Global oil demand is expected to peak by 2040, compared with a previous estimate of 2030 made in 2024, due to stronger-than-anticipated resilience in consumption, according to experts from the CNPC Economics and Technology Research Institute at the International Energy Executive Forum 2025 in Beijing on Dec. 11.

The revised outlook projects global oil demand to peak at about 4.83 billion metric tons (97 million b/d) in 2040, rising from 4.54 billion mt in 2025, ETRI Vice President Wu Mouyuan said at the forum. ETRI is the think tank for the Chinese state-owned oil company CNPC.
[…]
Wu said that in a “chasm scenario,” which reflects heightened global divisions, peak oil demand could be postponed even further — to around 2045 — with peak volumes reaching about 5 billion mt.

“Oil demand has demonstrated greater resilience than expected, with emerging economies seeing sustained growth in oil product consumption and stable increases in demand for chemical feedstocks and aviation fuel,” Wu said.

~ Full article…

Peak Oil is Real and the Majors Face Challenging Times

The idea that global oil production was nearing its peak, only to plateau and then decline was a common view in the energy world for many years. The geophysicist M. King Hubbert predicted in the 1950’s that US oil production would peak in the 1970’s, a forecast that held true until technology allowed companies to economically extract oil and gas from tight geologic formations like shale. The recent surge in US liquids output – crude plus natural gas liquids (NGLs) – quieted the peak oil community. A well-known, largely peak oil-focused website – The Oil Drum – shut down in 2013, an event some considered the death knell of the peak oil theory. But not so fast says Steven Kopits from energy business analysis firm Douglas-Westwood. Total global oil supply growth since 2005 – 5.8 million barrels per day – came from unconventional sources, shale oil and NGLs in particular, Kopits recently told the audience at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Not only US, but global, oil supply growth is entirely leveraged to unconventionals right now,” and the legacy, conventional system still peaked in 2005, he said.

Peak oil: Experts differ on when demand will reverse

Oil is making a strong comeback as geopolitical agendas shape energy forecasts worldwide. OPEC, founded in 1960, predicts global oil demand will rise to 122.9 million barrels per day by 2050, while the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects a peak around 2030 followed by a decline. These conflicting projections underscore how energy outlooks have become political, influenced by climate policies and economic priorities. Under President Trump, U.S. energy policy has reversed green initiatives, accelerating drilling in New Mexico and halting offshore wind projects, while global shipping and petrochemical sectors continue to rely heavily on oil. Despite cheaper renewable technologies, rising demand in fast-growing economies like India and persistent oil use in transportation andaviation signal that fossil fuels will remain central to global energy for decades—posing serious challenges for climate goals.

Trump’s hostility toward Venezuela is neither episodic nor merely ideological in the narrow sense. It is a form of class war conducted at the level of states. Venezuela’s real transgression is not mismanagement or authoritarianism, as Washington endlessly repeats, but defiance — the refusal to fully subordinate its labour, resources, and political economy to U.S. capital. This is an unforgivable crime in an imperial order that equates obedience with legitimacy.

This explains why U.S. pressure persists even after years of demonstrable failure. Sanctions, sabotage, diplomatic isolation, and regime-change fantasies are not policy mistakes; they are instruments of imperial coercion. Their purpose is not reform but capitulation.

Imperialism as systemic necessity

A progressive analysis begins where liberal moralism ends. The United States does not target Venezuela because Trump is uniquely irrational, though he may be. It intervenes because capitalism in its imperial phase requires expansion, extraction, and domination. Monopoly capital seeks new outlets for surplus and profit, and any state that resists this logic becomes a threat.

Venezuela sits atop immense oil reserves and strategic minerals. An independent, redistributive political project in such a location is intolerable to a system built on accumulation by dispossession. Trump merely strips away the language of diplomacy. Where previous administrations cloaked intervention in the rhetoric of democracy and human rights, this one speaks more openly — exposing punishment, coercion, and domination as the true grammar of U.S. foreign policy.

~ Full article…

Caroline Ellison, the former cryptocurrency executive and ex-girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, has been quietly moved out of federal lockup after serving roughly 11 months of her two-year prison sentence, Business Insider has learned.
[…]
Ellison reported to the low-security Danbury prison in early November 2024 to serve a two-year sentence she received for her role in the massive multibillion-dollar fraud scheme that led to the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s business empire.

She had pleaded guilty to conspiring with Bankman-Fried — the founder of the FTX crypto exchange and its sister company, Alameda Research — in the $11 billion fraud scheme.

Ellison served as the star witness in Bankman-Fried’s 2023 criminal trial, testifying that the pair used Alameda to invest billions of dollars’ worth of assets secretly siphoned from FTX customers.

~ Full article…

The Kobeissi Letter post below provides the evidence that the stock market crash is not too far away. The Wall Street cabal and their CNBC mouthpiece have once again lured the average schmuck into the most over-valued market in history.

The Kobeissi chart shows individual investors now make up 20% of the daily trading volume, close to the highest in history. You can see that after the last great collapse in 2009, individual investors made up less than 10% of daily trading volume. The dumb money is always lured into the market before they pull it.

The Margin Debt chart provides even more proof you can’t fix stupid. Not only have the dumb money schmucks bought into the AI bullshit narrative, going all in on the “Magnificent Seven” stocks, but they are so confident in their investing magnificence, they have driven margin debt to an all-time high of $1.2 trillion.

Their confidence is at all-time highs, just like it was in 2000 and 2008. When retail buying, based on momentum, drives the market to highs, as the smart money sells to them, the market looks unstoppable. But, when the bottom drops out and margin calls start to pile up, the path to a 20% to 30% crash in a matter of days will sober up these dumb money idiots.

~ Full article…

The conclusion that soaring asset prices mean the economy is strong and so all is well is a hallucination that goes unrecognized because the entire financial system is hallucinating because it’s “training” on artificial data that it generated in a self-referential feedback loop of artificial stimulus and the resulting rise in asset valuations and spending. That none of this stimulus boosted utility value or productivity is left out of the “training,” which focuses solely on curated data that supports the hallucination.

Here is how the author of the Unified Theory of Model Collapse describes this process:

“Training on AI-generated data causes models to hallucinate, become delusional, and deviate from reality to the point where they’re no longer useful: i.e., Model Collapse.

The more ‘poisoned’ the data is with artificial content, the more quickly an AI model collapses as minority data is forgotten or lost. The majority of data becomes corrupted, and long-tail statistical data distributions are either ignored or replaced with nonsense.

Those models lose the capacity to understand long-tail information (improbable, but important data) that is no longer represented. Information on topics like serious injuries, getting punched in the nose, how dangerous wild animals can be, and what it’s like to truly be hungry because you can’t find food. Their models default to synthetic human artifice instead of understanding real implications.
[…]
The conclusion here is striking: the entirety of the modern world of Progress–urbanized, detached from the “raw” real world in service of convenience and abundance, a world where we “train” our mental models on “cooked,” curated, processed artifices–is all a vast, inter-connected, self-reinforcing hallucination bound for a collision with an inconveniently “raw” real world.

The Bubble Economy will be the first point of contact.

~ Full article…

Labor, through income tax and social security contributions, is one of the pillars of the tax systems of almost all countries, and the impact of automation on the tax base — or, in other words, the potential decrease in revenue — is not a new concern. In 2019, Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps proposed a tax on robots to help maintain social benefits. Shortly before, Bill Gates, founder of one of the world’s largest technology companies, Microsoft, which has its own artificial intelligence (Copilot), had suggested applying the same tax burden to robots as would be borne by the workers they replace.

“The trend toward automation and AI could lead to a decrease in tax revenues. In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income,” says Sanjay Patnaik, director of the Center for Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution. He suggests that governments address “the risks posed by AI” by increasing capital gains taxation rather than creating a specific tax on it, due to the difficulties in designing such a tax and the distortions it could generate. The repeated use of the conditional tense is because the impact of generative AI, the kind capable of creating content on demand, is still uncertain, both in positive terms — improved productivity and economic growth — and negative terms; job losses.
[…]
MIT economists Daron Acemoğlu and Simon Johnson warned about this in 2023. “Over the past four decades, automation has increased productivity and multiplied corporate profits, but it has not led to shared prosperity in industrialized countries,” they cautioned in a document for the IMF.

~ Full article…

and Mitsotakis sits comfortably inside it. Within the European People’s Party, governments that deliver growth on paper, lock down borders, and stay aligned with NATO are rewarded and shielded, regardless of what they do domestically. On top of that, the EPP is now unapologetically edging toward formal alliances with the far right. A right-wing bloc made up of the EPP, Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists, and Patriots for Europe now dominates the European Parliament, giving the EU the most right-wing assembly in its history and normalizing collaboration with forces once considered beyond the pale. Qatargate and other lobbying scandals did not produce a serious cleanup; they signaled to the political class that influence is simply another commodity, to be traded so long as it stays behind closed doors.

Greece is the clearest example of how this works. A country once cast as the sick man of Europe, punished with memoranda and IMF supervision for its corrupt political class in 2010, is now paraded as a model. The same state that was disciplined for cooking the books is sold back to Europe as a star pupil to be copied, with Mitsotakis garlanded for an “economic miracle” and talked up in Brussels as a future European Commission president.

For years, European leaders warned of an external menace to democracy; yet ultimately, the coup came from within. Politically, that is the real danger of the Greek “miracle”: it hands Europe’s ruling class a handy manual that says you can gut labor protections, hollow out media pluralism, spy on opponents, dismiss deadly disasters, funnel public money to party clients, and talk up new weapons deals with an Israeli government that has committed genocide in Gaza — and still be hailed as a modernizing reformer, so long as bond yields stay calm and capital keeps cashing in.

From: Greece’s Broken Democracy Is a Warning for Europe

Maintaining Tradition

New Democracy is not suddenly drowning in scandal; it has been swimming in these waters for years. Under Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis between 2004 and 2009, it faced a rolling crisis of legitimacy: these years saw the “Greek Watergate” wiretapping affair, the Vatopedi land swap controversy, the Siemens bribery case, and murky financial deals involving pension funds and state assets. This all fed a sense of entrenched graft and impunity. None of this ever brought real accountability for those at the top, but it normalized a style of rule in which backroom deals, clientelism, and the protection of party networks were treated as the Greek state’s basic operating system.

Mitsotakis came to power promising to break with that past, but his premiership has extended it. The first major crack in his stage-managed image came in 2022, when the Predator spyware scandal blew open. Investigations showed hundreds of people — ordinary citizens, journalists, opposition figures, and even his own ministers, including reporter Thanasis Koukakis and PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis — under surveillance through a toxic mix of illegal spyware and “legal” wiretaps, just after he pulled the intelligence service under his direct control. The trail led straight to his office: his nephew and main fixer, Grigoris Dimitriadis, and the head of the National Intelligence Service resigned, but no political figures have been prosecuted, and the government hurriedly shut down the parliamentary inquiry in what the opposition called a staged whitewash.
[…]
The OPEKEPE scandal — named after the state agency that channels EU farm subsidies — exposed a subsidy system riddled with made-up agricultural projects: invented livestock numbers, banana plantations on Mount Olympus, olive groves in military airports, even grazing land stretching out into the sea. Billions in EU funds were routed through this machinery while auditors were pushed aside and agency heads who questioned irregularities were removed.

A European investigation led by Kövesi’s office describes a systematic, organized fraud operation using OPEKEPE to siphon off Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds. Brussels has already hit Greece with a €392.2 million fine and a 5 percent cut to future farm subsidies for years of nonexistent oversight. Far from a handful of crafty villagers milking Brussels, the trail runs straight through the political class: New Democracy ministers and MPs, with especially thick clientelist webs in Crete — the same island flipped by the party in the June 2023 elections — as subsidy money washed through party-friendly intermediaries into safely fenced-off fiefdoms.

On 8-9 December, the European Commission and its oil company co-host HEREMA will hold the fifth Industrial Carbon Management (ICM) Forum in Athens. As the EU gears up for its annual meeting on carbon capture, new research by Oil Change International and Corporate Europe Observatory1 shows that carbon capture and storage (CCS) has received €17.3 billion in public subsidies from the EU, its member states, and Norway.2
[…]
The ICM Forum has been dominated and steered by the fossil fuel industry, and has shaped EU policy and directed public money towards CCS as a way to lock-in fossil fuels.4 This year’s co-host HEREMA aims to expand oil and gas production, and is facing local resistance over its controversial Prinos CCS site.

~ Full article…

Mapping the money behind carbon capture — Public subsidies and industry ties

The fossil fuel industry is behind the push for CCS

Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) has exposed how the European Commission’s ICM Forum (formerly the ‘CCUS Forum’) is dominated and steered by fossil fuel industry lobbyists. Its working groups produce recommendations for the Commission, effectively inviting the fossil fuel industry to shape EU policy. The Commission’s subsequent strategy (the ICMS) closely mirrors these recommendations.

The 5th forum in Athens is co-hosted by HEREMA, a Greek state-owned oil company with an explicit goal of increasing oil and gas production.b HEREMA’s CO2 storage project in Prinos, Thassos, is facing strong local resistance due to risks of CO2 leakage, groundwater pollution, and earthquakes.

Since last year’s ICM Forum in Pau, France, all four working groups mandated to help implement the ICMS have published recommendations. Each group had fossil fuel industry co-chairs and/or report editors, including Equinor, the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP), and six others (see Figure 2).c These eight fossil fuel groups alone spend nearly €20 million a year lobbying Brusselsd – and the Commission is listening to them.

In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media; advances in AI-driven persuasion sharply reduce the cost and increase the precision of shaping public opinion, making the distribution of preferences itself an object of deliberate design. We develop a dynamic model in which elites choose how much to reshape the distribution of policy preferences, subject to persuasion costs and a majority rule constraint. With a single elite, any optimal intervention tends to push society toward more polarized opinion profiles – a polarization pull'' - and improvements in persuasion technology accelerate this drift. When two opposed elites alternate in power, the same technology also creates incentives to park society insemi-lock” regions where opinions are more cohesive and harder for a rival to overturn, so advances in persuasion can either heighten or dampen polarization depending on the environment. Taken together, cheaper persuasion technologies recast polarization as a strategic instrument of governance rather than a purely emergent social byproduct, with important implications for democratic stability as AI capabilities advance.

~ Full article…