Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For practically every minute of my life, I’ve been involved in coal. I grew up in a part of Western Kentucky that was then the biggest coal producing area in the country. When I was small, my home town held a “Strawberry Festival,” because the country produced a good part of the nation’s strawberries. By the time I was a teenager, the festival was renamed as the “Coal Festival.” Those strawberry fields were long gone.
Well before crude hits $100 a barrel, retail prices would soar, and stalled consumer spending will likely weigh down the economy (Special report on $100/barrel oil)
Lifestyle changes — including how we drive, where we shop and how we invest — can ease the squeeze as the world’s oil supply shrinks
The world’s oil reserves are running out much faster than industry and governments are admitting, a conference in Edinburgh has been told.
Wind farms, while necessary, are a classic example of what environmentalists call an “end-of-the-pipe solution”. Instead of tackling the problem – our massive demand for energy – at source, they provide less damaging means of accommodating it.
Disappearing islands, thawing permafrost, melting polar ice. How the earth is changing.[Long well-written article on climate change.]
One of the world’s leading energy analysts yesterday called for an independent assessment of global oil reserves because he believed that Middle Eastern countries may have far less than officially stated and that oil prices could double to more than $100 a barrel within three years, triggering economic collapse.
An approximately 6,000-square-foot yard provides generous space for a bustling urban farm. From the street it is impossible to tell that the property holds everything from apple trees to tomato vines, rabbits to goats, and chickens to domesticated pigeons.
United States President George W. Bush has failed in his effort to get the Saudi Government to increase oil production in the near term. The Saudi Government has said there is nothing it can do because its production is already at or near full capacity, and that the long-term solution to the oil price problem is for the US to increase its investment in refining capacity.
The oil market is vibrating and crude oil prices are bobbing up and down like a float on the water. Around the world experts make analysis and try to explain why. The fact that the price of crude oil is approaching $60 per barrel and the production costs for the same barrel fluctuates between $1 and $10 shows that common economical theories are not valid any longer, something new is in the air and the question is how to interpret today’s vibrations.
Low-key interviews with a petroleum geologist and an environmental editor. (Audio)
The US president is welcoming Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah to his ranch in Texas on Monday. Bush says he’s looking for “a straight answer” to how close the Saudis are to reaching production capacity.
