World Without Oil, Amen

Think $4 for a gallon of gas is screwing with your summer? Wait until you hear about something called peak oil. According to a growing number of experts Last fall, the day before Thanksgiving, my mood as I stood before the enormous Scotford complex was simply one of awe

Did you hear that Alaska has more oil than the Middle East?

Busting the myths about cheap and unlimited oil being broadcast by Rush Limbaugh, Jerome Corsi and other ignoramuses. Petroleum may be in short supply these days, but the United States does have a related surplus: myths of oil abundance. You don’t have to drill deep into our political discourse to find suspect stories about oil, […]

A Multi-Prong Approach to Carbon Neutrality

Several charges have recently been leveled at the biofuels industry. Misinformed critics have cited indirect land use issues, the food-versus-fuel debate, and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest as reasons to halt or eliminate the production of fuel ethanol. It Many promised future technologies may not materialize, or else may cause unexpected harm. Plug-in hybrids […]

Rice and Circus in East Timor

With the regional and global spike in food prices it is naturally imperative that East Timor corner crucial sources of food, joining a queue of food deficit countries from the Philippines to Singapore. But how and why has East Timor – a land of subsistence agriculturalists and one of the world’s poorest nations- been turned […]

Living Near Highway Tied to Adverse Birth Outcomes

Living near a highway may raise a pregnant woman’s risk of premature delivery or having a low birth weight baby and, counterintuitively, affluent moms-to-be seem to be more vulnerable to highway pollution than their less well-off counterparts. Using the Quebec birth registry, the researchers analyzed data on nearly 100,000 live births registered between 1997 and […]

Vestas Shares Surge on Wind Power Orders

Denmark’s Vestas, the world’s No.1 wind turbine maker, said on Friday its order backlog ballooned, sending its shares up nearly 8 percent despite operating profit coming in slightly below expectations. Vestas is riding a surge in demand for renewable energy sources amid soaring oil prices and increasing concerns about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.Vestas, […]

Kenya: Fuel Crisis Bites As Companies Seek Black Gold

Even with reports that Kenya could have struck oil in Lodwar, the fuel situation in the country has been declared a crisis at the highest levels of Government. And the situation doesn’t look promising. Industry experts now say that there is little the country can do besides planning for the future.Kenya imports crude oil for […]

Sri Lanka expert says solar energy too costly without subsidy

Solar energy is still too expensive to be used widely without government subsidies, a Sri Lankan expert has told the island’s energy-intensive industries which are grappling with the highest electricity costs in Asia. Tilak Siyambalapitiya, managing director, Resource Management Associate, said solar energy cost 60 rupees per kilowatt hour whereas now industrialists are not paying […]

The Strange History of Birth Control

Book Review of Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population by Matthew Connelly. Recently, a number of family planning advocates have resumed warning us about the dangers of overpopulation. Wars in the Middle East and Africa, food shortages throughout the developing world, and even global climate change have all recently been attributed to “population […]

Using Land to Grow Biofuels a Net Loss for Environment

(NaturalNews) The production and use of biofuels such as ethanol would contribute to global warming more than simply using gasoline, according to two studies published in the journal Science. One study, conducted by a scientist from the Nature Conservancy and researchers from the University of Minnesota, concluded that the conversion of the Southeast Asian or […]

Wind power is costly, ineffective source of electricity

Wind contributes more every year to our energy mix, but still provides only 1% of our electricity — compared with 49% for coal, 22% for natural gas, 19% for nuclear and 7% for hydroelectric. We can and should harness the wind, but 22% of our electricity by 2020 is far-fetched. Wind power is expensive (even […]

Stark warning on Britain’s shrinking coast

Abandon homes to the rising sea, warns Britain In his first interview since taking office, Lord Smith of Finsbury says Britain faces hard choices over which areas of our coast to defend and which to allow the sea to reclaim. He said detailed work was already far advanced on identifying areas of the east and […]

Oil, natural gas helped fuel war in Georgia

The lopsided war between Russia and Georgia may have come to an end. The conflict had many causes. They include Russia’s attempt to assert some of its old dominion over the region, overreaching by Georgia’s democracy-minded president, Mikheil Saakashvili, Russian umbrage at what it sees as Western meddling in its backyard and anger at moves […]

Price of oil independence: Eternal conservation

Commentary: Recent price drop in U.S. no reason to increase consumption PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. (MarketWatch) — The good news is that the price of crude oil has tumbled more than $33 a barrel from its recent peak. The bad news is that the price of oil has tumbled more than $33 a barrel from its […]

Shock waves spread as oil bubble bursts

THE exposure of the oil price boom as a speculative bubble has been the catalyst for a change in world financial flows, and the ripples are now spreading through currency, commodity and financial markets. […] Evans cites the definition of speculative bubbles by Yale economist Robert Shiller, who says they arise when news of price […]

Wind turbines across Oregon stir up health scare

Study suggests living close to an energy farm can cause a variety of physical ailments “I started to cry,” Eaton, 57, recalled of her first sight of the Willow Creek Wind Project in late July. “They’re going to be hanging over the back of our house, and now there’s the medical thing.” “The medical thing” […]

Energy Sector Remains a Global Investing Wild Card

[…] This energy-price conundrum doesn Don

With OPEC Planning to Cut Production, the Decline in Oil Prices May Not Last

Oil prices have plummeted 24% from the record high levels achieved in July, but the sell-off that sparked a stock-market rally over the last four weeks may not last since the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is already gearing up to cut production. […] This bleak outlook could foreshadow a series of production cuts, […]

Bus route changes help district balance budget

CORPUS CHRISTI “In a time when more families than ever before are considering bus transportation because of the high fuel costs, the district decides to cut back on transportation,” Benning said. “I’m lucky because I can take him to school, but what about those who can’t because they have to work or other reasons?” The […]

Peak oil is coming, and we’re unready

Has the world already reached peak oil, a time of permanently high oil prices and shortages that will profoundly change our way of life? The answer, I think, is likely yes, but the proximity of this catastrophe is not the most important question to ask. Oil is a finite natural resource; sooner or later, the […]

Giving Our Children a Gas Crisis of Their Very Own

…Our boy, who must also budget for the exigencies of a steady girlfriend, has beefed up his work hours since graduation. But his long-awaited raise at the market was only two bits, up to $8.75 an hour. Gloomily, he concluded: Some of his co-workers have lost their homes in foreclosure; others have lost their cars. […]

Oil companies pull workers on threat from storm Fay

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Shell Oil Co and Marathon Oil Corp pulled nonessential workers from the eastern and central Gulf of Mexico due to the threat of Tropical Storm Fay, but offshore production was unaffected, the companies said on Sunday. Shell said about 200 workers were evacuated on Sunday from the eastern Gulf, the same number […]

Suffering is relative for inflation-hit Saudis

RIYADH (Reuters) – With inflation rising across the Gulf Arab region, Saudi Arabia’s perennial problem of unequal distribution of wealth has never been so obvious. While poor Saudis queue for hours to obtain water in the kingdom’s second city Jeddah, others are able to take advantage of America’s new-found disdain for gas-guzzling four-wheel-drives by snapping […]

Richard Heinberg: Losing Control

Humankind has control issues, and they Today, as the result of cheap energy and the technologies it fuels, we enjoy climate-controlled living and shopping areas; our physicians cure previously fatal illnesses; we conquer problems of distance and time without a thought or care. When I say “we,” I am of course referring to the collectivity […]

A Push to Increase Icebreakers in the Arctic

A growing array of military leaders, Arctic experts and lawmakers say the United States is losing its ability to patrol and safeguard Arctic waters even as climate change and high energy prices have triggered a burst of shipping and oil and gas exploration in the thawing region. The National Academy of Sciences, the Coast Guard […]

Book club participants’ take on ‘The Long Emergency’

Book club participants made astute observations about The Long Emergency and how reading the book affected their thoughts on oil dependence. A sampling from the blog: Artie: It’s one thing to assume that technology will find clever replacements to heat and cool us, and for the internal combustion engine to transport all 6 billion of […]

Campaign 2008: Franken touts energy proposals

Rural Minnesota can play a key role in an energy economy, providing needed jobs and cutting dependence on foreign oil, says Al Franken. … The United States has 3 percent of the world

US gets ready to blow its economy away

Visiting America last week to talk to audiences across the country about “global warming”, I was struck by television commercials for the two presidential candidates. Senators McCain and Obama were each shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical “green” credentials. Since America has already built […]

Ethanol byproduct makes cows happy

WASHINGTON One-third of all the corn used to make ethanol ends up as an ingredient in feed that farmers in the upper Midwest

U.K. Biofuels Sources Are Largely Unknown

In the first report since a U.K. mandate required that 2.5 percent of road transport fuel be supplied by biofuels, the independent agency charged with tracking the country’s biofuels resources, the Renewable Fuels Agency, acknowledged last week that suppliers have been unable to prove the production methods for 80 percent of the country’s biodiesel and […]

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