Video of recent presentation about the effects of radiation from Chernobyl and Fukishima. Very blunt and fact filled.

France's energy and environment minister mandates lights off between 1AM and 7AM everyday by summer 2013. The plan is to improve energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2020.

On Thursday, Sept. 6... just a few days ago, China made the official announcement. China said on that day, our banking system is ready, all of our communication systems are ready, all of the transfer systems are ready, and as of that day, Thursday, Sept. 6, any nation in the world that wishes from this point on, to buy, sell, or trade crude oil, can do using the Chinese currency, not the American dollar.

I post this to help others too get familiarized with an economic term known as - demand destruction. In reading the Articles posted here at Collapse Net I have not really seen the exposure of this term. But in reading the August 16th evening edition of World Desk News I seen premunitions of demand destruction throughout as the collapse of western civilization continues -- unabated. This may also be of interest: http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com/2011/04/20/when-will-we-see-demand-destruction-for-oil/

A serious fire caused by aging infrastructure at the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, CA early in the evening on Monday, August 6 knocked out 16% of gasoline production in the Golden State. With it's more stringent standards for meeting low emissions requirements, the state will be hard-pressed to meet the energy needs for transportation. Gas prices surged above $4 a gallon throughout Marin and the Bay Area on Friday. Analysts said the damage to the refinery could push Northern California gas prices higher for the rest of 2012 and perhaps into 2013. "There is definitely a price spike going on," Gregg Laskoski, a senior petroleum analyst with GasBuddy, said earlier this week. "There is no question the fire at the Richmond refinery is the catalyst for this."

AAA said it expects gas prices for August to be flat or slightly higher. Prices should begin to decline after Labor Day as the summer driving season winds down, demand for gas decreases and refineries switch to less-expensive fuel blends. COMMENT: Yeah - right. What a joke. With a stagnant job market and historical unemployment, there is an increased demand???

One of the worst droughts in U.S. history is hampering oil production, pitting farmers against oilmen and highlighting just how dependent on water modern U.S. energy development has become. The current domestic oil boom (fable?), is possible partly by hydraulic fracturing. Known as fracking for short, the controversial practice gets oil and natural gas to flow by cracking shale rock with sand, chemicals, pressure and water. Lots of water. Each shale well takes between two and 12 million gallons of water to frack. That's 18 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water per well. "We're having difficulty acquiring water," said Chris Faulkner, CEO of Breitling Oil and Gas, an oil company with operations in many of the new shale regions including Bakken in North Dakota and Marcellus in Pennsylvania.

India suffered its second huge, crippling power failure in two days Tuesday, depriving as much as half of the vast and populous country, or up to 600 million people, of electricity and disrupting transport networks.

A massive grid failure in Delhi and much of northern India left more than 300 million people without electricity on Monday in one of the worst blackouts to hit the country in more than a decade.

Facing [declining demand] for electricity and stiff federal environmental regulations. A record-high 57 generators will shut down in 2012, representing 9 gigawatts of electrical capacity, according to EIA. In 2015, nearly 10 gigawatts of capacity from 61 coal-fired generators will be retired. Declining [consumer] demand for electricity is reflective of the poor economic, and employment conditions in the United States.