WhatFinger


In Britain, North Sea oil and gas is a resource that just refuses to quit.

Fuelling The Rise Of The Anglosphere



James C. Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge claimed that ‘the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-first century’. Bennett’s contention was that the cultural values endemic across what he termed the ‘Anglosphere’ economies would, via the influence of the Internet’s information highway, prove to be the Next Big Idea. The rise of the Anglosphere economies could be turbo-charged via an entirely unexpected dynamic: vast new domestic energy wealth – in the shape of shale and deepwater oil and gas, and oil sands – across leading Anglosphere nations. --Peter Glover, Energy Tribune, 28 February 2012
The distribution of energy on the planet is shifting: the stranglehold that Middle Eastern dictatorships have over the world’s energy supply is loosening and just as the rise of manufacturing in China shifted the world’s economic axis, so will the rise of shale energy in North America. The shale revolution could be responsible for the resurgence of the United States as an economic superpower, with cheap local energy underpinning the second coming of its manufacturing industry. One thing is for sure: the world isn’t running out of oil and gas any more. –Alan Kohler, Business Spectator, 29 February 2012 The idea that seized the imaginations of the bien pensant chattering classes in the Noughties – "Peak Oil" – is no longer relevant. So says the commodities team at Citigroup, and policy-makers would be wise to examine the trends they've identified. The death of Peak Oil kicks away the underpinnings from a great deal of policy-making by our bureaucracies and their advisers. Over the past two decades, we've seen the mushrooming of the "sustainability" sector, which is almost completely dependent on state funding and which shares similar erroneous assumptions. --Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 23 February 2012

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The U.S. may surpass Russia as the world’s largest energy producer in the next 10 years as output of natural gas climbs, according to Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Mark Kiesel. --Bloomberg, 27 February 2012 The [Canadian] government’s notion of an energy strategy — emphasize the power and efficiency of markets, get rid of red tape, finger environmental radicals, and remind the U.S. how secure Canadian supplies are — received a double boost this week. The obvious one was the Obama administration’s embrace of the news that TransCanada plans to proceed with the southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline. This is half the pipeline whose approval the White House recently nixed. Mr. Obama’s new vision of a bright future for hydrocarbons is also related to the fact that the global green energy bandwagon has hit less of a pothole than a chasm. Not only is it economically unsustainable, but the “settled” science behind it is being increasingly questioned, while the Kyoto political process is stone dead. --Peter Foster, Financial Post, 29 February 2012 President Barack Obama has angered green businesses and NGOs by throwing his weight behind a new plan that could see work start on the controversial KeystoneXL tar sands oil pipeline in the next few months, crushing hopes that the administration would permanently block the project. --James Murray, BusinessGreen, 28 February 2012 For the first time ever decarbonisation is an explicit goal of the next EU budget. And it shows: the European Commission wants to devote fully 20% of the €1 trillion budget, which runs from 2014 to 2020, to climate-related actions. The goal: to change the face of the European energy system and sow the seeds for a low-carbon economy in 2050. But it is the Member States who will ultimately have to make up their minds whether they want to make the EU's green dream come true. --Sonja van Renssen, European Energy Review, 28 February 2012


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