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 [...]
Environmentalists on both sides of the border are cheering the recent announcement from Washington and Ottawa that both the United States and Canada will soon simultaneously impose much tougher fuel-emission standards for car manufacturers. Any given vehicle producer’s combined fleet of cars and trucks must average 35 miles per gallon by 2016 (or 100 kilometers [...]
Buddy, my furnace repairman, tells me it’s time to buy a new furnace. And I’d better act quickly if I still want to order the old mid-efficiency model. In the New Year, I have to buy a high-efficiency one, which, of course, costs twice as much. Welcome to the brave new world of energy scarcity—it’s [...]