OPEC in its monthly report for March notes a steady increase in Libyan oil production since the conflict began last year. Production for February, the cartel reports, was about 75 percent of the pre-war levels. This week, the country’s prime minister received accolades from Washington as Tripoli marched closer to June elections for a constitutional assembly. OPEC, however, warned that unrest could resume if the interim administration in Tripoli fails to generate broad-based national support. If lingering political issues in Iraq provide any insight,…

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So far, high petroleum prices are helping Iran beat the new, ‘crippling’ US and EU sanctions. And, ironically, it is the Obama re-election campaign that is suffering most from the sanctions, not IranWhile Iran is producing about 500,000 barrels a day less today than was typical for it in recent years, the price has risen over 20% in recent months. As the Bernama article points out, if Iran made $250 million a day on petroleum exports of 2.5 million barrels a day at $100 a barrel (the Brent crude price of last fall), and if the exports…

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“When the dollar collapse comes, it will happen two ways – gradually then suddenly. That formula, famously used by Hemingway to describe how one goes bankrupt, is an apt description of critical state dynamics in complex systems. The gradual part is a snowflake disturbing a small patch of snow, while the sudden part is the avalanche. The snowflake is random yet the avalanche is inevitable. Both ideas are easy to grasp. What is difficult to grasp is the critical state of the system in which the random event occurs.” Jim Rickards,…

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The three Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were always undigested morsels in the maw of the USSR. Liberated by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles into independence, the three nations enjoyed freedom until the cynical Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 assigned them to the Soviet sphere of influence between Hitler and Stalin. Subsequently absorbed by the USSR, the states were “liberated’ by the Nazis in their 1941 Soviet invasion plan Operation Barbarossa, only to be “re-liberated” in 1944 by the Red…

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The numbers for productivity of seaweed are stunning compared to everything other than algae on land. The problem is the cultivation, growing the preferred species, harvesting it and getting it to shore for processing. Prof. Avigdor Abelson of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Zoology and the new Renewable Energy Center, with his colleagues Dr. Alvaro Israel of the Israel Oceanography Institute, Prof. Aharon Gedanken of Bar-Ilan University, Dr. Ariel Kushmaro of Ben-Gurion University, and their Ph.D. student Leor Korzen are now developing…

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