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Last Wednesday, Harvard’s local chapter of the national divestment campaign received a sharp and public rejection from university president Drew Faust, who released a public statement that she will not support reinvesting Harvard’s endowment portfolio away from fossil fuels. The letter has been billed as a massive disappointment for divesters, whose path to reshaping how Harvard invests its massive endowment is rapidly narrowing. This narrative entirely misses the point of divestment. Divesters might have lost an important battle, but they’re winning the much more important war. If you speak to those involved in divestment campaigns at Harvard or abroad, you...

5 Unexpected Benefits for America From the Natural Gas Boom By Tyler Crowe November 2, 2013 |Guess what, America? Natural gas is cheap and abundant. The ability to access shale gas through new extraction techniques has opened up reserves we didn't think possible, and proven reserves of gas are 60% higher than what they were a decade ago and growing by the day. This has also led to natural gas prices that have seen historical lows. When adjusted for inflation, today's gas prices are where they were in the 1990s.The most obvious result many of us think about when we...

Capitalism, said economist Joseph Schumpeter seven decades ago, is a process of creative destruction. New inventions, new processes, new methods of organization lead to the creation of new profitable and efficient businesses and to the destruction of old ones unable to compete. There are few accounts of the creative side of Schumpeter’s phrase more vivid than Fracking: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, a new book by Wall Street Journal writer Gregory Zuckerman. For years politicians, policy experts and corporate executives have tried to reshape American energy policy and development. They have operated on a series of...

President Francois Hollande wants to balance the French deficit by taxing the rich, taxing the poor, taxing trucks, raising the VAT, and increasing the tax on corporations. That policy blew sky high this week in a storm of riots by Brittany farmers. Please consider French Gov't Backs down on Truck Tax After Riots French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on Tuesday indefinitely suspended the introduction of a green tax on trucks following riots at the weekend in the Brittany region. The move comes three days after a protest by hundreds of food producers, artisans and distributors in the western Brittany region...

Most of us are aware by now that the introduction of widespread hydraulic fracturing into the oil and gas business has resulted in a rapid growth in U.S. production. U.S. crude output is up by nearly 2.5 million barrels a day (b/d) since mid-2007 and natural gas production is up by 25 percent. The key question of course is how long production will continue to grow before it inevitably declines. Optimists maintain that we have just scratched the surface of our shale oil reserves and that production will continue increasing for years, if not decades. Realists are not so sure,...

Define irony? Pseudo-scientist, carbon bean counter and pay-per-view psychic Al Gore pockets millions of dollars touring the globe and capitalizing on the fear, paranoia and misfortune of natural disaster victims. According to our imaginary Climate guru – that’s called schizophrenia in psychotic circles – any meteorological, physiological, sociological, and/or economic event is caused by Global Warming: blizzards, droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, school shootings, racism, cancer, poverty and Miley Cyrus. In other words, Al Gore single-handedly unearthed a unified field theorem – i.e., Global Warming of the Third Kind – that inexplicably yet irrefutably explains everything and anything occurring within our...

1 Real Threat That Could Kill America's Oil Boom By Tyler Crowe | More Articles October 27, 2013 | Comments (3) The one thing you see in the energy section of any news publication is the price of oil. Most of the time, it will give some doom-and-gloom reason that has little to do with the price of oil, or it will be some analysts making claims that oil will be double what it is today, or that it will drop 20%-30%. The most fascinating part of these prognostications is that they rarely give any real reason. A great example...

On the very same day that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) announces: “US Rises to No. 1 Energy Producer”—thanks to the shale boom made possible through a technology known as hydraulic fracturing—an environmental group released a report calling for a complete ban of the practice, which would effectively shut down the oil-and-gas industry (and all of the jobs and revenues it creates) and increase dependence on foreign oil. Coincidence? I don’t think so. You probably haven’t heard about either, as most news coverage, on October 3, centered on the government shutdown—eclipsing all else. Why would Environment America choose to release...

The Niobrara Shale Play – the Next Bakken? [ 0 ] February 1, 2013 The Niobrara shale formation extends across northeastern Colorado, northwestern Kansas, southwestern Nebraska and southeastern Wyoming.  The play ranges in thickness from 275-400 feet deep, with three primary carbonate-rich benches that average 10-25 feet thick with 5-10% porosity. Within the Niobrara, oil and natural gas are found at 3,000-14,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface.  O&G producers tap these resources through both vertical and horizontal wells typically drilled at 7,000-8,000 feet with variable geopressures. To date, most of the Niobrara’s O&G development focuses on the Denver-Julesburg Basin (“DJ...

SmallerLarger Share on email Share on print More Sharing Services Expand Photo A cloud formation fills the sky as an oil pump is silhouetted in front of it near the town of Hereford on the northeastern plains of Weld County. Drilling operations throughout northern Colorado are suspected to only have tapped into a fraction of the oil and natural gas in the region. Tribune file photo | A cloud formation fills the sky as an oil pump is silhouetted in front of it near the town of Hereford on the northeastern plains of Weld County. Drilling operations throughout northern Colorado...

After a decade or more of shale development in the US, the country remains "in the early innings" of that growth with tens of billions more dollars expected for infrastructure and development, according to an analysis by investment bank Credit Suisse unveiled Tuesday. Overall, strong drilling activity and continued technological progress should lead to "significant oil production growth still to come in the key regions such as the Permian [Basin] ... as well as the Eagle Ford, Bakken and Niobrara (Wattenberg)" shales, the report, "The Shale Revolution II," said, referring to the West Texas, South Texas, North Dakota/Montana and Colorado...

For decades, OPEC nations have, for the most part, enjoyed a good living. As long as oil prices remain high, they can recover billions of barrels of oil at relatively low cost and sell it to the rest of the oil-thirsty world. But the North American shale oil boom is shaking things up for the cartel. In fact, the surge in U.S. and Canadian oil production resulting from the application of new drilling technologies threatens to reduce OPEC's share of the global oil market this year to its lowest level in more than a decade. Does that imply gloom and...

Australia’s newly elected prime minister pulled no punches when giving his thoughts on the country’s carbon tax, which he says must be abolished as quickly as possible. “The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment,” Abbott told The Washington Post. “Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.”

One of the most critical changes in global energy flows happened this week. China inaugurated a 2,500 kilometre pipe to carry natural gas and oil from the Indian Ocean across Myanmar in southeast Asia and into southwest Yunnan province. The gas portion of the line became fully operational this week. The line is expected to carry over 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day into China. The twin oil line is expected to follow. This massive development has several key implications for the global energy balance. Myanmar's significant offshore natural gas reserves (and growing production) now have a "go-to"...

A pipeline pumping natural gas from Myanmar to energy-hungry China has gone fully operational, state-run Chinese media said on Monday. BEIJING: A pipeline pumping natural gas from Myanmar to energy-hungry China has gone fully operational, state-run Chinese media said on Monday. The project, stretching more than 2,500 kilometres from western Myanmar to southwest China, will help the world's second-largest economy feed its growing energy needs. It comes as close political ties between the two nations have weakened, after Myanmar's quasi-civilian regime took office in 2011 and brought in sweeping reforms that have led to the scrapping of most Western sanctions....

The $1 trillion farm bill will serve as the first test of how deeply the shutdown fight has damaged relations in Washington. Congress has made the legislation its first order of business as it pivots away from the battles over government funding and the debt ceiling. The leaders of the agriculture committees in Congress and K Street lobbyists are eager to put the finishing touches on the bill, which could get wrapped into a year-end budget deal that replaces automatic sequestration cuts. But some fear Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who has vowed to complete the legislation, might be too wounded...

Could global warming be a boon to farmers? A recent study found that rising carbon dioxide concentrations bestow an additional $11.6 trillion in benefits from crop production between now and 2050. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change found that while many studies focus on the costs of rising carbon emissions, few studies focused on whether or not more carbon in the atmosphere could be beneficial to society. In fact, the Obama administration recently raised its social-cost-of-carbon estimate from $21 per metric ton to $35 per metric ton to the ire of global warming skeptics and...

The president is committed to the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Man-made carbon emissions, he believes (or pretends to believe), cause global temperatures to rise, and this temperature increase is destructive. By reducing man-made carbon emissions, temperatures can be made to fall. Every part of this logic is flawed, if not utterly false. Do carbon emissions cause global warming? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is largely composed of climate researchers with what would seem a strong vested interest in promoting the global warming agenda. Yet even the IPCC has a 5% doubt that human activities affect the climate.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says global warming poses "a far more serious problem than al Qaeda" and accuses energy companies of being willing to "destroy the planet" for profits. In an interview with Playboy magazine, Sanders targets coal and oil companies who he says have outsized influence over lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “Big business is willing to destroy the planet for short-term profits,” Sanders said. “And because of their power over the political process, you hear a deafening silence in the U.S. Congress and in other bodies around the world about the severity of the problem. Global warming is a...