Oil Speculation needs some rules

In the summer and fall of 2008, when the cost of oil and gasoline hit unprecedented heights, oil speculators were actually buying and storing oil to take it off the market in hopes that prices would go higher. Charles Gibson talked about this and even visited oil storage facilities in Oklahoma, for his documentary on ABC called, Over a Barrel, The truth about oil. Brokerage companies, like Lehman Brothers, were not breaking the law by doing this, but they should have been…

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Exxon Mobil Is flooding Washington with lobbying money, more than all US clean energy companies put together in the first 6 months of 2009. They are apparently afraid that the clean energy bus will leave without them, or the American public will become convinced that clean energy is better than fossil fuels. They aren’t spending it all on drilling for oil, but you can bet your boots that the majority is for beating the business-as-usual horse. He isn’t dead yet, but he is on life support...

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On July 30, 2009, the venerable New York Times reported that a new study by the consulting firm, McKinsey, had released a study saying that making our homes and businesses more energy efficient could reduce our projected energy use by 23 percent by 2020. Where in blazes have they been?

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Sorry Sarah, but we may not have to destroy the Arctic Wild Life Reserve to replace fossil fuels from abroad, if you'll pardon the pun. No drill, no spill.

Biofuels, like ethanol made from corn, consume lots of energy and water and take a lot of land to produce. Cellulosic materials, like wood chips and grass are more efficient than corn and take no crops out of the food chain. A new start-up company based in Cambridge, MA, named Joule Biotechnologies, claims they can make 20,000 gallons of biofuels per year per acre. This is phenomenal since so far only algae-based biofuels come even close to this new technology, only producing from 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre per year. This new process is of the scale of production that can make biofuels a viable substitute for fossil fuels. It could mean that biofuels could replace all fossil fuels for transportation. How are these quantities achieved and what is the process?...

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The British newspaper, the Guardian, published an article July 26, 2009, revealing that George W. Bush kept evidence of global warming from the public by classifying as secret spy satellite photos showing the dramatic melting of polar ice sheets. The claims of global warming deniers’ ring a bit hollow with this revelation. The receding ice shelf poses a threat to seals and polar bear habitat, and the ice free Arctic Ocean absorbs more and more solar radiation as a result of the missing ice cover, with the possibility of run-away warming...

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Kenneth Harney’s column in the Star’s business section reports that a new generation of energy-efficient mortgages are being offered by the FHA, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae. The FHA was directed to offer a minimum of 50,000 new energy-efficient mortgages. An energy-efficient house is defined as one in which energy consumption is reduced by 20 percent after renovations. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were directed to develop new mortgage products and more flexible underwriting guidelines to reward energy conscious borrowers and builders…

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Statistics can lie, or at least tell partial truths. It is frequently reported that we consume 400 million gallons of gasoline every day, 13 million barrels of oil are imported every 24 hours, and with 4 percent of the world’s population we consume 25 percent of the world’s oil.

There is problem with these statistics:...

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Remember the ad on TV for gasoline that urged the viewer to "Put a tiger in your tank?" Well now you really can put a little tiger in your tank. The only problem is getting him to do it, the tiger, I mean. It might take a lot of training...

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Will the real Sara Palin step forward, please? Please God, tell me it's Tina Fey. Sara has finally revealed her great political career plan. She's going to be the Republican party's spokesperson against the Obama energy program. She, who doesn't believe that humans have any affect on climate change, and whose husband is in the oil business, is going to.....do what?....

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    I have been reading comments of people arguing on blog sites today. You know the type. They sign in to a blog, no matter what the subject and proceed to argue back an forth as to the meaning of something the original article writer said and what they believe to be true or not. Today the subject was sustainability and what the term meant or implied. One side said that it was a bogus term meaning absolutely nothing…

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Thomas Friedman, in his book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, said that global warming was becoming global weirding, referring to the weather. There's another type of weirding operant here. Any time a blog or article comes out about climate change, the deniers come out like roaches when the lights go off. A recent example occurred today in my local paper. It almost made me choke on my coffee...

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