oil
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Now that we’ve killed Osama bin Laden, let’s kill oil
The U.S. military’s killing of Osama bin Laden is a huge victory in the war against terror and on behalf of a safer, freer world. But if this is to be the beginning of the end for al Qaeda and repressive governments everywhere, we have to make it our national mission not just to hunt […]
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What’s the matter with elasticities? (Answer: maybe nothing)
Price-elasticities — dimensionless parameters that express the extent to which a price increase triggers a usage decrease — are central to policies that aim to reduce a harmful activity by internalizing its damage into its price. The efficacy of carbon fees, congestion tolls, cigarette taxes, and the like turns on the proposition that the toll […]
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API shocker: Oil makes money!
In a transparent attempt to blunt impending justified rage over this week's profit reports from Big Oil, the latest piece of spin to emerge from the well-paid creative minds at the American Petroleum Institute is a real classic. The gist, in a nutshell, is that oil makes money -- a lot of money.
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High gas prices mean Exxon will make more money than any publicly held company in history this year
Exxon's earnings are expected to go up 50 percent this year, reports the Wall Street Journal. What was Washington's response? The House GOP voted overwhelmingly to protect the billions in taxpayer subsidies oil and gas companies receive. So let's see … you're paying Exxon at the pump, and you're also paying them on tax day. It's […]
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Washington is lying to you about the cause of high gas prices
When it comes to the causes of high prices for gasoline, Washington is reaching truly epic levels of mendacity. Last Thursday, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) aimed to "set the record straight on America's oil" in a Washington Post op-ed that was completely jam-packed with BS. Murkowski, along with countless other congresscritters on both sides of […]
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How the bicycle economy can help us beat the energy crisis
This is the fifth column in a series focusing on the economics of bicycling. Libya. Bahrain. Iraq. Afghanistan. Canada. Fukushima. North Dakota. The Gulf Coast. Pennsylvania. Each of these stories stands alone as an urgent parable about our increasingly fragile reliance on affordable, plentiful energy. Take them together, and the myth of abundant fuel that our […]
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Silver Buckshot
Wars in the Middle East and oil rig blowouts in the Gulf have given us gasoline in the range of $4 to $5/gallon. Growing concerns over asthma-inducing pollution from coal fired power plants, not to mention mercury pollution in food supplies and greenhouse gas emissions, have resulted in the termination of numerous coal projects and […]
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The planet strikes back: Why we underestimate the Earth and overestimate ourselves
The Earth may look glum, but it’s not to be messed with.Photo: John LeGearThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. In his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global […]
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Obama as Snuffleupagus: Expect our imaginary friend to skip out on Power Shift again
Obama chooses basketball over climate activists.Photo: The White HouseOn the eve of the Power Shift 2011 climate youth conference, no one expects President Obama to show. If he did, he’d probably get booed by activists angry about his tightening embrace of the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries. But it was a very different story […]