News from February 2005

UK faces power cuts within three years, warn energy companies

By Tim Webb

27 February 2005

Britain’s biggest energy companies and unions will issue their starkest warning yet to ministers this week about the consequences of the Government’s flawed energy policy.

Senior industry figures will say that the country faces power cuts in three years unless the policy is overhauled.

The Independent

Bear Flattener – Jim Puplava

As the Fed withdraws liquidity from the financial markets, the major averages will continue to struggle until eventually they fall. The cyclical bull market in equities is close to peaking, if it hasnÃ¢Â€Â™t already. The stock market has very little upside as long as interest rates are rising. The Fed is trying to influence long [...]

Anti-wind farm report dismissed

A report from the world’s biggest wind power producer denouncing wind farms as too expensive and inefficient has been widely dismissed in the UK.Money would be better spent targeting energy efficiency to combat greenhouse gases, the German Energy Agency said. It comes as UK wind power grows at the fastest rate in the world, with [...]

Market Failure: Global Warming and Peak Oil

There is a wider lesson from our evolving understanding of global warming that is particularity relevant to that other emerging global-scale problem threatening global society collapse: peak oil.

Markets have never quantified and accounted for the greenhouse gas costs of burning fossil fuels. The costs of production and demand by users have always been the market variables setting the price of coal and oil.

aljazeerah.info

White House Budget Slashes Clean Energy

A Look at the Administration’s Budget Request for Sustainable Energy Programs in FY2006
by Ken Bossong

In his most recent State of the Union address, President Bush stated that the United States needed “reliable supplies of affordable, environmentally responsible energy,” and urged Congress to “pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on foreign energy.” However, there is a marked disconnect between the President’s words and the funding priorities he laid out in the Fiscal Year 2006 (FY06) budget request he recently submitted to the U.S. Congress.

Renewable Energy Access

The Pendulum of Global Leadership – Stephen Roach

Financial markets are abuzz about the possibility of yet another spurt of US-centric global economic growth. Irrespective of the current-account deficit and external debt implications of this outcome, AmericaÃ¢Â€Â™s growth dynamic is the magic to which the rest of a growth-starved world has become addicted. In the minds of investors and policymakers alike, thereÃ¢Â€Â™s no [...]

Americans’ personal incomes take a dive

Personal incomes which had been bolstered by a large stock dividend payment in December plunged 2.3 percent in January, the sharpest decline in more than a decade. Consumer spending was flat, the government reported today. The Commerce Department said the sharp January drop in incomes followed a record 3.7 percent jump in incomes in December [...]

Breakthrough in solar photovoltaics

A Palo Alto (California ) start-up, named Nanosolar Inc., founded in 2002, claims that it has developed a commercial scale technology that can deliver solar electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The Hindu

Global output struggles to meet demand

Meanwhile, growth in new supply was disappointing. A series of late-year disruptions cut the annual gain in non-OPEC crude and liquids output to 1.4 million bpd, compared to a rate of 1.9 million bpd in 2003. Nevertheless, world oil production grew 3.4% last year, to 71.721 million bpd. Much of the gain came from reserve [...]

‘’some sort of peak”

Editorial Comment, Polemic propaganda (Or, the 2% solution.) “The world is running out of oil.” Few statements are as undeniably true as this. But it’s a bit like the lyrics from an old blues song, “the doctor says it’ll kill me, but he won’t say when.” The world started running out of oil shortly after [...]