Oil looks cheap, but investors are wary

LONDON (Reuters) – A flight into cash during the credit crisis has helped drive oil and other commodity prices down so steeply that they are a potential “buy” for pension funds with a longer view. But timing is everything. “People are sitting on cash — big lumps of it,” said Mark Mathias, chief executive of […]

World’s biggest refinery poised to start in India

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s Reliance Industries (RELI.BO) is set to double its capacity by starting up its new 580,000 barrels per day plant (bpd) this weekend, creating the world’s biggest refinery just as global oil demand collapses. The $6 billion project will make the oil complex in Jamnagar in western Gujarat the world’s single […]

Save energy, save the economy

The country may spend $30 billion on conservation in the coming year, but will that put people back to work? NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — It looks like America may be getting a whole lot more energy efficient as part of any new stimulus plan. But how exactly will that happen? While new light bulbs, insulation […]

Spill at Tennessee Coal Plant Creates Environmental Disaster

Greenpeace is calling for a criminal investigation into a major environmental disaster at a coal plant outside Knoxville, Tennessee. Early Monday morning, a forty-acre pond containing toxic coal ash collapsed. 2.6 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled out of the retention pond, burying homes and roads. Over 400 acres of land are now under […]

‘Green’ jobs compete for stimulus aid

In one of the first internal struggles of the incoming Obama administration, environmentalists and smart-growth advocates are trying to shift the priorities of the economic stimulus plan that will be introduced in Congress next month away from allocating tens of billions of dollars to highways, bridges and other traditional infrastructure spending to more projects that […]

Oil prices near $35 on more dour economic news

HOUSTON Investors expecting more evidence of slowing U.S. energy demand got a bit of a surprise as the Energy Department reported crude inventories dropped last week. But Americans continue to cut back on driving amid the worst recession in a generation, leading to growing stockpiles of gasoline and eroding demand for motor fuel. Gasoline futures […]

Energy and money

Is energy merely another commodity among many in the modern industrial economy? Or is it the very basis of our financial and material life? Alfred Korzybski, the founder of a discipline he called general semantics, is famous for the saying, “The map is not the territory.” In keeping with this dictum, we might readily agree […]

Russia, China warn of dire economic straits in 2009

… Commenting on the worsening situation, Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky, warned that unpaid wages, the threat of layoffs and unpopular government anti-crisis measures “may aggravate the protest mood.” China’s top economic planner also warned of “great challenges” ahead. The head of the National Development and Reform Commission, Zhang Ping, said “grave risks” lay ahead […]

Science Adviser

My post on John P. Holdren They declared that

Kunstler: Legitimacy Dwindles

…When legitimacy erodes, anything goes. Nothing is respected including rules and personalities. The center doesn’t hold and the new vacuum there is a tumultuous place. The same crisis of authority and legitimacy is spreading from nation to nation now. Soon, China will contend with a discontented army of the unemployed. Greece has been in an […]

Volatile energy prices strain ties in Northeast

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) Heating oil dealers, many of them mom-and-pop operations, never imagined the price of oil could drop so steeply and stand to lose a lot of money

Russia expects first deficit in a decade

Russia will run a budget deficit in 2009 for the first time in a decade as low oil prices take their toll on government revenue, a Kremlin official said Wednesday, the state RIA-Novosti news agency reported. Arkady Dvorkovich, the president’s economic adviser, said the size of the deficit was not yet clear but it would […]

Fat-Fueled Ford Is Biodiesel Biohazard

If you had cosmetic surgery with Dr. Craig Alan Bittner, there’s a chance fat sucked from your butt went right into the fuel tank of his SUV. Bittner called his thigh-test fuel “lipo-diesel.” We call it revolting, but we’re also stepping out on a limb and calling his bluff. It seems some investigators from the […]

Fill ‘Er Up With Human Fat

Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them. For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator.Love handles […]

Oil Services in the Trash Bin?

While ‘peak oil’ may be delayed, or may in fact have already been reached, there is a certain inexorability to the exhaustion of fossil fuels, and as aggregate supplies decline in the years ahead, the need for more Oil and alternative energy will soar. When viewed on a three to five year basis, it is […]

Analyst warns of ’solar market eclipse’ in 2009

Global revenue for photovoltaic (PV) panels is expected to plunge by 19 percent in 2009, following eight consecutive years of growth, as a massive oversupply puts pressure on pricing, according to a forecast by market research firm iSuppli Corp. Worldwide revenue from shipments of panels will decline to $12.9 billion in 2009, down from $15.9 […]

Australia GM Unit To Build Small Car

The Australian arm of General Motors said on Monday it would build the first fuel-efficient small car in decades after securing government funding and as GM moves onto taxpayer-backed life-support in the United States. As sales of large-engine family cars traditionally favored by Australians slide amid tough financial conditions and global warming fears, GM’s Holden […]

Global warming might cook up too many male fish

Many reptiles have no sex chromosomes. Instead, their gender is determined by temperature. In crocodiles, for example, males are hot: eggs incubated in sand above a certain “”pivotal temperature”” almost always hatch males. That could spell trouble, because Earth is warming so fast that natural selection may not have time to adjust pivotal temperatures. Female […]

Scotland: Generation of green electricity showing a big surge

New statistics have shown that the amount of energy produced by renewable sources in Scotland has dramatically increased. Government figures have revealed that a fifth of the electricity used in Scotland last year came from renewable sources.The statistics from the Department of Energy and Climate Change showed that 20.1 per cent of electricity used in […]

The best strategy for cutting greenhouse gases and the use of fossil fuels.

The European Union established a trading program for carbon emissions in 2005. In the United States, a proposal for a similar system is at the center of the new administration’s energy policy. Under such programs, a regulatory authority sets a cap on total carbon emissions, and tradable emissions allowances are issued or auctioned off to […]

U.S. Military Preparing for Domestic Disturbances

A new report from the U.S. Army War College discusses the use of American troops to quell civil unrest brought about by a worsening economic crisis. The report from the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute warns that the U.S. military must prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” that could be provoked […]

Steve LeVine – Blunder: A New Age for Russia

Zach Shore, who teaches at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, usually writes about foreign affairs with a historical bent In any case, I have wanted to write a couple of year-end looks at the news, including Russia

Chavez says falling oil prices will not detain his socialist revolution

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) “Oil could fall to zero dollars, and I guarantee you this revolution will not be detained,” he said. “Totally the opposite.” Prices for light, sweet crude settled at $38.98 on the New York Mercantile Exchange Tuesday

More declines for oil on latest batch of bad news

Oil prices dipped below $38 a barrel Tuesday on fresh evidence of weakness in the U.S. housing market and a shrinking gross domestic product that suggests the recession may be worsening. A report by the Commerce Department showed that sales of new homes fell in November to the slowest pace in nearly 18 years, while […]

U.S. Weakens Plan to Curb Air Pollution at Refineries

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency weakened plans to reduce air pollution from new refineries after petroleum-industry lobbyists complained about potential costs for oil companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. The Washington-based regulator, supported by environmental groups, had proposed tighter limits on Flaring restrictions, proposed by the EPA in June for new or modernized refineries, […]

E85 experiment doesn’t prove cost effective

After a 60-day trial run this summer, the West Lafayette Police Department has decided to no longer fill half of its patrol fleet with E85. In early June, officers with flex-fuel vehicles started purchasing the alternative fuel at the Family Express on Indiana 25 North, near Interstate 65. E85 was selling for about 99 cents […]

Gas exporting states agree Qatar-based ‘gas OPEC’

“A new organisation has been born today…. The charter has been agreed. The headquarters will be in Qatar,” Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said after the meeting. The forum groups Russia, the world’s biggest gas producer, with other gas-rich states such as Iran and Qatar and a dozen other gas-exporting countries. The GECF had been […]

‘Global land grab’ causing alarm among NGOs

MADRID (AFP) “On the one hand, ‘food insecure’ governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production,” said the Spanish-based NGO Grain. “On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial […]

Oil-Refining Margins Are Worst in Three Quarters, BP Data Show

(Bloomberg) — Profits from turning a barrel of crude into oil products are the worst since the first quarter amid waning demand for gasoline and other fuels, according to BP Plc data. BP The U.S. economy shrank in the third quarter at a 0.5 percent annual pace as the now year-old recession began to intensify, […]

Putin: no more cheap gas

MOSCOW (AP) Russia’s economy is already suffering as crude oil prices

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