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Anti-regulation aide to Cheney is up for energy post
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
A senior aide to Vice President Cheney is the leading contender to become a top official at the Energy Department, according to several current and former administration officials, a promotion that would put one of the administration’s most ardent opponents of environmental regulation in charge of forming department policies on climate change.
F. Chase Hutto III has played a prominent behind-the-scenes role in shaping the administration’s environmental policies for several years, the officials said, helping to rewrite rules affecting the air that Americans breathe and the waters that oil tankers traverse. In every instance, according to both his allies and opponents, he has challenged proposals that would place additional regulations on industry.
(18 August 2008)
Why oil prices continue to fluctuate (audio and transcript)
Stacey Vanek-Smith, Marketplace (US public radio)
The idea of drilling domestically for oil has long been circulating, but can it be a reality? Stacey Vanek-Smith talks with Mark Bernstein, director of USC’s energy institute, about why that won’t really help oil prices.
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Stacey Vanek-Smith: … Mark, if we really ramped up oil production in this country, what affect would it have?
Mark Bernstein: Well, we’d hit our peak oil production 30 years ago, and we’re not likely to find a whole lot more anywhere.
Vanek-Smith: So it’s not a question of us not tapping our resources, it’s a question of us having tapped them?
Bernstein: We’ve tapped them. There are still some resources left, and there’s some off the coast — we don’t know how much. There’s some in Alaska. But we’ve tapped most of them. And so we can either think about tapping the rest now or holding it back as an insurance policy for later.
Vanek-Smith: We’ve heard a lot about offshore drilling, about ANWAR, obviously, building up refineries and stepping up oil production. Would that cushion us from fluctuations in the oil market?
Bernstein: In the long run it would, but not for 15 or 20 years. It takes a long time to find the oil, it takes a long time to drill the oil and to pull it out. There’s a shortage of oil rigs right now, so even if we opened up a whole bunch of these leases, the oil companies wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway because there are no rigs to drill with. So it’s not a short-term solution.
(18 August 2008)
Petrol pump pilgrims keep faith
Greg Wood and Sandra Shmueli, BBC Online
A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.
Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.
Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.
“We don’t have anybody else to turn to but God,” Mr Twyman told the BBC. “We have to turn these problems over to God and not to man.”
(17 August 2008)
Renewed push for uranium mining in West
Sandy Shore, San Francisco Chronicle
Cattleman George Glasier sees the next nuclear era amid the blood-orange mesas of Paradox Valley, the same Western range lands that hold a darker legacy from the last rush to pull uranium from the ground.
Residents of this valley near the Four Corners region are getting an unimpeded view of the second uranium rush. Many are worried.
Glasier, a onetime mining executive-turned-rancher, wants to build a uranium mill on cattle-grazing land near his spread. It would be the country’s first in decades.
The land is not far from the toxic uranium mines, now mostly abandoned, that serve as a reminder of an industry born of the Cold War.
As the third global energy shock begins to drastically alter national economies, a potential shift in U.S. energy policy has moved to the forefront of the upcoming presidential election.
(17 August 2008)
