Energy Wars

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia will call for a summit between oil producing countries and consumer states to discuss soaring energy prices, Information and Culture Minister Iyad Madani said Monday.

02/05/08 "ICH" -- -- Look around. The evidence of a withering economy is everywhere. In "good times" consumers shun the canned meat aisle altogether, but no more. Today, Spam sales are soaring; grocery stores can't keep it on the shelves. Everyone is looking for cheaper ways to feed their families. The Labor Dept. assures us that core-inflation is only 4 per cent, but everybody knows it's load of malarkey. Food prices are going through the roof. White bread is up 13 percent, bacon is up 7 percent and peanut butter is up 9 percent. Inflation is rampant and there's no end in sight. The dollar is closing in on the peso and working people are struggling just to get by. The bottom line is that more and more people in "the richest country on earth" are now surviving on processed pig-meat. That says it all.

Why are oil prices soaring so high, and will they ever return to Earth? Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris, explains why peak oil is real, why biofuels are indispensable, and how China determines what you pay at the pump.

New York - Besides gasoline, the Department of Energy calculates, there are 57 major uses of petroleum - everything from cosmetics to ballpoint pens, nylons, and even the waxes in chewing gum. That is why the effect of high oil prices is now spreading well beyond the pump, where gasoline hit another record price of $3.98 a gallon on Wednesday. Now, consumers will have to brace themselves for other higher costs, since businesses such as Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Colgate-Palmolive are raising prices on their products to recoup energy costs.

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - U.S. regulators should weigh the environmental impact of oil sands extraction in Canada before granting permits for pipelines that will carry the rising flood of Canadian crude to refineries in the United States, a green group said on Wednesday. The recommendation was one of several in a report by the Washington-based Environmental Integrity Project on massive expansions and retoolings of U.S. refineries aimed at running more oil derived from the oil sands of northern Alberta.

It should be a truly fascinating - albeit possibly enormously grim - thing to watch, one of the more dramatic and revolutionary market-driven shifts in modern history, upheaving everything we've become so accustomed to and changing behaviors and attitudes and alliances and political agendas and ass-girths and no I'm not talking about the "Lost" finale or the new 3G iPhone or how Brangelina's twins are a sure sign of the Second Coming.

The U.S. Energy Department on Thursday will discuss how to best move 16 million tons of uranium mill tailings off the banks of the Colorado River in Moab, Utah. The Energy Department's contractor on the job, Energy Solutions, will move the tailings pile to a disposal site near Crescent Junction.

ABORIGINAL elders from Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory say they have been stonewalled by the Commonwealth over whether their land will be used as a nuclear waste dump. The land was designated as a future dump under the Howard government's controversial Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), which did not require full consent from affected traditional owners.

Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

Virtually every individual, family, business and institution in the United States is grappling with the destructive consequences of our national failure to devise a responsible energy policy. The price of oil has risen 85 percent in the past two years. Because of our extreme dependence on fossil fuel, that price increase is causing a shock to our economic system that is apparent in higher gas and food prices, rising costs for manufactured goods, damaged corporate profits and painfully stretched household budgets.

We applaud the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for publicly acknowledging what most educated observers have been saying for months: Wall Street speculators are reaping unconscionable profits by exploiting and manipulating the unregulated energy trading markets.

Oil megaprojects are large oil field projects to bring a significant amount of new oil production capacity to market. Tabulations of oil megaprojects are used in an attempt to forecast whether future global oil supply will be adequate to meet demand for oil, or whether the world is reaching Peak Oil. As such, oil megaproject analysis has been controversial. This approach to oil forecasting is also known as the "bottom-up" approach, in that it relies on building a detailed model of where and when new oil production capacity will come on line.

A bill to revise the Japan Atomic Energy Agency Law to allow the construction of a site to dispose of low-level radioactive waste passed the House of Councillors on Wednesday. The revised law designates the agency as a body responsible for constructing and managing waste sites. JAEA will draw up a construction plan based on guidelines to be formulated by the Education, Science and Technology Ministry and will start looking at candidate sites for the facility with an eye on starting operations a decade later.

A geologist with the New Brunswick Mines Branch in Bathurst has taken exception to media articles concerning unsafe levels of radon and uranium in the Harvey area ("Radon dangers aren't that dire," Telegraph-Journal, May 26). He dismisses any suggestion that well water potentially contaminated with radon or uranium poses a health threat, yet provides no evidence to support his assertion. He also suggests that mortality rates in the Harvey area aren't any different that any other place in the province, but doesn't provide any data to support this claim.

I understand Natural Resources Minister Donald Arseneault to say health risks would occur after exposure of "500 hours," a mere 21 days, of being within five feet of a drill sample with just one per cent of uranium.

Twenty-five years ago, the Nuclear Freeze campaign mobilized hundreds of thousands of Americans to demand an end to the testing, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons. At that time, advocating the complete abolition of nuclear weapons was a fringe position confined to a few utopians on the left. Even most antinuclear activists struggled getting past the "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" common sense of pundits and arms control experts.

Discussion of nuclear power regularly leads to the issue of what to do with the waste created during power generation. One course of action many experts and scientists support is building geologic repositories where the dangerous, long-lived waste can be stored--for instance, inside of a mountain. Throughout the next year, the Bulletin's web-edition will present a country-by-country analysis of how certain nations are proceeding with the disposal of the waste produced by their nuclear power plants and reactors.

There is no end in sight to the recent strong gains in oil prices, endangering world economic growth and food equilibrium. This prediction is supported by our own modeling, which indicates that prices are more likely to go up than down in the near future. Could this mess have been avoided, why did it come about and what can be done?