richard lyon
 

Hello, I’m Richard Lyon.

I’m an oil industry consultant, energy economist,
& social reformer
, currently based in Dundee, Scotland.

If you want to get in touch with me, is best.

 

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

The shale gas stock bubble

Lord” Lawson’s recent gas emissions
 

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Terminal ignorance

Business as usual” at the BBC
 

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Americans who tell the truth

Those who write the rules are those who profit from the status quo. If we want to change that status quo, we might have to work outside of those rules because the legal pathways available to use have been structured precisely to make sure we don’t make any substantial change. - Tim DeChristopher

 

Monday, 2 January 2012

Oil as a consumer weapon?

Hubris at the Financial Times.
 

Wednesday, 30 November 2011

American Airlines files for bankruptcy

In an update to this piece, American Airlines has filed for bankruptcy, citing “crushing debt caused by high fuel prices”. It was, until 2008, the word’s largest airline.

AMR pension plans are $10 billion short of what the carrier owes, and any default could be the largest in U.S. history, government pension insurers estimated.

 

Monday, 21 November 2011

Neoclassical economics as a pseudo-science

Astrology, Ptolomaic astronomy … and neoclassical economics.
 

Sunday, 20 November 2011

Yergin’s record on forecasting

Not so good.
 

Monday, 31 October 2011

Occupy London

The dean and chapter of St Paul’s have superbly demonstrated in recent days the point Occupy London is making: that City interests have compromised and captured some of the most powerful institutions in the country. One might have hoped that an institution such as St Paul’s, conscious of its own history of civic purpose and national identity, not to mention the radical gospel of a Jewish itinerant carpenter, would have grasped the symbolism of the moment more astutely. That they failed demonstrates all the more starkly the ethical bankruptcy of our age. And that, after all, is exactly what Occupy London is about.

Guardian

 

Friday, 28 October 2011

GrowthBusters

Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity from Dave Gardner on Vimeo.

 

Monday, 10 October 2011

We are the 99 percent

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

 

Monday, 29 August 2011

The end of the space age

John Gruber nails it:

In the final analysis, space travel was simply the furthest and most characteristic offshoot of industrial civilization, and depended—as all of industrial civilization depends—on vast quantities of cheap, highly concentrated, readily accessible energy. That basic condition is coming to an end around us right now.

 

Sunday, 14 August 2011

Banking on Energy

Chris Cook:

Oil is not priced in dollars. Dollars are priced in oil.

This is the essence of the financial discontinuity heading our way. Make sure you understand it.

 

Friday, 12 August 2011

Hubbert Curve Forecasting - is it “Good Enough” ?

How a simple tool shows just how optimistic resource optimists are
 

Sunday, 7 August 2011

Fraud

James Galbraith:

This is the diagnosis of an irreversible disease. The corruption and collapse of the rule of law, in the financial sphere, is basically irreparable. It’s not just that restoring trust takes a long time. It’s that under the new technological order in this field, it can not be done … And therefore there can be no return to the way things were before. In other words, we are at the end of the illusion of a market place in the financial sphere.

 

Thursday, 28 July 2011

Resilience

John Michael Greer:

Every civilization, as it nears the limits of its resource base, has to deal with the mismatch between habits evolved during times of relative abundance and the onset of shortages driven by too much exploitation of that abundance. Nearly always, the outcome is a shift in the direction of greater efficiency. Local governments give way to centralized ones; economies move as far toward mass production as the underlying technology will permit; precise management becomes the order of the day; waste gets cut and so, inevitably, do corners. All this leads to increased efficiency and thus decreased resilience, and sets things up for the statistically inevitable accident that will push things just past the limits of the civilization’s remaining resilience, and launch the downward spiral that ends with sheep grazing among ruins.

 

Friday, 1 April 2011

Peak Oil debunked

… the Communists up there [in Canada] say we’re ruinin’ the envi-ro-ment. Well I says ‘poo poo’ on that. I says: ‘read the bible’.

 

Saturday, 19 February 2011

Screwtape advises his nephew

Screwtape, finding a new agenda, writes to his nephew Wormwood.
 

Tuesday, 8 February 2011

Guardian: Wikileaks and Saudi oil

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

This is the export land effect:

A fourth cable, in October 2009, claimed that escalating electricity demand by Saudi Arabia may further constrain Saudi oil exports. “Demand [for electricity] is expected to grow 10% a year over the next decade as a result of population and economic growth. As a result it will need to double its generation capacity to 68,000MW in 2018,” it said.

 

Monday, 31 January 2011

The militarisation of society

Why we now think it’s OK to straddle naked in an airport.
 

Thursday, 14 October 2010

The size of the gap

How much oil do we need to find, and how quickly?
 

Tuesday, 5 October 2010

The infinite oil supply

or why, to a neoclassical economist, cats are dogs.
 

Monday, 2 August 2010

Why carbon capture won’t fly

The enormous cost of shoving carbon into the ground.
 

Friday, 30 July 2010

Why bother?

Being negative is the most positive thing you can do.
 

Tuesday, 27 July 2010

Economic Policy Centre: The £1 trillion black hole

The government has worked out that there is a £2.2 trillion shortfall between UK pension liabilities and the amount that has and will be set aside to meet them. But they used the wrong discount rate growth rates — it’s closer to £4 trillion. So — no pension.

 

Monday, 3 May 2010

The elephant in the room

… “Investment in these markets will, I believe, bring unprecedented growth for the entire world going forward. The downturn in the economy going forward is merely a correction. In the long term, growth will prevail.” — Alan Greenpants, Economist and former char lady at the US Federal Reserve

Eyewatering.

 

Sunday, 2 May 2010

The significance of the Deepwater Horizon

This is why it is called “unconventional oil”.
 

Friday, 23 April 2010

Review: Tipping Point

When small things have large consequences.
 

Thursday, 22 April 2010

The real lesson of Eyjafjallajokull

What a volcano tells us about strawberries in January.
 

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

The future of public debt: prospects and implications

Why we will work until we die.
 

Tuesday, 6 April 2010

The UK election

A tough job for whoever gets it.
 

Saturday, 3 April 2010

The end of airlines

Leaving on a jet plane.
 

Wednesday, 31 March 2010

Hydrocarbon “lock-in” in universities

Academic confusion.

The undulating plateau

A fantasy.
 

Friday, 26 March 2010

Survival of the State

Why has the UK government reversed its denial of Peak Oil?
 

Wednesday, 3 March 2010

Jeff Rubin on triple digit oil

So it’s not about running out of oil. We’re never going to run out of oil. But what the world is going to run out of — indeed, what the world has already run out of — is the oil that you can afford to burn.

The project called “Globalism” is almost over. It will affect your life in profound ways. Watching Rubin to find out why is the best use of 45 minutes you can make today.

 

Tuesday, 2 March 2010

The Story of Cap + Trade

Clever.
 

Wednesday, 2 December 2009

Why did the real estate bubble burst?

Kunstler tells it like it is:

The real estate bubble burst because Globalization itself has started to tremble and creak like so much old infrastructure that surrounds us. Basically, unfettered capitalism that is Globalization has hit absolute limits and growth cannot continue under any circumstances. As they say, the party’s over. What are these limits you ask? Basically they are set by the laws of thermodynamics. We industrialized humans are sitting on this planet of finite size running a global economy primarily on a fossil energy source that is not replenishable on any time scale we can imagine.

I love his posts.

 

Monday, 30 November 2009

Arithmetic, Population & Energy

Society, as we have constructed it, cannot function without an exponentially growing energy supply. Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, using nothing more than high school maths, demonstrates just how impractical this is.

 

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

Head in the sand

The UK Government’s fatal obsession with markets.
 

Sunday, 22 November 2009

The Global Oil Depletion Report

Global oil depletion is del understood, well advanced, and imposing increasing constraints on future global oil supply…Large resources may be available, but are unlikely to be accessed quickly and may make little difference to the timing of the global peak… A global peak is likely before 2030 and there is a significant risk of a peak before 2020

Yup.

 

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

Did oil cause the latest recession?

The IEA points out that it had warned in 2006 that the effect of high oil prices from the preceding four years had not yet worked their way through the world economy, and that further increases in prices would “pose a significant threat to the world economy, by causing a worsening of current account imbalances and by triggering abrupt exchange rate realignments, a rise in interest rates and a slump in house and other asset prices”.

The FT is starting to get it.

 

Sunday, 1 November 2009

An old reserves trick

BP’s CEO trying a trick that was debunked 140 years ago.
 

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

A post-oil world gets less sci-fi by the day

The IEA figures showed there could be a gap of 7m barrels a day between supply and demand by 2015. That represents about 8% of the expected world demand by then, 91m barrels a day. The gap will grow as demand keeps growing. Taylor warns that world supply levelled off between 2005 and 2008, so quite where the new oil is going to come from is unclear.

 

Tuesday, 1 September 2009

What can I do ?

Eight simple actions you could take now to reduce your energy use.
 

Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Ten things you should know about the oil supply

Many of these facts have been staring us in the face for some time.