Tesla, city strike deal to build all-electric sedan

San Jose to provide 90 acres for factory, free lease for 10 years SAN FRANCISCO – When Tesla Motors Inc. began taking orders last year for its all-electric sports car, celebrities lined up to purchase the sleek zero-emission vehicle with the six-digit sticker price. But with plans in the works for a new headquarters and […]

Pickens says Wal-Mart to study switch from diesel

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens said on Wednesday he has convinced the head of Wal-Mart Stores Inc to study the possibility of switching the fuel used for the retailer’s huge fleet of delivery trucks to compressed natural gas, from diesel. Wal-Mart officials confirmed that Pickens was a guest speaker at a […]

Scientific breakthroughs needed to unlock nation’s energy potential

America has given itself a tall order. We are determined to meet growing energy demands while reducing our reliance on imported oil and curtailing greenhouse gases. But these commendable goals are being overrun by reality. The U.S. is showing few signs of reducing its dependence on fossil fuels such as petroleum and natural gas. Crude […]

Scientists Behind ‘Doomsday Seed Vault’ Ready World’s Crops For Climate Change

ScienceDaily (Sep. 17, 2008) Crop diversity is the raw material needed for improving and adapting food crops to harsher climate conditions and constantly evolving pests and diseases. However, it is disappearing from many of the places where it has been placed for safekeeping

Ethanol makers hit by cash crunch, corn prices

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Shares of U.S. ethanol makers took a beating on Wednesday as they wrestle with unpredictable corn prices and dwindling cash piles at a time when capital markets look unlikely to provide easy financing. Aventine Renewable Energy Holdings Inc said on Wednesday it could seek to issue new debt and shares […]

Iran likely to face more power cuts this winter

TEHRAN: Iranians are likely to endure further power cuts this winter despite their country’s huge oil and gas reserves, Energy Minister Parviz Fattah warned in comments published on Wednesday. “There is a possibility of blackouts in autumn and winter,” the Etemad newspaper quoted the minister as saying. Fattah said cheap electricity and the resulting high […]

No relief in sight for summer heat trend

For the 30th consecutive year, the Earth’s summer temperature was above average (left), according to data released Tuesday by the National Climatic Data Center. Global temperatures were the ninth-warmest since records began in 1880. (Climatologists define summer as the months of June, July and August.) Measuring just the globe’s land areas, it was the seventh-warmest […]

Lost middle-class tribe’s ’secret’ eco-village in Wales spotted

For five happy years they enjoyed simple lives in their straw and mud huts. Generating their own power and growing their own food, they strived for self-sufficiency and thrived in homes that looked more suited to the hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. Then a survey plane chanced upon the ‘lost tribe’… and they […]

Medvedev wants Russia to set Arctic seabed borders

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered his officials on Wednesday to draft a law marking out Russia’s borders in the Arctic, where it is competing with the West for control of vast energy resources. Medvedev did not specify where the borders should lie but Russia has claimed large swathes of territory and any […]

Collapse of Wall Street precedes complete disintegration of system

About those “green jobs”… Do not be distracted by the hysteria of the news-media circus regarding the A big-picture analysis includes the loss of cheap, abundant energy that cannot be replaced. The news media studiously ignores this while pretending to present real news on energy and the environment. This policy is followed also by the […]

Russia: Oil Firms Producing at Loss Due to Lower Crude Prices

The country’s oil companies are losing money on crude production after a decline in prices pushed the market value of a barrel of the Urals blend below the cost of getting the fuel to consumers and paying taxes, UBS said Tuesday. A Russian company shipping crude from the Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk would post an […]

U.S. may seek IEA’s emergency gasoline supplies

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Bush administration was considering asking the International Energy Agency to release emergency gasoline and diesel fuel inventories into the U.S. market after Hurricanes Ike and Gustav disrupted domestic supplies, a cabinet official said on Wednesday. U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman told reporters that the Bush administration could decide as early as […]

Peak oil: postponed

What the oil companies don’t tell you Oil supplies will actually last for far longer than our politicians think, the scaremongers fear, and the oil companies tell us. So says Dr Richard Pike, head of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and someone who isn Before becoming chief executive of the RCS, Pike spent twenty five […]

Broke!

The bailout of AIG has exposed more than just the collapse of Casino Capitalism. It exposes the governmental system to be as much a sham as our economy has been! How is it that $85 billion can just materialize to bail out this one insurance company (insuring for the most part, opaque, enormously complicated and […]

Wind and Heat Pumps: A Winning Combination

Last month, I posted some nice maps showing when and where good wind resources are found in the US. Now I’ve found something better: a visual comparison of electrical load with wind farm production[pdf file], published by the Western Area Power Administration in 2006. The study compared electricity production from five wind farms in Northern […]

Looking Ahead – The Weekly Petroleum Inventory Reports

…Like many (but not all) of you, I have been struggling to understand how RBOB could be down so much with prices at the pump higher and refinery shut downs. One possibility is that we are receiving as-yet-unreported gasoline tanker shipments from overseas to compensate for our downtime. A more likely explanation however, is that […]

The view from the graveyard of empires

…Like all the others before it, the emergence of the U.S. as a world power was based on massive economic growth at the end of the 19th century. The continued growth and all the military, diplomatic and cultural muscle that flow from it have been based on cheap oil. But the era of cheap oil […]

CNBC’s ”Hunt for Black Gold” will Premiere on September 24th

“The Hunt for Black Gold” hosted by Maria Bartiromo follows the flow of oil from the moment it comes on line, into the supertankers, into the refineries and finally pumped into the consumer’s gas tank. Bartiromo’s special moves from Alaska’s North Slope all the way to the Gulf of Mexico – critical areas in the […]

The Next Big Disruption: Peak Oil

What happens when the demand for oil clearly surpasses suppliers’ ability to provide it? No industry will escape the disruption of so-called peak oil. “Peak oil” is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few […]

Environment: Tar sands – the new toxic investment

Report warns against oil industry’s equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage crisis Shell and BP have been warned by investors that their involvement in unconventional energy production such as Canada’s oil sands could turn out to be the industry’s equivalent of the sub-prime lending that poisoned the banking sector and triggered the current financial crisis. The […]

Mediterranean forests are a burning issue

On average, some 400,000 hectares of forest go up in smoke each year in the region, notably in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, creating billions of euros worth of damage and all too often taking human lives.Climate change threatens to make matters worse. Not only will the more intense and frequent heat waves and hotter […]

China to become world’s largest investor in green energy

China is on the verge of becoming the world’s largest investor in green energy as it struggles to reverse the catastrophic effect its industry has wreaked on the environment. Last year, China spent Li Junfeng, an energy expert at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said that in terms of the “overall scale of […]

Malaysia: Borneo hinge to Anwar’s ambition

If Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is successful in his historic bid to form a reformist government in Kuala Lumpur, he will likely owe much to the country’s Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak.Sarawak has long been an important petroleum-producing province and now Sabah is joining it as a result of new and large deep […]

Big-bang report blasts Iran

Just as Iraq was pressed to “prove a negative”, that is, the absence of a clandestine weapons of mass destruction program, the IAEA is now dead set on denying Iran a clean bill of health as long as it has not satisfied concerns about a similar absence. Consequently, irrespective of his proposed modality, ElBaradei in […]

The Biofuel Business Is Going Horizontal

Computer companies initially made everything they needed–chips, software, chassis, cooling systems. Gradually, the business went horizontal: some made chips, others went into software and others just concentrated on equipment. The same is going to happen in biofuels, Neal Gutterson, CEO of Mendel Biotechnology told me during a break at the GoingGreen conference taking place in […]

Boeing: Biofuel research pace ‘remarkable,’ could partially power flights by 201

Boeing remains bullish on the scientific progress of biofuel development, with Director-Environmental Performance Billy Glover saying this week that the manufacturer is confident commercially viable biofuel will be available to partially power aircraft by 2013. Speaking in Seattle at an Air New Zealand environmental briefing, Glover reiterated his previous statements that the pace of breakthroughs […]

Solar companies feel fallout from Lehman bankruptcy

Fallout from Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. Sept. 15 bankruptcy filing is hitting the clean-tech sector. At least three solar companies, including SunPower Corp. of San Jose, Evergreen Solar of Marlboro, Mass., and JA Solar Holdings Co. Ltd. of Shanghai, China, have issued statements in the wake of Lehman’s bankruptcy about stock loans made to Lehman […]

Australia: Climate change already altering farm practices

More than 65pc of Australian agricultural businesses say they have perceived a change in the climate and 62pc say the change is affecting their operations, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. But approximately half (49.5pc) of the agricultural businesses reported a change in the management practices on their holding in response […]

Were We Wrong To Fret About Peak Oil?

Remember when $200-per-barrel oil looked inevitable? Or, at the very least, a $100-per-barrel plateau looked certain? Plenty of oil analysts thought that was just over the horizon (yes, I was also guilty of this). But now crude futures are hovering down around $90, despite the succession of brutal hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico—mainly due […]

Creation of special fund to help establish a market price for uranium

The world uranium producers and consumers in association with financial institutes intend to found a special international fund to establish a market price for uranium”, head of Kazatomprom JSC M. Dzhakishev has said at the Kazakh Government’s sitting today. “Absence of the market price is a main problem of uranium market for today. To solve […]

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