It was only two years ago that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia cautioned consumers that, without $75-per-barrel oil, there was no incentive for his kingdom to bring on new production. Today, apparently, even that price no longer works. Recently, the King announced that he has ordered a halt to all further underground oil exploration, arguing [...]

It’s not its carbon trail that stands in the way of the Alberta tar sands’ picking up the supply ball dropped by deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. After all, tar sands fuel is no dirtier than coal, and Americans haven’t let that fossil fuel’s carbon trail stand in the way of its generating [...]

Whether Hurricane Alex hits the Gulf oil spill or not, it’s only a matter of time before one will. Alex is, after all, only the first storm in a year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting will be an abnormally active one for hurricanes.
In case you’d forgotten, blow-outs of deep-water wells aren’t [...]

America’s Plan A for the future of its oil supply was shaky to start with. Hurricanes, and the devastation they’ve brought to offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, had already put the kibosh on earlier dreams of reversing the nearly 40-year decline in domestic oil production. Ironically, oil production in the Gulf had [...]

It’s funny that it’s taken the worst ecological disaster in US history to suddenly make other forms of oil extraction and processing look green. Only months ago, the carbon trail from the massive planned expansion of tar sands production made Canada a pariah at the world environmental summit in Copenhagen. But now tar sands producers [...]