On the same day the Obama Administration put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline, two engineering contracts totaling $12.2 billion were awarded to two U.S. companies for work in the Alberta oil sands. One included a $750 million contract to a Chicago-based company for work on Exxon’s huge Kearl Oil Sands project, one of [...]
There are many ways that oil shocks affect the economy, and none of them is good. As the prices of gasoline, diesel and home heating fuel rise, consumers’ energy bills eat up a growing share of their after-tax income, forcing cutbacks in more discretionary areas of spending. The next thing you know, people are going [...]
There are basically two ways to cut carbon emissions, and neither one of them involves global climate change summits like the one just held in Cancún, Mexico. The way I see it, you can either price carbon, or you can restrict growth. As they did for the previous meeting in Copenhagen, some 200 of the [...]
The strongest manufacturing numbers coming out of the Chinese economy in a seven-month period, coupled with plunging oil inventories in the world’s largest energy consuming economy, have sent oil prices to a 25-month high. With no let-up in China’s fuel demand, the world should be looking at triple-digit oil prices again within a quarter. That [...]
With France and China already plotting to replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency at the next G20 summit in Cannes, don’t count on this international forum’s lasting too much longer. The huge fiscal divisions that were already in evidence at the G20 summit in Toronto last June morphed into even bigger and [...]
In the soon-to-come world of triple-digit oil prices, distance will cost money. All of a sudden geography will become a lot more important to trade patterns than it has been in the ever-shrinking global economy. That’s about to have a profound impact on where we source goods. The cost of shipping goods from Mexico or [...]