Oil Companies Are Using a Simple Trick to Bilk Consumers out of Billions
By Brian Beutler, Media Consortium
Posted on August 14, 2007, Printed on August 17, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59593/
It's probably intuitive to most people that the gasoline in their fuel tank expands in the heat -- just like doorframes and cookware and everything else on the planet. What's probably less intuitive is that, in the United States, this physical phenomenon pumps a nearly $2 billion annual windfall out of consumers' pockets and into oil company coffers, according to numerous calculations, including a recent House of Representatives study.
Baca seterusnya di: http://www.alternet.org/The End of 'Easy Oil'
By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on August 18, 2007, Printed on August 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60086/
When "peak oil" theory was first widely publicized in such path breaking books as Kenneth Deffeyes' Hubbert's Peak (2001), Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over (2002), David Goodstein's Out of Gas (2004), and Paul Robert's The End of Oil (2004), energy industry officials and their government associates largely ridiculed the notion. An imminent peak -- and subsequent decline -- in global petroleum output was derided as crackpot science with little geological foundation. "Based on [our] analysis," the U.S. Department of Energy confidently asserted in 2004, "[we] would expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century."
Recently, however, a spate of high-level government and industry reports have begun to suggest that the original peak-oil theorists were far closer to the grim reality of global-oil availability than industry analysts were willing to admit. Industry optimism regarding long-term energy-supply prospects, these official reports indicate, has now given way to a deep-seated pessimism, even in the biggest of Big Oil corporate headquarters.
The change in outlook is perhaps best suggested by a July 27 article in the Wall Street Journal headlined, "Oil Profits Show Sign of Aging."Baca seterusnya di: http://www.alternet.org/
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