The headline in yesterday’s Financial Times said it all “Surge in shale oil output fuels US jobs bonanza”. According to the FT: “The boom in shale oil and gas production has created one bright spot in the otherwise grim US labour market.” “The rate of job growth is noteworthy,” Brian Davidson, an economist with the … Read More
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What now? Reading the tea leaves on Keystone XL
Written by Steve Kretzmann and Lorne Stockman Last week, the Obama Administration announced that it would “examine in depth alternative routes” for the Keystone XL pipeline and that this process “could be completed as early as the first quarter of 2013”. The Administration pledged to consider “all the relevant issues together”, including climate change, energy … Read More
The New Iraqi Oil Rush
It wasn’t meant to be like this. After nearly a decade of war, chaos and bloodshed, the Iraqi oil industry was meant to be controlled by the bureaucrats and politicians from Baghdad. But Big Oil obviously has other ideas, and in the good old-fashioned way it will do deals with anyone it can so long … Read More
Will The Real Max Baucus Stand Up Please?
In less than two weeks the Congressional Supercommittee must submit a plan to Congress to reduce the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. One of the big questions is whether the Supercommittee will recommend cutting billions of dollars in subsidies to the hugely profitable oil, gas and coal industries. According to a group of 36 … Read More
Story of Broke
Story of Stuff’s latest film – Story of Broke – is now here! And guess what? It’s all about subsidies – and how we can shift our taxpayer money away from the dinosaur economy and towards a clean, bright future! Check it out! And then take action!
Dead-End Oil
So the Europeans don’t want it. And by delaying the decision on Keystone XL for eighteen months, it looks like Obama and America doesn’t want it either. Despite one of the most aggressive marketing and public relations campaigns ever seen by the oil industry and Canadian government to try and sell the dirty tar sands, … Read More
Keystone delayed: prepare for the industry backlash
With Keystone XL delayed and almost certainly dead in its current form, the industry is a little upset. What we can expect to see over the next days and weeks and on into the election season is a relentless barrage of misinformation and outright attacks on the green movement, the President and anybody who shares … Read More
President Obama sides with the “many over the money” by effectively rejecting Keystone XL
This afternoon, officials at the White House and the State Department announced that they would “examine in depth alternative routes” for the Keystone XL pipeline and that this process “could be completed as early as the first quarter of 2013”. This amounts to an effective rejection of the pipeline. During TransCanada’s third quarter results call … Read More
“The door is closing”
We are used to dire warnings about climate change. But they do not often come from the IEA, the world’s energy watch-dog. And for such a conservative body, they do not often sound this dire. Such is our predicted catastrophic path of fossil fuel dependence, that over the next five years the last chance of … Read More
Bob Dudley: “All Mouth, No Trousers”
BP seems incapable of shrugging off the curse of the Deepwater Horizon at the moment, as the company jolts from one crisis to another. A quick flick at this morning’s headlines do not make great reading for CEO Bob Dudley, after the acrimonious collapse of BP’s $7.1 billion deal to sell a majority stake in … Read More