Dave Cohen writes the blog Decline Of The Empire. His commentaries cover a wide variety of subjects, including the American economy & macro-economics, the oil markets, peak oil, politics & policy, environmental issues and global warming. Dave was writing search engine software before he gave up on the industry in 2005 after 20 years as a software engineer. Dave has a M.A. in theoretical linguistics and was working on a Ph.D. before leaving The University of Texas at Austin in 1985 to do research in Artificial Intelligence. He attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate.
Is Canada's tar sands expansion in trouble? Probably not, but the issue is complicated, so bear with me.Back on November 9, 2012 I wrote a…
Back in 2006-2007 when I was writing about peak oil, I would never have believed that U.S. crude oil production would reach 7 million barrels-per-day…
On Friday I put up the following chart, and invited readers to comment on what's wrong with it.From Bloomberg's Sustainable Energy In America 2013 Factbook.…
In an editorial called Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary) (if necessary) which recently appeared in the science journal Nature, Jeremy Grantham argues…
Some readers didn't quite believe the premise in my reprinted Tuesday post How To Think About The Future (Redux). I'll repeat that assumption here.As we…
Here we go again, another ‘Planet Stupid’ update. All posts like this one have a predictable structure. Some egregious baloney is put out by a…
A controversy has broken out over what it costs General Motors (GM) to produce a Chevy Volt. A Reuters reporter got things going when he…
Freelance journalist Beth Gardiner had an editorial called We're All Climate Change Idiots in the New York TimesSunday Review on July 21, 2012. There are…
Let me say at the outset that geoengineering to control Earth's climate is not the wisest path which Homo sapiens ("Wise Man") could travel down.…
There is something perversely satisfying in watching humans screw up on a massive scale, and especially so when you've seen it coming for years now.…
With oil prices falling precipitously, this seems like a good time to reassess the widely anticipated phenomenon known as peak oil. How much of a…
Optimists and politicians like to remind us that U.S. exports are booming. Unfortunately, so are imports.The trade deficit in March, from Calculated RiskAn increasingly large…
What does this percentage refer to? 97% That's the percentage of global production of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) controlled by the People's Republic of China.…
In the August issue of Scientific American, David Beillo published an article called The False Promise Of Biofuels. I have a paper copy, but not…
Looking at the oil supply & demand fundamentals, next year looks like an accident waiting to happen. If economic growth in emerging economies remains on…
Once in a while I point out that the United States lacks an energy policy to deal with our oil problems, but we do have…
The Nymex oil price has calmed down a bit in the last week, and now stands at $100.10/barrel. Mysteriously, that's about 3 bucks higher than…
Capital will flow to where there's money to be made. It's just that simple. America's "accomodative" monetary policy has spurred a new wave of corporate…
I'm starting to think that the oil markets in 2010 are just a more chaotic version of the markets as they were in 2007. You…
Last week, octogenerian Paul Volcker lost his grip. Volcker, who was the Fed chairman before Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan, remembers a time when the Wall Street…