News from May 2007

One Crude Oil Languishes, Another Spikes

NEW YORK Crude oil on the Nymex ended 2006 at $61.05 a barrel, while Europe’s Brent crude closed the year at a slight discount of $60.86 a barrel. That relationship was the normal order of things for years: Nymex crude oil _ pegged to high quality light, sweet West Texas Intermediate _ has enjoyed benchmark [...]

Episode 36: Locus of Agency

KMO talks with Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization about the fragility of out vast centralized systems, the need for resiliency & diversity, and the possibilities for renewal and reinvention which only present themselves in historical moments of disintegration and collapse. Podcast: C-Realm

American Gluttony – We Must Change Our Habits

An economic expert recently claimed that if every American driver pledged to save one gallon of gas per week, the prices at the pump would plunge. Tom Kloza, analyst for the New Jersey-based Oil Price Information Service, said that a 1-percent dip in demand could shave as much as 50 cents a gallon off the [...]

Alternative Fuel Vehicles Will Be Tough Sell

Imagine a vehicle that runs on hydrogen or biofuels and offers the same features, performance and price as today’s gasoline vehicle. Will it capture half the market? Not likely, concludes a new MIT analysis of the challenges behind introducing alternative-fuel vehicles to the marketplace. Not even if it’s three times more fuel-efficient. Among the barriers: [...]

What if the Oil Runs Out?

Though the government is planning a massive expansion of transport networks, it has never considered this question. Motorised transport is a form of time travel. We mine the compressed time of other eras – the infinitisimal rain of plankton onto the ocean floor, the settlement of trees in anoxic swamps – and use it to [...]

Because we’re worth it

The baby-boomers Sally asked her mother what she should do for her summer holidays that would look good on her CV.

Chinese city panics over undrinkable water supply

Panic water buying in a major eastern Chinese city has broken out with millions hoarding drinking supplies after public taps became tainted with polluted lake water, state press reported Thursday. Stores in Wuxi city, Jiangsu province, began rationing sales of bottled water after the outbreak of blue-green algae contaminated the drinking supplies of the city [...]

ExxonMobil shareholders rebuff concerns on climate change

ExxonMobil shareholders on Wednesday voted strongly against several measures that dissident investors proposed to reform the climate policies of world’s largest oil company. A majority of ExxonMobil shareholders defeated resolutions, urging the oil giant to set goals to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and to boost its use of renewable energy, at ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder [...]

Who Owns the Wind?

With a growing number of wind power stations in Germany, a new kind of legal case is rearing its ugly head. The crime: stealing wind. It’s an offense not mentioned in the bible or the statute books. But in a broader sense it is about theft, even when the booty itself is invisible. But it [...]

US urges G8 deal on gas emissions

US President George W Bush has urged countries to agree on long-term goals for cutting greenhouse emissions. He called for 15 countries identified as major emitters, including developing nations, to meet in the coming months. The call came in a statement outlining US policy ahead of next week’s G8 summit, in which the German hosts [...]