A $10-per-barrel drop in oil prices seems a curious response to the ongoing disaster at BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead, and to its potentially devastating repercussions on future world oil supply. But when the Dow loses 1,000 points in the same week, there’s obviously something else going on.
If the world’s economic outlook is the same as [...]

What does $80-per-barrel oil say to you?
Three years ago, it would have told you that global oil markets were at record tightness. Back then, the US president was making a personal pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to vainly plead for more production. And economists were worrying about the implications for global economic growth.
Today, it seems the [...]

It’s Wednesday, and the week’s US oil inventories numbers will soon be out. I have no clue what they will say, nor much interest, either. But others do.
Exactly why oil traders and speculators think the data has anything to do with the state of world oil demand is beyond me. I suppose, like Pavlov’s dog, [...]

Don’t confuse North American voter skepticism about the recent farce in Copenhagen with indifference to environmental issues.
Photo ops for local schmoes trying to make it big on a world stage don’t abate a single ton of carbon going out into the atmosphere, and neither does anything else coming out of that environmental summit. Nor could [...]

Will technology leapfrog depletion and save drivers from the cost of triple-digit oil? Every auto producer in the world has an electric car in the works; General Motors, of course, will start producing its Volt later this year. But in actuality, the car of the future is really a throwback to the past.
In 1899, an [...]