Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, has done what GM couldn’t when, 20 years ago, EV1 was introduced as the first (failed) mainstream, all-electric car. Tesla has moved electric vehicles (EVs) from cult to elite status. Seductively designed and impressively engineered, the nearly $100,000 Tesla is a must-own for one-percenters. Could Tesla, in particular, […]
John Hofmeister, a Fuel Freedom board advisor and the former president of Shell Oil Co., appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Nov. 23 to discuss the falling price of oil. Watch a clip here: Watch the entire “MTP” program here (Hofmeister comes on about the 35:20 mark), and read the transcript here. Hofmeister, appearing […]
Have we seen the bottom of the great oil-price plunge of 2014? Experts say not yet. But oil prices rose sharply Monday, making their biggest jump in two years: Nymex crude-oil futures rose 4.78 percent, to $69.31 a barrel. And Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose 3 percent, to $72.54. It had been down as […]
The big news in the international oil markets last week was that OPEC decided not to cut production, which would have propped up free-falling prices, at least temporarily. OPEC’s non-action sent oil prices falling further Friday, with the Brent benchmark slipping below $70 for the first time in four years. NPR reports that some experts […]
The battle lines already are drawn over the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement Wednesday that it’s seeking to reduce the nation’s levels of ground-level ozone, the main component of smog. Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to review air-quality standards every five years. Under President George W. Bush, the agency set the ozone […]
Environmental writer and activist Naomi Klein writes in The Nation that the conventional wisdom, at least among supporters of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, is that the project didn’t really matter. Even if it were scuttled, TransCanada, the company hoping to build the pipeline extension from tar-sands oil in western Canada to Nebraska, would find […]
BusinessWeek’s Matthew Phillips reflects on the EPA’s decision to delay proposed changes to the renewable fuel standard, a revision that was expected to reduce the amount of corn-based ethanol to be blended into the nation’s gasoline supply. Now that the new RFS standards have been put off until sometime in 2015, ethanol producers have the […]
Bloomberg has a story about what U.S. drillers will do in response to whatever OPEC does this week at its regular meeting. OPEC, led by its top producer, Saudi Arabia, will do one of two things: Nothing, which means the cartel’s output will remain unchanged, and crude prices will say flat (or keep sliding). Or […]
You won’t be fully up to speed on how oil production, and hydraulic fracturing, has transformed the rural communities of North Dakota unless you read Deborah Sontag’s exhaustive piece in The New York Times. Sunday’s Part I of a series, “The Downside of the Boom,” includes video, satellite maps and other visuals to complement its […]
The federal government’s new threshold for the amount of ethanol blended into America’s gasoline supply was already 10 months overdue. So officials have gone ahead and delayed the decision further, into 2015. The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday that it would defer an announcement on the renewable fuel standard (RFS), which stipulates that ethanol should […]
