F. Chase Hutto III has played a prominent behind-the-scenes role in shaping the administration's environmental policies for several years, the officials said, helping to rewrite rules affecting the air that Americans breathe and the waters that oil tankers traverse. In every instance, according to both his allies and opponents, he has challenged proposals that would place additional regulations on industry.

The increasingly unpopular Garcia administration is under pressure due to soaring energy costs and failure to translate economic growth into a general rise in the standard of living. It is actively courting outside energy giants and this week agreed a £2.5bn stake in the state oil company to China.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - NATO has received a note from Moscow saying Russia is halting military cooperation, in the latest sign of tension over the violence in Georgia, an official said Thursday.

In what may be surprising to some, the most recent figures from the Center for Responsive Politics show that the oil industry gives a relatively small sum to individual political campaigns - it's 16th on a list of top 50 industries.

The Long Descent examines the basis of such fear through three core themes:

The County Board of Supervisors will be holding a hearing next Tuesday morning, August 26, to discuss the ongoing energy crisis in our region, state and country. With “peak oil” perhaps already here, or arriving soon – as more and more respected analysts now agree – this hearing is timely. While the Community Environmental Council is convinced that peak oil is a very serious problem, we are concerned that the growing awareness of this slow-moving crisis will lead to some bad choices regarding solutions. There are many non-solutions being discussed in the popular media, including increasing offshore oil drilling, coal power and nuclear power. Offshore oil drilling is a non-solution because it won’t help in the short-term or the long-term. It’s all about numbers. Using the best available data, from the federal Energy Information Administration, we can see that opening up all federal waters to offshore drilling will contribute a drop in the bucket to our country’s oil supplies even by 2030 (160,000 additional barrels a day, compared to a projected consumption by 2030 of 24 million barrels per day). Offshore drilling is a distraction from the real solutions.

[...] the energy debate, as its being played out in the Presidential campaign, is far from funny. The reality is that whether the U.S. drills or not, it really doesn't make a difference — not against the sheer scale of the energy and climate crisis facing America and the rest of the world. (Indeed, the other 6.3 billion people factor into this equation too.) The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently estimated that under a business-as-usual scenario — which the U.S. seems intent on abiding — global oil demand would rise 70% by 2050. That increase represents five times as much oil as Saudi Arabia produces annually. You could drill America with exploratory wells until it looked like Swiss cheese and still not make much of a dent in that figure.

Global competition, declining resources, and domestic demand on resources have placed energy issues at the forefront of daily news. This situation highlights the incredible U.S. appetite for energy and tremendous reliance on foreign energy. The volatile nature of the world oil market not only places the U.S. economy at risk, but also jeopardizes America's security. The War on Terrorism has strained U.S. relations with many oil-producing states. Rapidly increasing crude oil demands by Asia add new competition for this resource. If foreign producers denied the United States oil, the effects could cripple the U.S. economy and would significantly impact security. The 2002 National Security Strategy acknowledges the importance of the nation's economy; however, there is no mention of the linkage of energy security and the economy. Until the United States commits to developing alternative forms of energy to gain independence from foreign oil, the United States remains vulnerable to volatile markets, global politics, and possible interventions of non-state players. Current policy limits U.S. action to diplomatic economic and information efforts to maintain access to oil. This Strategic Research Project analyzes the need to change the National Security Strategy to advocate the use of military force to guarantee access to foreign oil sources.

"Foreign companies, including Russian companies, have not taken up the call to develop these projects. As a result of them not wanting to work in these conditions, the Iraqi people have suffered greatly," Karim Waheed, Iraq's electricity minister, said at a news conference in Moscow.

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.

The 20-somethings were delayed immediately when they found someone had taken their food during the night, and it took them two hours to restock. They faced further delays when they found that the weather board still had the previous day's forecast (clear weather) posted. Rather than use up more time searching for that day's forecast, they pressed on. By then, the sun had dawned on a gorgeous day — surely the weather would be the same as the day before, they thought.

I've seen a number of comments, both at TheOilDrum and elsewhere, suggesting that the US is now less susceptible to supply disruptions because we have reduced our demand for oil by several hundred thousand barrels per day over the past year. In general, I get the sense that people think we can insulate ourselves from supply disruptions, from our dependence on potentially unreliable foreign sources of oil, by improving our efficiency and eliminating "unnecessary" oil consumption. In my opinion, this is backward. In this post, I will argue that, because the demand that is destroyed first in a free market is the demand that is easiest to eliminate, the resulting consumptive system is more inelastic, more brittle, and more susceptible to systemic shock from supply disruption. I will approach this argument by outlining what makes a system either resilient or brittle and why market-driven demand destruction creates a more brittle system. I will conclude with a few thoughts on how we can increase the resiliency of our energy-driven economy in a future environment of declining energy supplies.

Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, said the center received a distress signal late Tuesday about the raid on the MT Bunga Melati Dua and immediately notified Western naval ships patrolling the area.

The United States has been promoting the idea of pipeline routes skirting Russia as a way to promote European energy security, but the chances of making that work have always been slim. The reason: The United States has been simultaneously trying to keep Iran, the world's other major holder of natural gas reserves, out of world markets and out of alternate pipeline networks. Without the Iran card, it's very difficult to win a pipeline game against Russia.