Ecuador probes oil companies over pollution

QUITO (Reuters) – Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa said on Saturday the government would suspend contracts with any foreign oil company found to have needlessly damaged the environment. “Any company … state-run or private, that unnecessarily (damages) Ecuador’s environment, or does not fulfill its contract, will face sanctions,” Correa said in his weekly radio address. Correa, […]

Watt demands think tank on energy crisis

A SCOTTISH business leader is demanding the creation of an energy commission to cut through the political dogma that he says is frustrating debate on developing a national fuel strategy. David Watt, director of the Institute of Directors Scotland, said energy production, supply and consumption was at the top of Scotland’s agenda but ideological arguments […]

Power plants concern residents

HAYWARD And it was only last week that Ramsey, a Hayward resident for more than 50 years, found out the city might soon transform from just another energy consumer into a crucial generator of the Bay Area power supply. “Why Hayward?” asked Ramsey, who imagines the worst in the two new plants: rows of dirty […]

9 oil workers kidnapped in Nigeria freed

BEIJING – China’s Foreign Ministry announced Sunday that nine Chinese oil workers who were kidnapped last month in Nigeria had been released unharmed by their captors. The workers were taken Jan. 25 when gunmen stormed the government-owned Chinese National Petroleum Co. office in the Nigerian state of Bayelsa. The Foreign Ministry said in a brief […]

Boxer wants U.S. to host energy summit

UNITED NATIONS – The head of the Senate’s Environment Committee called on the White House Friday to hold a summit grouping the 12 largest greenhouse-gas emitting nations. Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record)’s comments came on the heels of a report released by a U.N.-sponsored panel of climate scientists which said there was little […]

Report: North Korea considering concessions

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea is ready to freeze a key nuclear facility and allow international inspectors limited access to the country in exchange for millions of barrels of oil and an easing of U.S. financial restrictions, a Japanese news report said Sunday. The report came one day after the main U.S. negotiator on […]

Bolivian forces take control of pipeline

LA PAZ, Bolivia – Soldiers and police retook control of a natural gas installation Saturday, using tear gas and rubber bullets to drive out protesters who had forced the closing of a key pipeline serving the nation’s two largest cities. Demonstrators seized the Transredes pumping station near Camiri, 320 miles southeast of La Paz, following […]

Worldchanging Interview: Lester Brown

A large share of the world’s oil is used for transportation and we know that a good part of that can be substituted — we can substitute, as I mentioned using plug-in hybrids with, we can substitute wind for example, any source of electricity, but wind, because it’s clean, or — for automotive fuel, for […]

ASPO February 2007 Newsletter

791. Regional Assessment ASPO

Alerts shut 4 Swedish nuke plants

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) — Four out of Sweden’s 10 nuclear reactors were off-line on Saturday because of safety worries, capping a difficult week for the Nordic country’s nuclear industry. Sweden relies on nuclear power for around half of its energy needs and electricity prices jumped last July when half the country’s reactors were taken off-line […]

Dmitry Orlov: Collapse and its discontents

[Many readers are familiar with Dmitry Orlov, who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and from his experience offers options for surviving the collapse of Western civilization as we know it.–CB] It’s been a couple of years since I started writing on the subject of economic collapse, as it occurred in Russia and […]

A Civil War inside OPEC

A showdown within OPEC may soon erupt. Iran and Saudi Arabia are at odds over oil cuts. Could this fissure lead to OPEC’s dissolution? In This Corner Iran and Venezuela have a few things in common. And, although both share a hatred for the U.S., the bond I’m referring to is their desperate need for […]

Cyprus: Oil Dispute with Turkey Won’t Go Before UN

NICOSIA, Feb 2, 2007 (Xinhua via COMTEX) — Cyprus said Friday that it will not bring the oil exploration dispute with Turkey to the UN Security Council at the moment. Government spokesman Christodoulos Pashiardis made the statement in an apparent response to a U.S. call for refraining from actions that might further raise the tension. […]

Climate Change: Case Closed?

The debate on global warming is over. That’s the ultimate message from the report released in Paris today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body of leading researchers charged with analyzing climate science and producing the final word on what is happening Those two words

Comrade Hillary Tackles ”Obscene Profits”

Ever the opportunistic populist, Comrade Hillary Rodham Clinton is seeking to make class warfare the hallmark of her 2008 presidential campaign. Speaking before a room filled with hypnotized Democrats, Her Ladyship declared that she wants government to take excessive oil profits and “put them into a strategic energy fund.” There she goes again! Dragging out […]

Ten years left to avert catastrophe

For the past six years, more than 2,000 scientists from around the world have been writing the most definitive and up-to-date assessment of climate change. It is the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since it was set up by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation in 1988. The […]

15 points to break with oil addiction

1. Human addiction to energy consumption has spiralled to an unsustainable level in which oil is the hard drug of the global capitalist economy. 2. That this consumption is causing irreparable damage to the biosphere and is pushing the planet into a climate collapse which condemns many forms of life to extinction, among them probably […]

Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change

PARIS, Feb. 2 The report summarized the fourth assessment since 1990 by the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, sizing up the causes and consequences of climate change. But it is the first in which the group asserts with near certainty

Don’t blame Mexican tortilla crisis on biofuels, blame subsidized corn instead

We have received some sharp questions from readers on why we do not report on Mexico’s widely covered ‘tortilla crisis’. Don’t these protests prove that there is a growing conflict between food and fuel? We don’t think so. The questions stem from the unnuanced way in which mainstream media report on biofuels. The price increases […]

Green giant Russia to produce 1 billion tons of biomass for exports

Alexej Gordejev, Minister for Agriculture of the world’s largest country, announced at the EU’s Green Week in Berlin, that East-West agrarian cooperation and reform offers a tremendous opportunity for both partners in the field of green, carbon-neutral energy. Gordejev says his country’s current bioenergy production potential for exports stands at a whopping 1 billion tons […]

Exxon Mobil Conference Calls…ever listen to one?

As part of a public relations outreach effort to improve their image on climate change, Exxon Mobil invited a half-dozen or so green-shaded bloggers to a conference call with Ken Cohen, their Vice President of Public Affairs. The Oil Drum editors were invited, and I ended up being the one to do it. Here are […]

Bolivian protesters shut down pipeline

LA PAZ, Bolivia – Protesters forced the shutdown of a natural gas pipeline serving several of Bolivia’s largest cities to demand that President Evo Morales broaden his petroleum nationalization and expand state energy company operations in southern Bolivia. Vice President Alvaro Garcia confirmed that protesters on Friday had taken control of a pumping plant outside […]

Analysis: Science is no longer on the side of the sceptics

This was not a wake-up call. This was “We told you so.” Seventeen years and a zillion computer hours after the world’s climate scientists first ran the big calculation, they came up with the same estimate of the warming the planet will see by the end of the century if we go on pouring out […]

Tortilla crisis hits the poor as clean fuel drives up corn price

After enduring huge protests against his razor-thin election victory and braving fist fights in parliament at his swearing-in, Mexico Tens of thousands of farmers, trade unionists and consumers gathered in Mexico City

Global warming: the final warning

According to yesterday’s UN report, the world will be a much hotter place by 2100. This will be the impact … +2.4 Independent

Fuelling the future

Peak oil production is between 10 and 20 years’ away, according to Europe’s biggest car maker, Volkswagen, writes Andrew English After that, failing supplies and increasing demand will push fuel prices even higher. VW is calling for a drive towards a second generation of biofuels, claiming that first-generation fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, compressed […]

Limits to Growth co-author says collapse due to climate possible

If climate change sparks a global collapse this century, future historians are unlikely to acknowledge what caused it, says Norwegian scholar Jorgen Randers. Delivering the 2006 Templeton Lecture at Sydney University last night, Professor Randers said that when future generations look back over the century, they are unlikely to recognise climate change as the root […]

EU will need imports to hit biofuel targets

Europe will need to import thousands of tonnes of bio-fuels to hit stringent new targets proposed by Brussels yesterday. Oil companies said a law requiring all petrol to be blended with 10 per cent ethanol by 2020 would call for supply from countries such as Brazil that could produce vast quantities at cheap prices. “Europe […]

A canary in the Chinese coal mine

The wheat farmers of Donglu village can’t sell their harvest. The wheat kernels are dark, sooty, hollow and twisted. “Nobody wants to buy it, so we have to eat it at home,” says Zhang Xiaojiao, a farmer in the village. “Look at it,” she says, brandishing a handful of the stuff. “It doesn’t taste good. […]

Using ICT to improve energy efficiency

The information and communication technologies (ICT) sector has an important role to play in helping the EU achieve its energy efficiency goals, according to a workshop on applying ICT solutions to energy efficiency challenges, held in Brussels as part of the EU’s Sustainable Energy Week. The EU’s Action Plan for Energy Efficiency, which forms part […]

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