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"* Sale would be one of the largest utility deals this year * E.ON shares down 0.1 pct, sector unchanged Germany's E.ON, the world's largest utility by sales, may sell its U.S. unit in what could be one of the biggest deals in the industry this year, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. "It'd be good to get rid of that business," said a person from within E.ON familiar with the management's strategy. "Our debt is a real burden for us." E.ON had bought the E.ON U.S. unit, formerly known as LG&E, in 2002 as part of its 9.6 billion pound ($14.30 billion) takeover of Britain's Powergen, but the overseas operation remained separate while it was integrating European operations such as energy trading."

By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these "scientific experts," cited so often to confirm "man-made global warming," have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that "peer-review" their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails being sought under the public disclosure laws. Wow. I'm about as shocked as Claude Rains' character when he found out there was gambling going on at Rick's Place in "Casablanca." Aren't you? Most Popular Stories # SHERMAN FREDERICK: Reid's chances look really dim # LETTERS: CityCenter: No joy, just a stark grayness # LETTERS: Do-gooders don't always do that much good # EDITORIAL: Lots of cash equals guilty # EDITORIAL: A hefty golden parachute # LETTERS: In praise of neighborhoods where kids can be kids # VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The global warming fraud is melting # LETTERS: Union not only culprit in auto industry's demise # EDITORIAL: Cost control? # LETTERS: What are they thinking at City Hall? East Anglia is not some cowtown community college. The Climate Research Unit there is one of the world's four major collators and repositories of "global warming" piffle.

By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these "scientific experts," cited so often to confirm "man-made global warming," have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that "peer-review" their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails being sought under the public disclosure laws. Wow. I'm about as shocked as Claude Rains' character when he found out there was gambling going on at Rick's Place in "Casablanca." Aren't you? Most Popular Stories # SHERMAN FREDERICK: Reid's chances look really dim # LETTERS: CityCenter: No joy, just a stark grayness # LETTERS: Do-gooders don't always do that much good # EDITORIAL: Lots of cash equals guilty # EDITORIAL: A hefty golden parachute # LETTERS: In praise of neighborhoods where kids can be kids # VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The global warming fraud is melting # LETTERS: Union not only culprit in auto industry's demise # EDITORIAL: Cost control? # LETTERS: What are they thinking at City Hall? East Anglia is not some cowtown community college. The Climate Research Unit there is one of the world's four major collators and repositories of "global warming" piffle.

Just days before a scheduled Board of Supervisors' vote Tuesday on a "clean energy" plan, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. submitted a brief summary of its proposal to join with local governments to boost use of renewable energy. The PG&E summary, which contained few details, was submitted to the county on Friday in advance of supervisors' decision on whether to join a Marin County joint powers authority that would compete with PG&E for Marin customers. Supporters of the Marin Clean Energy initiative say the authority would match PG&E's rates while substantially reducing use of nonrenewable, "dirty" energy required to meet Marin County's energy needs.

"Energy Secretary Steven Chu today dismissed accusations of fraud in climate science generated by the release last year of hacked e-mails between researchers, saying e-mails showed "warts and bumps" in the scientific process. Chu told a Senate panel there are "mountains" of evidence that climate change is real and the Energy Department will continue to rely on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which critics say has been undermined by the so-called "Climategate" e-mails."

"In a fight that showed the flaws in California's ballot initiative process and the sheer nerve of PG&E, the state's largest utility, clean energy and local control has won. Proposition 16, which would have change California's constitution to force cities and counties to get the approval of two-thirds of their voters before using public money to invest in local energy projects or utilities. PG&E spent over $46 million on the effort, which would have ensured its monopoly. Prop 16 stems from a 2002 state law, that allowed "community choice aggregation," which allows counties or cities to purchase electricity while utilities continue to offer the infrastructure for power delivery--the power lines, distribution equipment, supply natural, and even billing. "

Around 100 Greenpeace activists have occupied a construction site in Rotterdam's harbor to protest against a coal-fired power plant German energy giant E.ON AG is building there. The environmental group says it hopes to force E.ON to change its plans and build a plant that will release less carbon dioxide.

"San Diego doesn't need to import sunshine from the desert," said Weiner, conservation coordinator for the San Diego-based Desert Protective Council. Environmentalists have won some rounds. SDG&E had been pushing to build Sunrise through the heart of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a recreational jewel beloved by hikers and campers. That 150-mile route appears doomed after recent decisions by an administrative law judge and a utilities commission member. * Map Map Judge Jean Veith wants the commission to reject the Sunrise Powerlink because she has concluded it's too costly, too harmful to the environment and not needed for SDG&E to meet clean-energy mandates.

Who's going to control the local electric grid, and thus the city's energy future? Two months after Pacific Gas and Electric Co. spent $10 million to defeat a clean energy measure on the San Francisco ballot, Sup. Sophie Maxwell has stepped into the battle, introducing a mild ordinance that lifts some of the language from the Clean Energy Act but would accomplish very little. We're glad to see Maxwell stepping up her efforts to close the dirty Mirant Power Plant in Potrero Hill, but her legislation needs some significant amendments. Maxwell's ordinance, cosponsored by Sup. Aaron Peskin (who is one meeting away from being termed out), would make it city policy to "take all feasible steps" to close the Potrero plant. That's a laudable goal. It also borrows the aggressive environmental goals from the Clean Energy Act, stating that the city needs to meet all its energy needs by 2040 with renewable power. But unlike the Clean Energy Act, Maxwell's mandate ignores PG&E, which supplies the vast majority of the electricity in San Francisco and which can't even meet the state's weak alternative energy standards. Her requirement would apply only to the city's own power supplies, which come mostly from the Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric project and thus already meet the 2040 standards.

Tom Wilbanks, a corporate fellow at ORNL and a significant contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change work that shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore, said the reports emerging out of the University of East Anglia's climate research unit are embarrassing and indefensible. But he said he doesn't believe there will be a huge effect long-term on studies of global climate change. Wilbanks said he was stunned to read reports of the e-mails, including some reported to be from scientists he knows well from Lawrence Livermore and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.

Tom Wilbanks, a corporate fellow at ORNL and a significant contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change work that shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore, said the reports emerging out of the University of East Anglia's climate research unit are embarrassing and indefensible. But he said he doesn't believe there will be a huge effect long-term on studies of global climate change. Wilbanks said he was stunned to read reports of the e-mails, including some reported to be from scientists he knows well from Lawrence Livermore and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.

The energy dynamics of computing. Includes fascinating insight into the energy requirements of biological computing -- e.g., brain power. Fantastic, a must-read.

Energy Bulletin's Bart Anderson has an interview in, of all places, a French cyberpunk journal - The future is Amish, not Mad Max: interview with Bart Anderson of EB. Laurent Courau: Your site puts forward the concept of "peak oil." Could you begin by reviewing this essential point for the readers of La Spirale? Bart Anderson: There is a limited amount of petroleum in the earth. After the easy deposits have been exploited, we go after deposits that are more difficult and expensive to develop (e.g. tar sands, deepwater and arctic oil). At a certain point - peak oil - the amount of oil produced reaches a maximum. Afterwards, less and less oil is produced. In this way oil production follows a more-or-less bell-shaped curve, Hubbert's Curve. The curve takes its name from the Shell Oil geoscientist, M. King Hubbert, who presented the idea in 1956 and predicted the peaking of U.S. oil production, which occurred in 1970.

Last May, protesters took over James E. Rogers's front lawn in Charlotte, N.C., unfurling banners declaring "No new coal" and erecting a makeshift "green power plant" - which, they said in a press release, was fueled by "the previously unexplored energy source known as hot air, which has been found in large concentrations" at his home. And so it goes for Mr. Rogers, the chief executive of Duke Energy. For three years, environmentalists have been battling to stop his company from building a large coal-fired power plant in southwestern North Carolina. They say it will spew six million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, in addition to producing toxic gases and mountains of fly ash similar to the muck that engulfed a Tennessee community recently.

I've been getting a lot of calls and e-mails from people asking about the falling prices for oil in recent weeks. The immediate explanation is that world economic activity is decelerating. Demand is falling. OPEC announced cuts in output. But the markets still believe that economic decline will trump the ability of OPEC to prop up the price of oil. Enjoy it while it lasts. Just over the horizon, things are about to become dicey. This week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) will release a new report on the future of world energy. In its World Energy Outlook, the IEA will state categorically that "Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable." There's not much wiggle room in that statement. According to the IEA, despite the recent fall in oil prices, the medium- and long-term outlooks for energy supply are grim. Conventional oil output is destined to decline. Demand will still grow, however, especially in the developing world. And the twain shall only meet by prices rising to clear the market. "It is," as our Arab friends like to say, "written."

A federal judge on Wednesday issued a ruling that could clear the way for a multimillion-dollar payout of punitive damages to thousands of commercial fishermen and others who claimed harm from the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. Click to enlarge Click to enlarge Judge Russel Holland Story tools Comments (18) Recommend (0) E-mail a friend Print Digg this Seed Newsvine Send link via AIM Add to My Yahoo! Yahoo! Buzz Font size : A | A | A Judge H. Russel Holland of Anchorage rejected a bid from one plaintiff, Sea Hawk Seafoods Inc., to throw out a complex allocation plan for the damages and replace it with one that would steer potentially millions more dollars to the company.

Of course Katharine Gun was free to have a conscience, as long as it didn't interfere with her work at a British intelligence agency. To the authorities, practically speaking, a conscience was apt to be less tangible than a pixel on a computer screen. But suddenly - one routine morning, while she was scrolling through e-mail at her desk - conscience struck. It changed Katharine Gun's life, and it changed history. Despite the nationality of this young Englishwoman, her story is profoundly American - all the more so because it has remained largely hidden from the public in the United States. When Katharine Gun chose, at great personal risk, to reveal an illicit spying operation at the United Nations in which the U.S. government was the senior partner, she brought out of the transatlantic shadows a special relationship that could not stand the light of day.

n environmental action group founded by former vice president Al Gore is accusing ABC of censoring an advocacy ad the group paid to air on the network. The Alliance for Climate Protection late Wednesday sent an e-mail blast to supporters with the ominous subject line, "ABC won't air our ad."

A speech delivered to the Energy Forum: "The Global Energy Market: Comprehensive Strategies to Meet Geopolitical and Financial Risks," at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, on May 21, 2008. The purpose of this talk is twofold: First, I will briefly cover some of the highlights of a paper co-authored with my colleague at the Naval Postgraduate School, Daniel Moran, titled "The Militarization of Energy Security."[1] This paper was published in the January 2008 issue of our e-journal Strategic Insights and is the opening chapter in an edited volume that will be published by Routledge in the summer of 2008 titled: Energy Security and Global Politics: The Militarization of Resource Management.

"Energy Secretary Steven Chu has steamed to the rescue of one of his flagship research programs less than a week after a congressional spending panel fired a warning shot across its bow. Appearing yesterday before the House of Representatives energy and water appropriations subcommittee to defend the Department of Energy's 2011 overall budget request, Chu invoked several icons of scientific achievement in describing where his fledgling Energy Hubs program fits into DOE's overall portfolio of energy innovation. It was his clearest and most colorful explanation to date of how his so-called Bell Lablets differ from two other programs-the Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)-that have attracted far less criticism from legislators. "

Nearly a dozen times over the past century, San Francisco voters have rejected ballot measures to support a takeover of the city's privately run electricity system. But advocates of public power haven't given up their goal of wresting control from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and this year are linking support of the measure to combating global warming and securing energy independence.

AOMORI, Japan - Nations should fight rising oil prices by cutting subsidies and vastly increasing investment in energy, while oil-producing countries need to ramp up output and divulge more information about how much they produce, the U.S. energy secretary said Saturday.