With demand slowing and supplies rising, the world is awash in oil - sending prices crashing by more than 50 percent from a record high of $147 a barrel just three months ago. That has prompted oil producers to convene an emergency meeting to try to regain some control over prices. But as OPEC ministers sit down Friday in Vienna to decide on production cuts they face a number of thorny obstacles to regaining control of the market.

It's stuff we all know about - compact fluorescent lighting, wind energy, efficiency, green jobs - the kind of stuff we talk about incessantly on TreeHugger. Yet seeing all these solutions in Earth School's 4-minute trailer of the upcoming documentary Carbon Nation makes them feel more real, just like seeing Al Gore do his shtick in An Inconvenient Truth brought the reality of global warming home (whether or not each individual fact he uttered could be 100 percent proven). And that's a good thing. Global warming gets scarier the more you think about it, but Carbon Nation, scheduled to be released late in the year, aims to dwell not on the scary but on the possibilities for solving the problem.

The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the news media are not sufficiently addressing the severity of climate change at a meeting of U.S. environmental journalists earlier this week. R.K. Pachauri, head of the 2,500-member IPCC, said that unless policies are enacted soon to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, the global perils from shifting weather patterns and sea level rise will become worse in the coming years. To communicate the dangers of climate change, Pachauri urged the annual gathering of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) to report how the most recent IPCC assessment will affect local communities.

Obama seems to understand part of the nature of the energy problem (unlike the morons in the "drill, baby, drill" crowd), with a recent interview with Time touching on some of the problems with industrial agriculture - Swampland. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January. The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

The Financial Times has leaked the results of the International Energy Agency's long-awaited study of the depletion profiles of the world's 400 largest oilfields, indicating that, "Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent." This is a stunning figure. Considering regular crude oil only, this means that 6.825 million barrels a day of new production capacity must come on line each year just to keep up with the aggregate natural decline rate in existing oilfields. That's a new Saudi Arabia every 18 months.

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell today joined the profits bonanza from record prices with a 71 per cent jump in third-quarter earnings. The firm made a mammoth 10.9 billion US dollars (£6.6 billion) between July and September - a period when oil prices hit a peak above 147 dollars a barrel. The news, which is likely to spark fresh calls for a windfall tax, comes two days after rival BP posted its biggest-ever quarterly profits of £6.4 billion.

The Air Car caused a huge stir when we reported last year that Tata Motors would begin producing it in India. Now the little gas-free ride that could is headed Stateside in a big-time way. Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) confirmed to PopularMechanics.com on Thursday that it expects to produce the world's first air-powered car for the United States by late 2009 or early 2010. As the U.S. licensee for Luxembourg-based MDI, which developed the Air Car as a compression-based alternative to the internal combustion engine, ZPM has attained rights to build the first of several modular plants, which are likely to begin manufacturing in the Northeast and grow for regional production around the country, at a clip of up to 10,000 Air Cars per year.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Wednesday called for a "clean break" from the Bush administration's energy policies, which she says rely too much on importing foreign oil. In a policy speech, the Alaska governor said the recent drop in gas and oil prices shouldn't deter consumers and lawmakers from seeking alternative energy sources. She cast energy independence as a national security issue, saying dependence on oil from the Middle East made the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist threats.

Sarah Palin just helped clarify McCain's double-talk on global warming: He doesn't think the government should do anything to stop it. Voters who care about either global warming or clean energy have only one choice -- and it isn't McCain-Palin. It's time to stop trying to guess whether the latest McCain campaign gaffe revision on global warming means the Arizonan has walked away from his previous support for mandatory government control of greenhouse gases. He has.

It's an addiction that threatens our economy, our environment and our national security. It touches every part of our daily lives and ties our hands as a nation and a people. The addiction has worsened for decades and now it's reached a point of crisis. In 1970, we imported 24% of our oil. Today it's nearly 70% and growing. As imports grow and world prices rise, the amount of money we send to foreign nations every year is soaring. At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone - that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

Peak oil is just five years away, and we must start to plan now to avert a truly ruinous crisis If eight companies across a broad spectrum of UK industry had warned, five years ago, that a ruinous credit crunch would hit the global economy this year, might the government have taken the warning seriously? Might UK leadership in damage limitation have been proactive, rather than reactive? Could a softer landing and a faster recovery have been possible as a result?

The world is heading for an "ecological credit crunch" far worse than the current financial crisis because humans are over-using the natural resources of the planet, an international study warns today. The Living Planet report calculates that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. As a result, we are running up an ecological debt of $4tr (£2.5tr) to $4.5tr every year - double the estimated losses made by the world's financial institutions as a result of the credit crisis - say the report's authors, led by the conservation group WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund.

Once again Gordon Brown has got energy policy all wrong. Even before Opec announced an output cut of 1.5 million barrels per day, the Prime Minister had denounced the move as "absolutely scandalous", fearing it would force the oil price higher just as the world slides into recession. He needn't have worried, since the cost of crude continued to fall on Friday to just under $63.

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.

The London Evening Standard reports that the economic slowdown seems to have hit European truck slaes particularly hard - Volvo truck sales plunge 99.7%. The depth of the recession was revealed today as truckmaker Volvo admitted demand across the Continent has crashed by 99.7% as it took orders for just 115 new lorries in the last three months. That compares to orders totalling 41,970 in the third quarter of 2007. Global orders for Volvo slumped 55% in the last three months while Scania, of which Volvo has majority control, said its western Europe truck orders collapsed by 69%.

News broke this week that 53 people were listed in a Maryland State Police database as "suspected terrorists." The listing was the result of an extensive surveillance program that infiltrated several activist organizations and gathered intelligence about the individuals and activities in them. Among those receiving a letter from the Maryland State Police last week was Josh Tulkin, of the Energy Action Coalition. Apparently, during a thirteen month period from 2005-2006 when Tulkin worked at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, State Police gathered intelligence and created a file for the young environmental activist.

Bunnatine Greenhouse sits in a cubicle in a far corner of an office in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers(USACE) headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., where, she says, "I am treated like a non-person." Months crawl by yet her immediate supervisor just can't seem to find the time to meet with her to discuss a work assignment. The taxpayers of the United States of America pay her salary, but, oddly, no demands are made of her.

Hazardous-waste spills and discoveries reported to Colorado authorities nearly doubled over the past decade, from an average of 561 a year from 1998 to 2000 to an average of 1,035 from 2005 to 2007. Population growth, carelessness, and the boom in oil and gas drilling are largely to blame.

Global recession? Must be time for the media's alternative-energy backlash My father used to say of his profession that newspaper editors are the people who come down from the mountaintop at the end of the battle and shoot the wounded. A massive credit crunch and a drop in the price of fossil fuels can mean only one thing to the editors of the traditional media -- an excuse for their favorite activity in the whole world, the backlash story. Faster than you can say "Joe the Plumber" isn't a licensed plumber, his name isn't Joe, and he has a tax lien against him, you can be sure that if the media ever lets itself fawn over you for even a nano-second, it will turn its coverage on a dime and run the minute a few whispy short-term clouds appear in the horizon. And so we have the New York Times story, "Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds," which is supposed to be a clever headline, but the NYT, which accompanies the story with a picture of wind turbines, seems to have missed the irony that wind turbines like strong winds.