Energy Probe

What to do about high energy prices

Posted on October 1, 2008 by energyprbe

Gordon Powers
MSN Finance
September 25, 2008

With energy prices soaring, is this the right time to lock into a fixed-rate gas contract or should you stick with the floating rate offered by your utility?

Both electricity and natural gas prices will surge as North American utilities shift from coal-fired generation to cleaner burning natural gas generation, suggests a recent report from CIBC World Markets.

Natural gas prices are tied to oil prices, which are predicted to stay strong, and that means utilities seeking gas to fuel generating facilities will face higher costs, passing those costs along to customers wherever possible. On the other hand, wholesale natural gas prices have tumbled sharply since mid-summer.

Oh, and another thing. Natural gas in Canada is priced in U.S. dollars, so if the Canadian dollar goes down, gas prices will go up simply because of the currency.

So, does this mean you should sign that fixed-price contract the next time someone starts banging on your front door? Well, it’s either that or continuing with your utility’s variable rate, which changes every three months and may have retroactive charges.

Essentially, when you sign up for a fixed-price contract, you’re placing a bet that future prices of natural gas will rise faster than expected and stay there. Even if they do, the increase must be more than the marketer’s mark-up for you to come out ahead of those paying floating rates.

Fixed-price contract retailers are middlemen, operating much like the banks. A bank offers its fixed-rate mortgage loans with money borrowed from customers who bought GICs with matching terms, making a profit on the spread between the interest rate it charges and what it has to pay out on deposits.

Natural gas retailers operate in a similar fashion except that they enjoy better margins than most banks. In fact, critics like Energy Probe put those mark-ups as high as 15%, which means that natural gas prices really have to take off for you to be ahead over the long term. There are clear pricing differences among retailers, however.

Energyshop.com is a good place to review current prices and options. It has a price comparison feature on its web site that allows buyers to shop around for the best deal from the marketers, ranging from one to five year contracts.

According to Energyshop’s research, which goes back to July 1999, Ontario consumers who locked in prices in the past have realized a savings about two thirds of the time. More recently, however, those who signed or renewed energy contracts have paid more than if they had stayed with their local utility.

The current price for natural gas ranges from 37.5 cents to 43.9 cents a cubic metre for a five-year deal, according to Energyshop. This means, at today’s rates, the utilities are charging less than what you can expect to pay from the retailers. But that can clearly change as regulators review and set price levels in October.

When approached by an agent, it’s important to distinguish between someone who says he selling you savings — which he can’t guarantee since no one can say for sure what prices are going to do — and certainty — which, if you’re a worrier, might help take your mind off the impact of energy prices on your budget.

If you do buy at the door, remember that you need to reaffirm the contract by phone for it to be valid. Be sure you know the price offered, any exit fees if you want out in the future, and your renewal options. If you don’t like what you see or it doesn’t jibe with the sales pitch, cancel — but don’t take too long.

You only have 10 calendar days from the date you signed to back out. If you’ve signed up at the doorstep or over the Internet, this 10-day period starts when you make the commitment to the retailer. Although every case is unique, marketers are generally reluctant to let people change their mind once this window closes.

If you do change your mind, be sure to deliver the cancellation notice in a way that will allow you to prove you sent it in case of a dispute.

A fixed-price contract might work for you if …

You’re looking for stable energy prices over the term of the contract.

You want to be protected against short-term price spikes resulting from natural events such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

A retailer can offer further incentives to earn your business.

But a fixed-price contract might turn out to be a bad idea if …

You can live with the uncertainty of floating prices.

You end up trapped at the contract price for the full term and rates subsequently drop.

You get stuck with early exit fees when you have to cancel before the end of the term.

Although it doesn’t change the actual pricing, one way to ride out a period of higher energy bills is by signing up for a billing plan that spreads your costs evenly through the year. This way, you can work the base number into your budget and still benefit from any market corrections along the way. But if you lock in today’s natural gas prices for the next few years, you’re stuck with them.

Wielding the carbon club

Posted on September 30, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 30, 2008

‘Cut back on carbon emissions,” the Third World is lectured. “It’s for the good of the planet and it’s for your own good, too. Don’t point fingers at the West’s carbon emissions. Don’t protest that you’d like your share of automobiles and air conditioners. Don’t tell us that you know what’s in your own self-interest. Just do as your told, or we’ll punish you.”

These threats are sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, always arrogant. Carbon has become a club with which to discipline the Third World.

The Globe and Mail took up the carbon club in a weekend editorial that praised Prime Minister Stephen Harper for vowing to prohibit bitumen sales from the tar sands to countries that misbehave on global warming, and chastised misbehavers China and India, now the world’s number one and number three carbon emitters. The Globe asserted that, “the emerging economic powers are not entitled to catch up to the emissions levels of the nations that industrialized in the 19th century,” adding that these restrictions are for the Third World’s own good: “East Asia and South Asia will not benefit if Shanghai and Bangladesh are below sea level.”

Likewise, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed last year that it would be “suicide” for Third World countries to base their progress on fossil fuels, as Western countries have: “If China and India were to follow the same pattern of development you are going to have serious conflict. Where are all the resources going to come from?”

In truth, the West has selfish motives, and not just because carbon cutbacks by Third World nations would leave more oil and other resources for the West — Western industry and Western jobs also hang in the balance. In a recent declaration, 27 EU leaders warned that “appropriate measures can be taken” against exports from Third World countries to protect European jobs, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted on “a mechanism that would allow us to strike against the imports of countries that don’t play by the rules of the game on environmental protection.” The protectionist U. S. Senate is also looking for a trade mechanism “to penalize countries such as China and India if they didn’t also limit emissions,” reported the Wall Street Journal in an article that referred to such measures as “China bashing.”

Should Third World countries do as they’re told? Or should they think for themselves and come to their own conclusions? The Indian government’s National Action Plan on Climate Change looked for evidence of harm to India from global warming. Its scientists found none. It also looked for man-made causes. Still no evidence. “No firm link between the changes [to India’s environment] and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established,” it concluded. Not surprisingly, India opposes curbing its economic growth in aid of science it considers suspect, to aid Western trade interests it considers hypocritical. China and others also balk at curbing their fossil fuel use — and economic growth — to suit western demands.

Should Third World countries doubt claims that dramatic carbon curbs would aid their economies? Yes, claim two of the world’s most distinguished academics, Freeman Dyson of Princeton, perhaps America’s most famous scientist, and William Nordhaus of Yale, the world’s pre-eminent climate change economist and author of the new book, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies.

Their unequivocal conclusion emerged from a widely discussed exchange in the pages of the New York Review of Books between Dyson, a climate-change skeptic who reviewed Nordhaus’s book, and Nordhaus, who believes that man-made global warming must be tackled. These academics were united on the dangers to the developing world of steep curbs on carbon, such as those promoted by the U.K. government’s Stern Review, the chief authority of those who advocate severe carbon cutbacks.

“The practical consequence of the Stern policy would be to slow down the economic growth of China now in order to reduce damage from climate change a hundred years later,” Dyson explains, with Nordhaus’s blessing. “Several generations of Chinese citizens would be impoverished to make their descendants only slightly richer. … the slowing-down of growth would in the end be far more costly to China than the climatic damage.”

Count on the West to use the carbon club to beat the Third World into submission. Pray that when it does, it at least has the grace to avoid adding insult to injury by insisting it is acting for the Third World’s own good.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Time for a vision of Ontario’s economy

Posted on September 29, 2008 by energyprbe

TD Bank Financial Group

September 29, 2008

Posted in Public Transit | 2 Comments

Global cooling sign: Solar winds at 50-year-low

Posted on September 28, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
FP Comment
September 28, 2008

In yet another sign that the Earth could be heading in to a period of global cooling, NASA reports that the solar wind is now at a 50-year low, the lowest that NASA has seen. This change in solar activity, which began to occur about a decade ago, coincides with the end of the climb in global temperatures that had been underway for decades.

“What we’re seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s,” explains Arik Posner, NASA’s Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC.

“How unusual is this event?

“It’s hard to say. We’ve only been monitoring solar wind since the early years of the Space Age—from the early 60s to the present. Over that period of time, it’s unique. How the event stands out over centuries or millennia, however, is anybody’s guess. We don’t have data going back that far.”

As a result of the diminished solar wind, cosmic rays are entering the Earth’s atmosphere in greater number. Research at the Danish National Space Institute shows that cosmic rays increase cloud cover on Earth, and that this cloud cover can have a cooling effect. Does this help explain why global temperatures plateaued a decade ago, and why they are now decreasing? Stay tuned!
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

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Oil sands cleanup

Posted on September 13, 2008 by energyprbe

(Sept. 13, 2008) The public debate on oil sands fails to recognize that restoration is possible and not that expensive. Continue reading →

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Oil sands cleanup

Posted on September 13, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 13, 2008

The public debate on oil sands fails to recognize that restoration is possible and not that expensive.

Alberta’s oil sands projects are ugly. Their tailings ponds pockmark the northern Alberta wilderness. Their open pit mines scar the land. This certifiable ugliness, the trademark symbol of oil sands destruction, has been the chief source of opposition to their development over the three decades that this rawest of resource industries has been in play.

This reason for oil sands opposition has largely disappeared. Oil sands still scar the land but in time the scars are removed, the tailings ponds are drained, the biota is brought back, and the land becomes as productive as before. Oil sands developments, far from being among the worst of energy technologies, now have less of a long-term negative impact on the landscape than many of the energy technologies touted as environmental saviors.

Thanks to ever tightening environmental legislation from the Alberta government, all oil sands operators are required to rehabilitate the land that they had despoiled. Skeptics pooh pooh this obligation, claiming that the scale of destruction on the vast oil sands expanse will be too great to ever remediate, that the work will never be done, that it will be too expensive.

To the contrary, the scale of destruction is far less extensive than imagined, the cost of remediation is far lower than imagined, and the remediation is being done along the way.

The oil sands region is indeed immense — just over 140,000 square kilometres, the equivalent of about two New Brunswicks. But of that, less than 3,500 square kilometres is suited to open pit mining operations. Of this still-large amount of land — approaching 5% of one New Brunswick — only 500 square kilometers has been disturbed to date and, of that, 13% has already been rehabilitated (Syncrude, the largest open-pit miner, has rehabilitated 22%). Relatively little land is laid bare at one time because the mining proceeds in a methodical fashion, in relatively small parcels at a time. After each parcel of land is mined out, it is backfilled, topped with the original over-matter, resoiled and replanted. While the vanguard of the mining operation chews up the land, the rearguard puts it back into place.

From the first shovel in the ground to begin the mining process, to the last tree that’s replanted, can take as little as 15 years, of which 10 years might be spent in remediation. The cost of the remediation per hectare per year now averages about: $2000, or $20,000 should the remediation take 10 years. Because that same hectare will have produced 10,000 barrels of oil, remediation costs as little as $2 per barrel.

The tailings ponds — better thought of as recycling pits — are part of this extract-and-reconstruct process. The ponds are not stagnant but dynamic, a half-way house for the gooey, silty wastes that come from the open-pit mining process. Over time, the solids in the tailings pond settle to the bottom, allowing the water to be recycled for other industrial operations and the solids to be pumped out for backfill. When the ponds are no longer needed in recycling, they are either topped up with fresh water, to become an ecologically sound lake, or backfilled and landscaped.

The overwhelming portion of the oil sands region — more than 135,000 square kilometres — has bitumen deposits too deep for open pit mining. Here, developers bring the bitumen up through wells, an operation not much different in terms of disturbing the land than the conventional oil drilling that has occurred over much of Alberta for decades. Little land is disturbed. For every billion barrels of oil extracted, and most oil sands oil will come from these wells, a mere 5.5 square kilometres of land will be disturbed.

None of this is pretty or easy on the environment, but energy production rarely is. Alternatives are often far worse and, as a practical matter, represent permanent and irreversible changes to the ecology. To obtain coal, we sometimes level entire mountains. To generate hydroelectricity, we flood vast tracts of river valley. To obtain, biofuels we convert forests to plant fuel crops.

Oil sands’ need to restore land is only one of its environmental burdens. This spring, some 500 migratory birds died when they landed in Syncrude’s tailings ponds — a severe snowstorm prevented the company’s vehicles from reaching the ponds in time to detonate the cannons that, for the previous 30 years, had succeeded in keeping birds away. Accidents might occur at the tailings ponds — recycled water might escape to the environment if safety systems fail, for example.

Oil sands are by no stretch benign. But neither are they the overarching evil that they’re portrayed to be.

Second in a series, also featuring:

Sands of peace

Posted in Energy Probe News, Tar Sands | Leave a comment

Sands of peace

Posted on September 6, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 6, 2008

Russia’s energy supplies enabled their aggression, Canada’s supply could be the placating alternative.

“When it comes to action over Georgia, Russia has the European Union over a barrel. In fact, 1.2 million barrels. That’s how much Russian crude is pumped westward every day down the Druzhba pipeline to fuel Europe’s economies.”

So began an article in the International Herald Tribune, one of many last week explaining why Europe — and the west — has little choice but to sacrifice parts of Georgia, and maybe a lot more, to Russia’s ambitions.

“Russia knows that when it comes to conducting a serious foreign and security policy, Europe is all mouth,” says Lord Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU external relations commissioner. This impotence emboldens Russia and revives its centuries-long drive to control neighbouring states.

A new Cold War looms, many are concluding, financed by Russia’s new found energy wealth and fueled by appeasement. Is the free world doomed to decades of hostility due to Europe’s energy vulnerability?

1.2 million barrels of oil a day is a lot. Or not. Alberta’s might as an energy power is now based largely on the ongoing development of just seven oil sands projects, most of them on the ultimate scale of 300,000 to 400,000 barrels of oil a day. Add three or four projects from Alberta on that scale to produce another 1.2 million barrels of oil per day and Europe’s entire oil dependence on Russia can be eradicated. A democratic peace-promoting country would have come to Europe’s rescue, providing not just oil but the steel needed in Europe’s spine.

The oil would do more than loosen Europe from the grips of an untrustworthy supplier who has shown no hesitation in using its energy exports to bully its customers — the Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia have all felt Russia’s wrath. With an immense addition to the world oil markets from Alberta, oil prices will plummet along with the need for appeasement, in the process weakening despotic and militaristic regimes. High oil prices arm despots against their own people, as with Burma’s military regime; they finance terrorism abroad, as with Iran; and they make dreams of empire thinkable, as with Russia.

Pictured: The world’s longest conveyer belt at the Muskeg River Mine project in Alberta.

Canada’s oil sands are rightly known for the immense environmental problems that they pose. They should also be known for their role in promoting peace and security around the globe. Canada already exports some 2.5 million barrels of oil a day to U. S., more than half of it from oil sands, providing the Americans with a secure supplier that reduces its need to intervene militarily in far-flung oil-producing regions.

Energy security remains a top political issues in the U. S. One of Barack Obama’s central pledges in his acceptance
speech last week was getting off Mideast oil in a decade. The U. S. imports some two million barrels of Mideast oil per day. In a decade, if the Alberta government’s plans come through, that entire two million barrels could come from increases in Alberta oil sands production alone. In another decade, Alberta hopes to expand its production by another three million barrels per day. Advancing just 1.2 million of that three million for the sake of Europe, and for the cause of peace, should become an imperative.

In the 1980s, when oil from oil sands cost about $30 a barrel, and oil prices were often in the $20 to $30 range, oil sands required economic subsidies to be viable business propositions, even ignoring their environmental harm. With oil now at $100 per barrel and production costs about $10 a barrel and expected to fall further, the profitability of oil sands is immense. No subsidies can be justified, economic or environmental.

Oil sands have a host of problems. These include known harms — they consume and pollute too much water, they despoil too much land — and they include one potential harm — greenhouse gases, which many scientists believe can cause the planet to warm dangerously. But problems have a way of getting solved, as we’ve seen with coal. Once the dirtiest of fuels, coal can now be burned cleanly, thanks to improvements in technology. Clean coal has the same emissions profile as natural gas, and it is getting cleaner still.

Oil sands are following the same route to rehabilitation. They still consumes too much water, but less than half as much as before. Although some 500 square kilometres of land has been despoiled to date, land is also beginning to be rehabilitated, as it must under the terms of the agreements that the producers signed with the government — Syncrude has reclaimed some 4,500 hectares at its site north of Fort McMurray, with impressive results. Greenhouse gas emissions are being halved.

Alberta’s oil sands represent one of the planet’s largest reservoirs of energy — some 2.5 trillion barrels of crude bitumen from which 300 billion barrels are estimated to be available, an amount that rivals the reserves of Saudi Arabia. They need to be developed properly: cleanly, to protect the environment, and quickly, to promote peace and stability.

Photo credit: Ted Jacob, Canwest News Service

First in a series, also featuring:

Oil sands cleanup

Posted in Energy Probe News, Tar Sands | Leave a comment

Conservatives miss Wikipedia’s threat

Posted on August 21, 2008 by energyprbe

Matthew Sheffield
Washington Times
August 21, 2008

Wikipedia, the community-edited encyclopedia that anyone can revise, is one of the Web’s biggest success stories. What you may not know is that it also has become an important player in the political world.

Started in 2001 on a shoestring budget, Wikipedia now ranks as the ninth most popular Web site in the U.S., according to Internet ratings company Alexa.com, outpacing such “old media” stalwarts as CNN, ESPN and the New York Times. (It’s even more popular worldwide, where it is currently the seventh most-read site.)

Since its launch, Wikipedia has become a valuable tool for students, journalists, lawyers and anyone looking to settle an argument, find a quick bit of information or start a research project.

This popularity makes Wikipedia very interesting in a political context, particularly because its pages are highly regarded by most Internet search engines. Chances are, if you look up the name of most any state or national politician, the Wikipedia entry on him or her will be in your top three results. In some cases, such as those of President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney, Wikipedia’s article actually beats out the official government biography pages.

When you add to its popularity the fact that Wikipedia has more than 10 million articles and great search-engine placement, it’s pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that Wikipedia is one of the most influential publications in American politics.

Basically anyone who works in political communications will acknowledge the value of Wikipedia as a messaging tool, but you would be surprised to find out how few politicians have come to this realization. That’s because most political leaders are either too busy or too technologically out of touch to make the Internet a part of their media diets. Many D.C. elites think that because they have no contact with the interactive Web in their personal lives, no one else does either.

Unfortunately for the right, there seems to be a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats who suffer from this thinking. Whether it’s a senator wondering how long it takes for “an Internet” to arrive or a nonprofit president thinking that placing an op-ed in the Podunk Courier is an accomplishment, the right has not placed the value on Wikipedia that it deserves.

Conservatives seems to be making another critical error regarding the online encyclopedia on the question of political bias. You can’t entirely blame them either, considering that Wikipedia seems to have tilted leftward in a number of cases.

As my NewsBusters colleague P.J. Gladnick has documented, the online encyclopedia blocked all mention of allegations that former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had conducted an extramarital affair.

In addition, Wikipedia articles on so-called “climate change” similarly tend to leave out information that contradicts conventional liberal views.

The reason for this is in the editing. Anyone can alter Wikipedia’s entries, in most cases without even bothering to register for an account. What this means in practical terms is that people with enough determination to force their viewpoints on Wikipedia can do so.

Accomplishing this task can take up large amounts of time, up to 15 hours a week, according to Jonathan Schilling, a 50-something software developer from central New Jersey interviewed by the New Republic in April.

Mr. Schilling told the magazine that he spent several hours a day managing the Wikipedia article about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries, all on his own initiative using the online name “Wasted Time R.”

Journalist Lawrence Solomon uncovered similar levels of dedication among extreme environmentalists when he tried to correct an entry that incorrectly stated that global warming skeptic Benny Peiser had endorsed an alarmist study.

The temperature debate is not the only area where left-wing bias skews Wikipedia’s articles. Right-leaning critics have noted the encyclopedia’s tilt in entries on Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Al Franken, Minnesota Democrat and former talk-show host for the liberal radio network Air America.

Faced with such bias, many people on the right seem willing to retreat from the Wiki Wars, resorting to legal maneuvering to block particularly noxious entries and crying foul about Wiki unfairness. Still others on the right have withdrawn to their own site, Conservapedia.

There is nothing wrong with such efforts, but they are incomplete — incomplete because they fail to recognize that liberal bias at Wikipedia isn’t like bias at ABC or CBS. These institutions are dominated by liberals, true, but their systematic structure is such that the ability for people on the right to push for fairness is severely limited.

That is not the case with Wikipedia, a participatory medium in which those who are most active enjoy the most influence. It’s time for the right to dust off its hands and engage in some old-fashioned activism.

Matthew Sheffield is a Web consultant and creator of NewsBusters.org.

Related stories on this topic, by Lawrence Solomon:

Is Wikipedia promoting global warming hysteria?

Wikipedia’s Zealots

Wikipropaganda – Spinning green

Hide your name on Wicked Pedia

The Opinionator

The real climate martians

Posted in Energy Probe News, The Deniers | Leave a comment

Slim Pickens

Posted on August 13, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
August 13, 2008

Oil imports are destroying the U. S., say a rising tide of alarmists in the U. S., chief among them T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil man turned wind power developer. "It is a clear and growing threat to our national security, and our national economy," he testified to the U. S. Senate. "It has to be stopped. We are on the verge of losing our Super Power status."

To hear it from Pickens, who is mounting a national ad campaign to promote his wind power investments, it’s even worse than that — the U.S. is aiding and abetting its enemies.

"We don’t buy all of our oil from our enemies. We do have some friends — Canada and a few others. But most of the money that the world pays for oil goes into the hands of countries that are not our reliable allies. And some of that money is used right back against us in the war on terror. And so, we are funding the people who are trying to wreak havoc on this country."

Pickens is outrageously misleading. True, the U.S. does import most of its oil, but barely — only 56.5% of net U.S. oil needs are now met from exports according to the most recent figures from the U. S. Energy Information Administration, not the 70% that Pickens’ ads claim. Moreover, this "oil dependency," as it’s called, is diminishing, not increasing, as Pickens claims, and precious little of it comes from countries that can be thought of as enemies of the U. S.

Neither is the U.S. dependent on any one country for an outsized amount of oil — the U.S. imports oil from some 69 nations, most of it from friends and allies and precious little from hostile states, including from newly hostile Russia, which meets less than 2% of U.S. needs.

America’s single largest supplier of oil is America, which meets almost half of its own needs. America’s single largest external supplier is Canada, which meets some 12% of U. S. needs. Add in Mexico, another large and reliable supplier of oil, and the U.S. meets about 62% of its needs from North American sources.

Add in other friendly countries in the Americas, such as Brazil, Columbia and Argentina, and the U.S. meets more than two-thirds of its needs from this hemisphere.

The U.S. imports oil from only one country in the Americas that can be considered hostile — Venezuela, which meets 6% of U.S. demand. To eliminate that 6% — and Russia’s 2%, too — the U.S. would only need to develop a fraction of its offshore oil resources.

Much is made of America’s dependence on the Middle East for its oil imports. In fact, the entire Persian Gulf meets only 12% of U.S. needs, and that 12% comes overwhelmingly from allies. Saudi Arabia, America’s largest supplier in the Gulf, meets 8% of U.S. needs and Iraq, the second largest supplier and a fast growing one, meets 3%. Kuwait, the country the U.S. rescued in the first Gulf War, is next, at just over 1%. America’s true enemies in the Gulf — Iran and Syria–account for virtually 0%.

Should America forsake trade with its friends and allies in the Gulf region? Or in Africa, where 16 countries — most of them very poor and small — are oil suppliers? Or in Asia, which all told meets less than 2% of U. S. needs? Or European suppliers such as Norway? Every country that sells the U.S. oil in return buys U.S. food, machinery and other U.S. exports.

America should not fear trade, and it should not feel trapped. Its oil suppliers are highly diverse, from around the world. Moreover, because high prices have transformed the economics of developing North American energy resources, the bulk of U.S. oil needs — now and into the foreseeable future — is likely to come from the continent. Canada, which is rapidly developing its tar sands, is soon expected to double its exports to the U.S., with another doubling to follow.

More to the point, with the U.S. public now overwhelmingly in favour of exploiting America’s vast on-and offshore resources, the U.S. is likely to ramp up its own production and — if it ever wanted to — could well displace all of its non-North American oil imports.

But why would it want to?

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

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Solar radio waves could signal global cooling

Posted on August 11, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
FP Comment
August 11, 2008

Those who view the Sun, and not CO2, as a driver of temperatures on Earth look to various measures of solar activity for explanations of climate change. For one such measure — radio waves from the Sun, or solar flux — they look to Canada’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in the Okanagan valley, near Penticton, British Columbia. What they find supports the view that another Little Ice Age could be coming.

Solar activity of late has been extraordinarily low. You can follow the solar flux along with the scientists, if you wish, by periodically clicking here. The column that’s third from the right shows the actual observed readings. The columns to its right are corrected by several percent to remove various distortions. The column at the extreme right hand is considered the most accurate of the three.

The observatory’s Solar Radio Monitoring Program, operated in conjunction with the Canadian Space Agency, produces three precise measurements of the solar flux density each day — solar radio emissions at 10.7 cm wavelength. The observatory believes that the 10.7 cm solar radio flux may be the most heavily used single piece of astronomical information in the world.

Why 10.7 cm? In 1946, famed Canadian astronomer Arthur Covington decided to measure the Sun’s “radio flux” — the variations in the Sun’s energy output at radio wavelengths. After realizing that the flux changed daily, and wondering if these variations were related to the sunspots on the Sun’s surface, he took advantage of a partial solar eclipse to monitor variations as the Moon covered the sunspots. In discovering that the sunspots emit much stronger radiation than the more luminous unspotted areas, he established that sunspots are associated with radiation “hot spots.” Covington used a radio wavelength of 10.7 cm (2800 megaHertz) to monitor the activity of the Sun.

For an explanation of the science, I offer the following excerpt from the National Geophysical Data Center in the U.S., which relies on the observatory’s data:

“The sun emits radio energy with a slowly varying intensity. This radio flux, which originates from atmospheric layers high in the sun’s chromosphere and low in its corona, changes gradually from day-to-day, in response to the number of spot groups on the disk. Radio intensity levels consist of emission from three sources: from the undisturbed solar surface, from developing active regions, and from short-lived enhancements above the daily level. Solar flux density at 2800 megaHertz has been recorded routinely by radio telescopes near Ottawa (February 14, 1947-May 31, 1991) and Penticton, British Columbia, since the first of June, 1991. Each day, levels are determined at local noon (1700 GMT at Ottawa and 2000 GMT at Penticton) and then corrected to within a few percent for factors such as antenna gain, atmospheric absorption, bursts in progress, and background sky temperature.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Posted in Energy Probe News, Global Cooling | 2 Comments