Prominent climate scientist Ken Caldeira has published an impassioned plea to those who care about climate change in which he essentially says that building (and presumably continuing to operate) any fossil fuel fired power plants is “immoral”. He is particularly upset by support for natural gas as an alternative to coal: if we emit greenhouse gases half as rapidly as we do today”, he points out, “we will wind up in the same place but it will take us twice as long to get there”. Cutting emissions without ditching fossil fuels entirely thus appears to be essentially worthless in his eyes. Read more »

I was worried that my defense of speculation in the oil market, published this week on ForeignAffairs.com, was late to the game, but my timing turned out to be right on. Just yesterday, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by Joseph P. Kennedy arguing that “pure” speculators should be “banned from the world’s commodity exchanges.” Read more »

You’re not going to win any popularity contests being a speculator in the oil market these days. As if Occupy Wall Street weren’t bad enough, a significant percentage of the American public is convinced that speculation is the reason why it’s costing them so much to fill up the tank. Comments by President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Congressional leaders suggesting that speculators may be to blame for pushing oil prices higher over the last few months have added heft to these claims. Read more »

U.S. coal production is down but exports are up. That’s led to widespread warnings that efforts to curb U.S. coal consumption won’t do much if anything to slow climate change unless the United States bans exports too.

That conclusion strikes me as premature. Read more »

In a post last Thursday, I identified four reasons for skepticism about a new IHS report that estimated the impact on energy markets of the currently proposed implementation of the Volcker rule. Kurt Barrow, Vice President of IHS Purvin & Gertz and lead author of the IHS report, has graciously penned the following guest post addressing the questions I raised. I may comment further on a few of the points below in another post. Read more »

A new study out yesterday claims that the Volcker rule, intended to push proprietary trading out of the banks, could end up slamming the U.S. energy sector, slashing two billion cubic feet a day off natural gas production and costing two hundred thousand jobs. The alarming report, commissioned by Morgan Stanley and written by the consultancy IHS, is making waves. I am, to put it mildly, not convinced. Read more »

Anticipation is heating up around another release of oil and petroleum products from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), likely in coordination with the United Kingdom, France, and possibly others. Read more »

It’s difficult to open a newspaper or turn on the TV without hearing that Americans are apoplectic about skyrocketing gas prices. If ever there was a moment to channel public anger toward policy progress, this would seem to be it. So I was intrigued to see a new poll from Hart Research Associates, commissioned by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which tests a series of messages about gas prices and policy responses to see which ones would work best. Read more »

Cliff Krauss and Eric Lipton have an epic, must-read piece in today’s New York Times on the boom in U.S. oil and gas. It includes a quote from me that I ought to briefly expand on: Read more »

Study after study seems to be reaching the same conclusion: abundant natural gas is no solution for climate change. Indeed some scientists, having looked at the numbers, have come to an even harsher conclusion: there is so much unconventional gas in the ground that our only hope for dealing with climate change is to leave it untouched. Read more »