oil

T. Boone Pickens, today:
“They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it,” Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. “Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars.”
Osama bin Laden, 2007:

Despite stated claims from politicians of every stripe about the desire to free the United States from the grip of foreign energy sources, the federal government has offered $15.3 billion in subsidies for imported oil since 2002, according to a new analysis from the Environmental Law Institute.
The report totals government expenditures on different energy sources, [...]

The Wall Street Journal has a piece today called “Cash for Clunkers: An Expensive Environmental Fix,” which argues that despite its bigger-than-expected environmental benefits, the soon-to-be-renewed vehicle upgrade program is a costly way to cut carbon emissions. The author writes that the effective price per ton of carbon emissions reduced is between $160 and $475 [...]

Foreign Policy replies to my skepticism at the idea of Russia and China backing an oil-embargo package on the Iranian regime with this recent piece by Brookings’ Erica Downs on China’s looming oil-sector investments in Iran. Downs gives some reason for thinking that the United States has leverage with the Chinese:
Beijing recognizes that a nuclear-armed [...]

The Washington Post’s Steven Mufson notices that oil prices aren’t behaving as we’d prefer, having climbed from under $40 per barrel to back within sight of $70 per barrel in just a few months. What gives?
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest prices should be falling. In industrialized countries, storage tanks are overflowing, with enough supplies [...]

The perils of basing your budget on oil revenue: the Iraqi government is practically hemorrhaging money thanks to falling oil prices, and that’s causing a drastic reduction in defense-related jobs and purchases, according to The Washington Post’s Ernesto Londono. The U.S. general in charge of mentoring Iraqi security forces observes that the shortfall will compel [...]

Huge news if true: according to The New York Times, the Iraqi government has agreed to allow the Kurds to export the oil developed within the borders of their autonomous super-province. This isn’t the same thing as the passage of the much-desired-and-much-delayed hydrocarbons law, but it has large implications for both that law and the [...]

I was more than a little incredulous when I read that Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) claimed via Twitter to have stumped Energy Secretary Steven Chu with a simple science question. After all, Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, while Barton doesn’t exactly have the firmest grasp of science. And, having witnessed the exchange firsthand at [...]

I wouldn’t normally flag a policy proposal by a car reviewer, but Dan Neil’s piece in The Los Angeles Times today deserves mention. With a few nifty calculations, he argues that we could cut our dependence on OPEC oil by 50 percent over ten years, simply by buying millions of hybrids and giving them away [...]

It’s eerie and uncomfortable and inappropriate that there isn’t much notice that six years ago today, the United States invaded Iraq. Maybe that’s natural now that the Obama administration is ending the war. Maybe it’s an indication of a cultural exhaustion with Iraq. We who don’t live in Iraq or serve in it should not [...]