to be used for power generation. Prior to that it had been considered a premium fuel too valuable to be used in this way. The regulatory change initiated a substantial building programme for combined cycle gas plants, fuelled by North Sea gas. Very quickly gas generation became a major component of baseload in

July 31: Indian national television reports on power outage (to a limited audience?!) "So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked." Mark Twain, Following the Equator. The enormous power cut recently seen in India, which affected perhaps 700 million people, serves to highlight the degree of the structural

George Monbiot recently made a major about-face on his peak oil stance, on the grounds that unconventional oil represents a new reality. The basis of his u-turn is a recent report on unconventional oil by Leonardo Maugeri, (former) oil executive at Italy's Eni, published at Harvard University, where Maugeri's a Senior Fellow at the John Kennedy School, Belfer Center, which we discussed here at TAE in Unconventional Oil is NOT a Game Changer. George Monbiot: We were wrong on peak

This is number nine in a series of articles documenting the principles and practice of eco-thrifty renovation written by Estwing of the ETR Blog for the Wanganui Chronicle. After writing about debt aversion and monster mortgage avoidance last Saturday morning, I was interested to hear on the radio that very afternoon about the record number of mortagee sales in New Zealand during the first quarter of the year. My heart goes out to those families losing their homes. Part of