Energy Policy Insanity

Just enough quiet time this morning (still suffering jet lag and waking up at 4 a.m.) to knock out an essay. I told my daughter last night that I plan to keep writing, but I […]

Coal and Ethanol

A Lightbulb Uses a Lot of Coal Just a very quick post today while still on vacation in the U.S. I was browsing around the other day, and I ran across this: How much coal […]

What’s On Tap

Update Four essays, plus this one, finished off today: The Problem With Biobutanol This Week in Petroleum 6-13-07 Letter to CNN on Inaccuracies in “We Were Warned” The Problem with CAFE With that, I am […]

The Problem With Biobutanol

The Essay I Didn’t Want to Finish This is an essay that I have been promising for some time. I have had to start it from scratch a couple of times, and I am starting […]

This Week in Petroleum 6-13-07

Update: Very brief update. First, I just came back from the hospital, where they extracted a small boulder from my kidney. With that, I put this horrible episode behind me. On the inventory report, I […]

Letter to CNN on Inaccuracies

Dear CNN, Over the weekend, I watched your special report We Were Warned: Out of Gas. I had previously seen the original version, “Out of Oil”, and wrote to CNN at that time pointing out […]

The Problem with CAFE

As I have been reading reports of the current debate over the pending energy legislation, it occurred to me that there is a fundamental problem with the approach to CAFE standards. The Washington Post reported […]

Ethanol Roundup

A couple of interesting ethanol articles that were recently brought to my attention. First off, we have Iowa State saying something I have been saying for a while: Corn ethanol unprofitable by 2008, says Iowa […]

Gasoline Prices Part II: Long-Term Factors

Introduction In Part I, I discussed the short term factors that have resulted in the recent, rapid increase in the price of gasoline. But there are a number of underlying, long-term issues that have been […]

Why I Sat Out the Feeding Frenzy

I have gotten several e-mails about Cyclone Gonu in which I was asked to comment. Some asked why I haven’t written about it, or why I haven’t participated in the discussions about it. I was […]