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Republicans followed through this morning on their threat to boycott a Senate committee's work this week on a sweeping climate change bill. The only one to show up, AP reports, was George Voinovich of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the environment committee, and he only attended to explain why the GOP is staying away. He said the tactic "is not a ruse" to block the bill, but reflects concern that the full economic impact of the bill has not been studied or made clear. Many Republicans deride the cap-and-trade system at the heart of the legislation's heart as a job...

Domestic oil refiners kept up their attack of climate legislation, saying a Senate bill under consideration could increase gas prices. Domestic oil refiners kept up their attack Wednesday of climate legislation, saying a Senate bill under consideration could increase gas prices. The group, among the fiercest critics of the measure, said the proposal could add 77 cents a gallon, or around 30 percent above today’s prices. Democrats on a key Senate panel shot back, saying the industry’s estimate is based on an inflated projection of the price of permits companies will have to hold to cover their carbon emissions. A...

U.S. consumers turned decidedly more pessimistic in October, according to a report released Tuesday, with households increasingly worried about job prospects. The Conference Board, a private research group, said its monthly Consumer Confidence Index fell to 47.7 this month, from a revised 53.4 in September, which was originally reported as 53.1. The current month's reading was well below economists' projections of 53.2, according to a survey conducted by Dow Jones Newswires. The downturn in consumer confidence at this stage of the recovery is to be expected, as it has occurred in previous recoveries (please see chart below), and does not...

Politics: Move over, John McCain and Olympia Snowe. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is fast becoming the Democrats' favorite Republican as he partners with John Kerry to push cap-and-trade through the Senate. Earlier this year, eight Republican congressmen made it possible for Waxman-Markey, the 1,400-page job- and economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation, to barely pass the House of Representatives. At the time it seemed dead on arrival in the Senate if it was brought up there this year. Once again, as with their medical plan, the Democrats seek to better the odds by putting a GOP hood ornament on a Democratic clunker....

Global Warming: President Obama warns of planetary doom at the U.N. if we fail to pass cap-and-trade legislation. Meanwhile, a former warm-monger predicts decades of cooling as the sun stays nearly "spotless."The president had hoped to address Tuesday's United Nations climate change summit in New York with a finished cap-and-trade bill. Failing that, he hoped he'd at least have a version of the Waxman-Markey bill that has passed the House on his desk before the Copenhagen talks in December to cobble together a follow-up to the failed Kyoto Protocol. Not only did that not happen in the cool summer of...

Energy Policy: A new study shows that Waxman-Markey will increase prices at the pump, deepen our dependence on foreign oil and shred our ability to turn crude into gasoline. Even fuel-efficient cars will still need fuel.Oil may bubble up out of the ground, but gasoline does not. It's made in those ugly little NIMBY places called refineries we are loath to build anymore because we're too busy trying to save the Earth rather than our economy and American jobs. When Hurricane Katrina shut down 20% of our refining capacity in a single day and raised gas prices in a single...

Cap-And-Trade: The administration likes to defend bad policies with analogies to the post office. New studies from a business group and the administration itself confirm that cap-and-trade belongs in the dead-letter bin.Along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Rep. Ed Markey likens the cost of the Waxman-Markey cap-and trade bill to "about a postage stamp a day," based on estimates made by the Congressional Budget Office and the EPA. But as we and others have shown, they arrive at this magical number in part by ignoring the hit on gross domestic product and employment that will occur. As Garret Vaughan, economist...

Stimulus: Brazil, a leader in the use of biofuels such as ethanol and in the face of falling oil prices, still plans to spend huge sums to expand its offshore oil resources. Drilling rigs are infrastructure too.With oil prices scraping the bottom of the barrel, pun intended, there wouldn't appear to be much incentive to pursue the development of new oil resources. And in tough economic times worldwide, the necessary investment required would appear to be prohibitive. As the U.S. seeks to get its economy going by building roads, bridges and bicycle paths, Brazil has decided to create jobs and...

As Palin pointed out to Salazar, the USGS assessment "estimates that Arctic Alaska has mean technically recoverable resources of approximately 30 billion barrels of oil, 6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and 221 trillion cubic feet of conventional natural gas."

Energy Policy: The chief economist of the International Energy Agency says the world is running out of oil. We've been told that for the last 150 years. The only thing we're running out of is the will to drill.Ever since the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., in 1859, experts have been predicting we would soon run out of oil. The latest is Dr. Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency in Paris, whose job it is to assess future energy supplies by OECD countries. In an interview with the Independent, Dr. Birol says that based...

A top expert tells Congress that oil will be around for a long time and high inventories and low prices are no excuse not to find more. Oil shock? How about a no-oil shock? Be careful what you wish for, goes the old proverb. Well, as we all had hoped, energy prices have fallen — but only as part of the global decline in economic activity. This has been used as an excuse to further discourage exploration for and development of domestic oil resources. But if the economy does recover, that policy could provoke another recession.

Energy: With Ahab-like determination, environmentalists have once again blocked oil exploration in the American Arctic. They may just have succeeded in putting the American economy on ice.On Friday, a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals Court panel in Washington, D.C., struck down the Bush administration's five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing off Alaska's northern coast. The plan was vacated, the panel ruled, because of allegedly insufficient environmental review because its "environmental sensitivity rankings are irrational." What is irrational is that despite a more than three-decade long record of environmental sensitivity at Prudhoe Bay and elsewhere, and despite booming polar...

Energy: While members of Congress take vacations their constituents can no longer afford, a country prepares to end its dependence on foreign oil by extracting supplies from shale rock. It's not the U.S. It's in the Middle East.Jordan imports 95% of its oil. Unlike the U.S., the desert kingdom plans on doing something about it. It does not, however, plan to cover its flat open spaces with solar panels or wind farms. It's going to do something the Democratic Congress has refused to do — get oil from its abundant shale rock. On Sunday, Maher Hjazin, head of the Jordanian...

Palin Vs. Kerry (And MoveOn.org) By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, July 15, 2009 4:20 PM The political death of Sarah Palin has been greatly exaggerated. In a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post, Alaska's governor exposes the cap-and-tax fraud that has nothing to do with earth's temperature and everything to do with government control of the economy. She also exposes the stealth socialism ambitions of the Democratic left and once again points out the availability of abundant "shovel-ready" resources under America's soil, off America's shores and even in America's rocks. Judging from the reaction from Sen. Kerry and...

Politics: John Kerry, replying to an op-ed Sarah Palin wrote on cap-and-trade, suggests the Alaska governor "check the view from her front porch." What she sees from there, senator, is energy wealth going to waste.The political death of Sarah Palin has been greatly exaggerated. In a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post, Alaska's governor exposes the cap-and-tax fraud that has nothing to do with earth's temperature and everything to do with government control of the economy. She also exposes the stealth socialism ambitions of the Democratic left and once again points out the availability of abundant "shovel-ready" resources under America's...

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump...As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million. Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once...

Thirty years after Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, we return to the days of rising joblessness, an unresponsive economy, deference to dictators, gutting the military and an energy policy tilting at windmills... As history repeats itself on the anniversary of the speech MSNBC's Chris Matthews wrote, we wonder if the "Hardball" host, who has worked for four Democratic politicians, is still getting tingles up his legs. The Democratic Party apparently has learned nothing in the past three decades. Will we see a return of the misery index? The only thing that's different is the sweater.

Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill? This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.

Climate Change: Supporters of economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation not only misquote the Congressional Budget Office's report lowballing the costs. They ignore how CBO cooked the books to get its numbers.We have often cited the CBO in our editorials. It's a nonpartisan entity whose staffers normally do a decent job analyzing data and crunching numbers. But as regards the true cost of climate change legislation, they have fallen victim to the computer-age trap: garbage in, garbage out. In recent weeks, ABC's "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos twice misquoted a CBO analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill that claims that we can save the...

Senate Democrats are breaking with President Obama over his plan for sweeping new climate-change laws that he says will rake in billions of dollars to help offset massive budget deficits. The dissenters, mostly Democrats from Rust Belt states likely to be hit hardest by the proposed environmental rules, question the economic impact of the program that would cap carbon-dioxide emissions and then sell to businesses the right to emit that carbon dioxide. The senators also want their states to get a chunk of the windfall from selling the credits - $646 billion over 10 years by Mr. Obama's estimate. "We...

Here is video of White House Budget Director Peter Orszag appearing on This Week with George Stephanopoulos yesterday, where he admitted - grudgingly - that President Obama's plans for a "Cap and Trade" Policy on carbon emissions will increase energy costs for all Americans! They will probably have the votes to do this, and this just may be the point at which Americans begin to turn on Obama. Once prices of electricity and other forms of energy begin to rise, the impact of Obama's leadership will begin to be felt in practical ways. Orszag did everything he could to not...

A Florida tourism group has dropped its long-standing opposition to offshore oil and gas drilling, saying that a cheap national fuel supply would trigger a boom for the Sunshine State's No. 1 industry. When gasoline prices skyrocketed to more than $4 per gallon this summer tourist spots such as Florida suffered, as would-be vacationers stayed home. So in response, the Florida Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus (FACVB) has adopted a new policy that encourages a "comprehensive, long-term energy policy" that includes increased oil and natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico along Florida's coast.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Oil prices dipped again Tuesday and gas prices hit their lowest levels since January 2005 with the United States officially in a recession. Analysts say prices at the pump may be bottoming out, though demand could fall even further in January with job losses reducing the number of people who drive to work. Gas prices fell for the 20th week since the July 4th holiday and hit $1.811 per gallon, according to the government's Energy Information Agency. Auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express said prices fell 0.8 cents overnight to $1.812, down...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Oil extended its sharp drop to below $49 a barrel on Tuesday, nearing a 3-and-a-half year low after OPEC's decision to leave output unchanged sent it tumbling a day ago and as gloom about the global economy grew. Japan's Nikkei average slid 5 percent on Tuesday, with exporters hit by a stronger yen after signs the U.S. economy has been in a recession for a year heightened risk aversion. U.S. light crude for January delivery fell 53 cents to $48.75 a barrel by 0056 GMT, following Monday's over 9 percent dive to the lowest settlement since May...

The global oil market is oversupplied by 2 million barrels per day (bpd), Iran's oil minister said here Sunday, a day after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) deferred a decision on a new output cut. "Market assessments indicate that the market has around 2 million barrels per day of oversupply," Gholam Hossein Nozari was quoted by Iran's satellite Press TV as saying. OPEC announced in Cairo on Saturday that it would maintain the current crude oil output until next month's meeting in Algeria. OPEC President Chakib Khelil, who is also Algeria's energy and mines minister, made the remarks...

With oil now at $50 a barrel, you no longer hear Congress complaining about oil speculators. The irony is there's probably more real speculation going on today than there ever was back in June and July. I'm talking about the type of speculation that involves hoarding oil today so it can be sold for more down the road. Today's speculators are actually buying oil. They're not merely flipping futures contracts without taking delivery - which is what hedge funds and commodities index funds were doing when they were in the crosshairs of Congress this summer. As I've argued before, investors...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Saudi Arabia said Saturday that it hoped to raise oil prices to $75 a barrel, but indicated that no measures would probably be taken until an OPEC meeting next month in Algeria. OPEC countries will have to cut oil production by 3 million barrels a day to hike price to $75, group says. OPEC countries will have to cut oil production by 3 million barrels a day to hike price to $75, group says. Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi said that OPEC will "do what needs to be done" to shore up falling oil prices when...

Text size: increase text sizedecrease text size Conquering The Cold Oil Prices Falling, But Interest In Alternative Fuels High By THERESA SULLIVAN BARGER | Special To The Courant November 23, 2008 Glen Rokicki Glen Rokicki peeks into the belly of a Vermont Casting wood-burning stove in the showroom of Fireside Supply in Hebron to check out the clean-burning aspects of BioBricks. (JOHN WOIKE / HARTFORD COURANT / November 20, 2008) Even before heating oil spiked toward $5 a gallon last summer, businesses that sell wood and pellet stoves were busy. By early fall, some pellet and wood retailers were so...

Oil prices are likely to sink as low as $35 a barrel without a massive production cut from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Lawrence Eagles, head of commodities research at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said Friday. OPEC needs to cut 3 million barrels a day to compensate for the bleak global economic outlook, which is expected to result next year in the first contraction to oil demand since the early 1980s. The group agreed in October to reduce output by 1.5 million barrels a day, but OPEC is unlikely to successfully make further cuts quickly enough to prevent further...

Oil prices on Thursday hit levels not seen in more than three years, and retail gasoline prices are now below $2 across nearly half of the country on dour economic reports suggesting a painful economic pullback. Benchmark crude fell as low as $48.50 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, levels last seen on May 18, 2005, when oil hit $46.80 a barrel. Meanwhile, prices at the pump fell again overnight nationally close to $2 a gallon, with the average price in 23 states even less than that.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil dropped more than 3 percent on Thursday, touching the lowest level since May 2005 as record U.S. job losses intensified concerns of a long and deep global recession and further crushed demand expectations. The U.S. government reported the number of workers making new claims for jobless benefits last week surged to the highest in 16 years, helping to push down global equity markets. U.S. crude fell $1.81 to $51.81 a barrel by 1251 p.m. EST after earlier touching $49.75, marking the lowest level since May 25, 2005, when prices hit $49.58. London Brent crude shed...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Remember $4 gas? Soon it will be $2 gas. As the nation's economy worsens, the demand for oil and gas wanes. As a result, prices drop. And drop. And drop. The price of gas fell overnight Sunday for the 60th consecutive day. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline fell 2 cents to $2.105 a gallon, according to a survey released Sunday by the American Automobile Association. A gallon of gas has dropped nearly in half since hitting an all-time high of $4.114 on July 17. It's been nearly two years since prices...

OPEC members will meet later this month in a bid to halt the tumble in crude prices, amid signs that a global economic slowdown is punishing near-term demand for oil. The news of the meeting, which analysts expect will result in another production cut, came as oil prices hit a 22-month low amid fresh evidence that the world's industrialized economies are in recession and consumers and industries are cutting back on fuel spending. The Paris-based International Energy Agency on Thursday slashed its forecasts for global oil demand, saying it will grow by just 0.1% this year. That is down from...

Steadily and stealthily, a natural gas cartel has emerged over the last seven years. On October 21 in Tehran, the Gas Exporting Countries' Forum (GECF) agreed to form a cartel. Russia, Iran, and Qatar announced that they intend to form a yet–unnamed group to "coordinate gas policy."

Your responses are still in pouring in from last week’s “Return of FDR” series. Many of them are excellent. We’ll look at those -- and take a hard look at the dollar and gold, as promised -- on Wednesday. But today I want to talk about a situation that feels like a ticking time bomb -- a time bomb that could go off sooner rather than later.After climbing to nearly $150 a barrel earlier this year, the price of crude oil has fallen. A lot. Crude’s big drop is good news for consumers, who won’t have to spend as much...

December crude futures on the NYMEX opened $3.26/barrel lower at $68.92/b Wednesday as the US dollar soared and US equity futures show for a lower open. The US Dollar Index on ICE traded at near two-year highs earlier at 85.921. When New York floor trading began, the dollar index was trading at 85.44, showing a 145 point gain. Dow Jones and S&P 500 futures in Chicago were lower, signaling a lower open across US equity markets. "The double whammy of a further strengthening in the dollar and a renewed plunge in global equities is providing primary impetus behind the overnight...

OPEC will need to order a "substantial" cut in oil output at next week's emergency meeting in Vienna, Algerian Energy Minister and current OPEC chief Chakib Khelil said Saturday."There will be a reduction in production at the next extraordinary meeting of OPEC, and it will have to be a substantial one to get the balance right between supply and demand," he told reporters."If it has to be 1.5 million barrels per day, or two million barrels per day, that's what it will be," Khelil added, during a visit to the southern Algerian province of Tamanrasset.Iran -- OPEC's second largest exporter...

It would be a tragedy if falling prices were to extinguish such alternatives and — given the time lag inherent in energy development — leave the country vulnerable to a yet another round of shocks. There is no disputing, as Ben Bernanke said, that recently falling oil prices are giving the economy a shot in the arm. But new energy projects also create jobs, and though oil prices impose a cost, Europe has lived with high prices (because of the imposition of taxes) and adjusted to them. ... What the country doesn’t want is to remain dependent only on oil...

he following First Take is real-time analysis and opinion by the MarketWatch commentary team.SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Nations has called an emergency meeting for Oct. 24 aimed at halting a precipitous drop in oil prices. Crude, despite an uptick Friday, has crumbled to $72 a barrel, half the price it fetched in July. See Futures Movers. Funny how fast things can change. Gone is the steady drone of peak-oil forecasts. Gone is the fear that we are in the pockets of "folks that don't like us very much." Prices are down at the pump, and...

Many Americans Tried to Save on Their Heating Bills and Are Now Paying the Price This summer, like so many past years, Bob Forguites decided to buy his home heating oil early and lock in his price for the winter. Oil was selling for about $4.50 a gallon back then, and it looked as if it wasn't about to fall. Forguites locked in at $4.10 a gallon. "It was a good price at that time," Forguites recalled. But now with the global economy near or in a recession, oil prices have plummeted to about $3 a gallon in his area...

SINGAPORE (AP) -- Oil prices jumped above $72 a barrel Friday in Asia from a 14-month low as investors bet fears that a severe global recession will devestate crude demand may be overblown.

Vienna, Oct 16 (DPA) The price for crude oil produced by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has fallen below $70, the group said Thursday.One barrel (159 litres) of OPEC crude stood at $68.58 Wednesday, $4.91 lower than $73.49 on the previous day. Citing the negative effect of the financial crisis on global oil demand, the cartel lowered its global crude oil demand forecast for 2009 by 450,000 barrels per day, to an average 87.2 million barrels per day. The group’s oil ministers are set to gather for an extraordinary session in Vienna on Nov 18 to discuss...

OPEC said Thursday it has brought forward to October 24 an emergency meeting to discuss the impact of the global financial crisis on oil markets, after initially scheduling the conference for November 18. "The OPEC Secretary General, Abdalla Salem El-Badri, has announced today that, following consultations with the President of the OPEC Conference and colleague Ministers, it has been decided to re-schedule the Extraordinary Meeting of the OPEC Conference. This will now take place at OPEC Headquarters, Vienna, on Friday, 24th October 2008 rather than on 18th November 2008, as previously announced," OPEC said a brief statement from the group's...

It's become another wild day for Wall Street. By 12:30 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 34 points to 8,605 after plunging 733 points on Wednesday, its second-biggest point loss in its history. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 22 to 1,651, after Microsoft (MSFT, news, msgs) Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said a deal with Yahoo (YHOO, news, msgs) still makes sense. Ballmer spoke at a Gartner conference in Florida. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was up 3 points to 911. On Monday, the Dow had soared 936 points; it was the only day this...

AP - Link only.

Crude oil prices fall to half of record Published: Oct. 15, 2008 at 6:18 PM NEW YORK, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- Crude oil prices fell to a penny more than half July's record price, retracting 50 percent on the New York Mercantile Exchange in just over three months. Crude oil fell $5.11 Wednesday to $73.64 per barrel, a 6 percent drop on the day, as unsettled economies continued to support investors' fears of falling demand. "The honeymoon relief package reaction now appears to be giving way to uncertainty over its impact on global demand," Mark Pervan, a senior commodity strategist...

Crude-oil futures fell below $75 per barrel Wednesday to close at their weakest level in more than a year after a group of key oil producers cut their oil-demand forecast for next year, fueling concerns that the global financial crisis will lead to a sharp slowdown in economic growth and further declines in oil consumption. "World demand is not willing to pay for high-priced crude oil right now so the market has to find an attractive price level," said Darin Newsom, DTN senior analyst. On Wednesday, that meant below $75, he said. Crude for November delivery fell $4.09, or 5.2%,...

North Texas Sweet Tuesday, October 14, 2008   The spot futures contracts for crude opened today at $83.60 for November contracts; that price is +$2.41 from Monday's close of $81.19. The Natural gas markets opened at $6.77 for November contracts +$.09 from Monday's close of $6.68. The Houston Ship Channel average price of spot gas delivered on October 1 is $7.27 per MMBtu according to Platts' Inside FERC Gas Market Physical gas delivery prices for Tuesday, October 14, 2008 are $6.61 for Henry Hub, $6.20 Houston Ship Channel, $6.22 for Katy $6.00 for NGPL TX/OK and $3.83 for Waha.     Company Price Effective Date ConocoPhillips $77.81 10-13-08 Geer $77.75...

NEW YORK – Oil prices fell below $79 a barrel in choppy trading Tuesday as investors took profits from the previous day's rally and shifted their focus back to signs of dwindling world energy demand. A falling U.S. stock market, a day after a record-breaking advance, also weighed on crude prices as oil market traders continued to fixate on equities as a barometer for the overall confidence in the shaky world economy. At the pump, retail gas price kept dropping. A gallon of regular dropped 4.3 cents overnight to a new national average of $3.163, according to auto club AAA,...

Crude prices could fall to $50 a barrel: Goldman Sachs 13 Oct 2008, 1017 hrs SINGAPORE: Goldman Sachs, one of the foremost bulls on commodities, turned a near-term bear on Monday after conceding that global financial turmoil would take a far bigger toll on demand than first anticipated. "We have underestimated the depth and duration of the global financial crisis and its implications on economic growth and commodity demand," its commodity markets research team lead by Jeffrey Currie said in a report dated Oct 13. The bank, which has consistently been at the top of oil price polls for years,...