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In four years, U.S. gas prices have doubled to more than $3.70 a gallon, and crude oil has tripled to around $125 a barrel. Allowing for inflation, that's higher than prices were during the 1978-83 oil shock that triggered a recession and sky-high interest rates. But . . .

China's national assembly Saturday signalled the country's commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by adopting a law supporting its renewable energy industry. The new law, an amendment to one on renewable energy adopted by the National People's Congress standing committee, obliges electricity grid companies to buy all the power produced by renewable sources. It also empowers the State Council's energy department, the electricity regulatory agency and its finance departments to determine the amount of renewable energy available in the country's overall power generating capacity. Power companies will be obliged to take up all of that capacity, and those refusing to do so will be fined an amount up to double that of the economic loss of the renewable energy company, Ni Yuefeng, vice-president of the assembly's environmental affairs commission, told reporters.

China's national assembly Saturday signalled the country's commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by adopting a law supporting its renewable energy industry. The new law, an amendment to one on renewable energy adopted by the National People's Congress standing committee, obliges electricity grid companies to buy all the power produced by renewable sources. It also empowers the State Council's energy department, the electricity regulatory agency and its finance departments to determine the amount of renewable energy available in the country's overall power generating capacity. Power companies will be obliged to take up all of that capacity, and those refusing to do so will be fined an amount up to double that of the economic loss of the renewable energy company, Ni Yuefeng, vice-president of the assembly's environmental affairs commission, told reporters.

26,400 turbines to wean Britain off its carbon habit Revolutionary plans for a massive expansion of offshore wind farms have been unveiled in a £100bn project designed to usher in a new era of green energy for Britain. A quarter of the country's electricity needs would be met through wind power by 2020 under the strategy, with the construction of 6,400 turbines within nine sites dotted around the coast. The programme amounts to the biggest energy supply shake-up since the discovery of the North Sea oil and gas fields more than 40 years ago.

26,400 turbines to wean Britain off its carbon habit Revolutionary plans for a massive expansion of offshore wind farms have been unveiled in a £100bn project designed to usher in a new era of green energy for Britain. A quarter of the country's electricity needs would be met through wind power by 2020 under the strategy, with the construction of 6,400 turbines within nine sites dotted around the coast. The programme amounts to the biggest energy supply shake-up since the discovery of the North Sea oil and gas fields more than 40 years ago.

Tips on leasing your land for oil and gas drilling and what to be careful of.

How to find a Marcellus Shale oil and gas drilling related job.

Haynesville shale map.

Information on the Haynesville Shale Formation, a huge reserve of natural gas located in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas. Haynesville Shale Maps and information.

Much ado and attention has been paid to the pollutants emmitted from the tail pipes of cars and trucks in recent years, both here in the U.S. and across the pond in Europe. With an estimated 250 million passenger vehicles in the U.S. alone, it would seem that cars would be a major contributor to pollution and air quality issues here and abroad. But newly released data from Europe suggests that a single container ship may cause as much pollution as 50 million cars and release as much as 5,000 tons of sulfur oxide into the air annually. And there are 90,000 such ships of varying sizes across the world at any one time.

New energy and renewable energy took nine percent in China's energy structure in 2008, while coal took 69 percent and oil and natural gas 22 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China. China's new energy and renewable energy have boomed in recent years including hydropower, nuclear power, wind power and solar power. The country's installed capacity of hydropower topped 170 million kw in 2008, the biggest in the world. Hydropower percentage in overall energy structure soared from one percent in 1949 to 7.4 percent in 2008.

New energy and renewable energy took nine percent in China's energy structure in 2008, while coal took 69 percent and oil and natural gas 22 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China. China's new energy and renewable energy have boomed in recent years including hydropower, nuclear power, wind power and solar power. The country's installed capacity of hydropower topped 170 million kw in 2008, the biggest in the world. Hydropower percentage in overall energy structure soared from one percent in 1949 to 7.4 percent in 2008.

President-elect, Barack Obama, has had a very favorable view of renewable energy, and has presented some specific plans about how to increase the renewable portfolio in the United States. Below is a lis of items in his proposed Comprehensive Energy Plan, with attention to both short term and long term objectives. Comprehensive Energy Plan * Provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump. * Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. * Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future. * Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined. * Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars -- cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon -- on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America. * Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.

If the plans being laid for the economy and the environment work out the way President-elect Barack Obama's advisers hope they do, the future of energy can be summed up in one word: electricity. That one word covers a lot of policy twists, however: What will the economic downturn mean for initiatives to cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions? What will the recent drop in gasoline prices mean for efforts to boost alternatives to fossil fuels? Can the electrical grid handle increased demand? How do you smooth out the highs and lows of power generation? Where will all that power come from?

The governors of the nation's largest energy-producing states are encouraging President-elect Barack Obama to quickly adopt a national energy policy that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The bipartisan Western Governors' Association delivered Obama a four-page letter outlining what steps it believes his administration should take to address the issue in his first 100 days in office.

Four Federal agencies today released a Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (Final PEIS) proposing to designate more than 6,000 miles of energy transport corridors on Federal lands in 11 Western States. The Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Defense (the Agencies) prepared the Final PEIS as part of their work to implement Section 368 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The proposed energy corridors would facilitate future siting of oil, gas, and hydrogen pipelines, as well as electricity transmission and distribution facilities on Federal lands in the West to meet the region's increasing energy demands while mitigating potential harmful effects to the environment.

Constellation Energy: Nuclear Operators Although it is too dangerous, too expensive and too centralized to make sense as an energy source, nuclear power won't go away, thanks to equipment makers and utilities that find ways to make the public pay and pay. Case in point: Constellation Energy Group, the operator of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland. When Maryland deregulated its electricity market in 1999, Constellation - like other energy generators in other states - was able to cut a deal to recover its "stranded costs" and nuclear decommissioning fees. The idea was that competition would bring multiple suppliers into the market, and these new competitors would have an unfair advantage over old-time monopoly suppliers. Those former monopolists, the argument went, had built expensive nuclear reactors with the approval of state regulators, and it would be unfair if they could not charge consumers to recover their costs. It would also be unfair, according to this line of reasoning, if the former monopolists were unable to recover the costs of decommissioning nuclear facilities. In Maryland, the "stranded cost" deal gave Constellation (through its affiliate Baltimore Gas & Electric, BGE) the right to charge ratepayers $975 million in 1993 dollars (almost $1.5 billion in present dollars). Deregulation meant that Constellation's energy generating assets - including its nuclear facility at Calvert Cliffs - were free from price regulation. As a result, instead of costing Constellation, Calvert Cliffs' market value increased.

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.

Researchers and officials concerned about global warming have focused on oil usage, but scientists on Wednesday said liquefied coal could have a greater affect on global climate change. Global warming scenarios are based on oil reserves, but those reserves will have less impact on global climate than the extent to which liquefied coal replaces oil and gas, scientists said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

I wonder how the CEO's of the oil, coal, gas cartels would respond to the question? "Do you care that your children, grandchildren and, their children will likely live in a world bereft of clean air, drowning coastal cities, vanishing polar geography, shortages in energy, rapacious prices for everything, and the gradual disintegration of economic, social and political order as the outcome of your shortsighted energy policies in this the early years of the 21st century????

# Kathleen McGinty-Former Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Head: McGinty served as a top environmental official under President Clinton, and she has promoted renewable energy legislation in Pennsylvania while working with utility companies. # Mary Nichols-California Air Resources Board Leader: Another former Clinton official, Nichols is working on the development of rules to limit heat-trapping emissions from power plants in California. Nichols is Senator Boxer's top pick for the job. # Ian Bowles-Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Leader: Bowles worked with officials from other Northeast U.S. states to open the first American market for trading greenhouse gas permits. # Kathleen Sibelius-Kansas Governor: Sebelius vetoed the Kansas legislature's attempt to overrule the denial of a permit to expand a coal-fired power plant. # Lisa Jackson-New Jersey Environmental Commissioner: Jackson is the current co-chair of Barack Obama's environmental transition team. She has worked at the EPA for 15 years and has focused on hazardous waste clean up and enforcement in New Jersey. # Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.-Environmental Lawyer: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is probably the most well-known candidate on the shortlist:

President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Colorado Senator Ken Salazar as the next Secretary of the Department of the Interior, three anonymous Democratic sources have confirmed. The sources say that Salazar has been offered the job, one telling the Rocky Mountain News "It's a done deal." Salazar, a Democrat, is four years into his first term as U.S. Senator from Colorado and has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration's energy and environmental policies, especially those relating to oil and gas development in the American West. When current Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced the draft rule designed to accelerate oil shale development across the West, Salazar reacted strongly, saying:

A century ago French philosopher and writer Paul Valery observed, "The central problem with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." He could have been commenting on current events. In August, Alternet invited me to write a series of articles on energy policy leading up to the election. At the time the invitation was extended, the price of oil was about $135 a barrel. Gasoline prices had eclipsed $4 a gallon. Natural gas prices hovered around $11 per million BTUs. SUVs sales were down, but car companies were having some trouble keeping up with the demand for smaller cars. Renewable energy was expanding rapidly. The most important energy issue was whether the renewable electricity credits, bottled up by Senate Republicans for the previous 12 months, would be extended before they expired at the end of 2008. The renewable fuel everyone loves to hate, ethanol, was blamed not only for the rapid rise in food prices but also for food riots around the world.

My top 10 oil industry stories of 2008: 1. Crude prices soar in 1H, WTI tops $147, Brent right behind 2. Prices collapse below $50 in 2H as demand retreats 3. Ethanol's struggles: VeraSun bankruptcy, others barely profitable, spreads collapse 4. Push begins to lift offshore drilling ban in US; Obama and McCain differ on approach 5. Capital crunch and low prices lead to deferred investment 6. Shale gas supply in US surges, a new factor in supply/demand balance 7. Credit crunch slows activity for once free-wheeling traders 8. Diesel surges, gasoline/naphtha plunge; traditional cracks skewed 9. Russian oil output to fall in 2008, first time in a decade 10. Brazil subsalt finds continue to lift nation's upstream prospects