The State of Oil

Oil prices have been in the $70s region, slowly rising with the recovery of the economy, they fell recently to $71.82 a barrel and this low price has multiple implications. The lower the price the less incentive there is to invest away from using oil, and the higher the price the more incentive there is to explore for more oil using more costly sources; this means that where ever the price of oil goes we will produce a lot of it. People living next to the tar sands in Alberta, Canada (containing 178 billion barrels of usable oil) are hoping for low future prices to make the extraction operation there unprofitable due to the cancerous effect it is having on the citizens. And in the Gulf of Mexico oil is found under deep water, putting 3 billion more barrels into the global oil reserve.

Electric Cars are the most likely proposed alternative to the combustion engine, The Economist assesses the situation and comments on what governments need to do to assist the creation of this new market.

Have a lesson on water use and availability on Planet Earth.

One study on climate trends supports the idea that our recent warming stands in the face of the cooling of the past couple thousand years, we could be delaying an ice age.