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How online auctioneer EnergyNet helps bring liquidity, and recovery, to America’s busted oil patch. In the first 18 months of the oil bust, 70 companies have gone bankrupt, defaulting on $40 billion in debt. A trillion dollars of oil company equity has been wiped out. Layoffs top 200,000. With oil holding at around $45 a barrel, more liquidations are on the way. Already the old guys swear this bust is worse than in 1986, when oil dropped below $25 in today’s dollars. At least one thing is better now: Thanks to the magic of the Internet, it’s easier for cash-strapped...

Bill McKibben was just named by Bernie Sanders to serve on the platform committee at this year’s Democratic National Convention. He joins Sanders’ other four appointments: scholar and racial justice activist Cornel West; Native American activist Deborah Parker; Minnesota Congressmember Keith Ellison, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and Palestinian rights activist and scholar James Zogby, who founded the Arab American Institute. We speak with 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben about how he’ll seek to translate his activism into Democratic Party platforms in Philadelphia in July. TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, before we end, Bill McKibben, I want to ask you...

Five years ago the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report entitled, “Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas?” Gas development was booming, from both conventional resources and US shale deposits, and gas was widely seen as a vital tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Much has happened since then, including a collapse in global oil prices, the signing of a new climate agreement in Paris, and a broadening of the anti-fossil-fuel focus of climate activists. If we’re still on the path to a golden age of gas, the ride will be bumpy. This is probably most evident across...

Mr. Trump, in his set-piece energy speech on Thursday, did something that might outlast his presidential hopes. In his anti-intellectual way, he made an intellectual contribution. For decades, poorly justified scientific fears of future warming have hovered as an incubus over U.S. energy development. These fears, you’ll notice, have not actually blocked much of anything: Fracking happened. The U.S. continues to export coal to China. But these fears fill America’s leadership class with guilt and cognitive dissonance. In a speech the media has done its best to ignore or debunk, he said, “From an environmental standpoint, my priorities are very...

A forestry company filed a civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) lawsuit against Greenpeace Tuesday for misrepresenting the company’s environmental record to raise funds and promote its agenda. Greenpeace knowingly and deliberately made false claims about the company while fundraising, and fabricated evidence of Resolute’s alleged environmental malfeasance, according to the forestry and paper company Resolute Forest Products. RICO is an anti-mafia law designed to combat organized crime. Greenpeace’ is a global fraud,” states the 124-page legal complaint. “For years, this international network of environmental groups collectively calling themselves ‘Greenpeace’ has fraudulently induced people throughout the United States and...

It’s easy for U.S. drivers to forget the high gas prices in recent years after the ultra-lows seen only months ago, but prices going into the summer months of 2016 are still well below what they were this time last year, and the lowest price heading into the summer months since 2009. Despite a recent uptick in the price per barrel of oil—up $20 since the last week of January 2016—U.S. drivers will still enjoy the low gas prices this summer. The spot price for WTI crude oil is still significantly lower than this time last year, trading today at...

Venezuela is running out of just about everything. Food, medicine, electricity, toilet paper, condoms -- you name it. ( Full title ). And over the weekend at least two large international airlines -- Lufthansa and LATAM -- said they will suspend service to Venezuela in the coming months due to the economic crisis. The widespread scarcities and fleeing businesses reflect a country in crisis. "There's a shortage of everything at some level," says Ricardo Cusanno, vice president of Venezuela's Chamber of Commerce. Cusanno says 85% of companies in Venezuela have halted production to some extent. Venezuela's economy is spiraling into...

US scientists have found what it could be key for the future of the country’s ailing coal industry as they detected that ashes from local operations, particularly those around the Appalachian region, are very rich in rare earth elements. Researchers from North Carolina-based Duke University analyzed coal ashes from coal-fired power plants throughout the US, including those in the largest coal-producing regions: the Appalachian Mountains; southern and western Illinois; and the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. One of the team main conclusions was that coal waste generated by the Appalachian coal operations was the richest in rare earth...

[ Excerpts from the Hall, Lambert, and Balogh EROI paper. You may want to read the original paper here since I’ve left out charts, figures, and text. In my opinion, EROI is important because it is due diligence – society ought to find out if there is any energy resource that can replace oil for transportation, since without transportation you can not build electricity-producing contraptions and you’re wasting rare earth minerals, steel, fossil fuels, and other finite materials making them. It is unlikely transportation can be electrified for reasons explained in my book When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the...

A new concept for a flow battery functions like an old hourglass or egg timer, with particles (in this case carried as a slurry) flowing through a narrow opening from one tank to another. The flow can then be reversed by turning the device over. Credit: Image courtesy of the researchers ================================================================================================================== A new approach to the design of a liquid battery, using a passive, gravity-fed arrangement similar to an old-fashioned hourglass, could offer great advantages due to the system's low cost and the simplicity of its design and operation, says a team of MIT researchers who have made a...

In his pledge to aggressively expand American oil and gas production, and his framing of that push as a salvation for the nation’s economic and fiscal health, Donald J. Trump is following in the footsteps of decades of Republican politicians. But in a market where domestic oil production is already higher than it has been in 40 years, and natural gas production is at a historic high, those proposals have run up against a major problem: the global economy. As the presumptive Republican nominee spoke in Bismarck, N.D., this week, in the booming Bakken oil fields not far away, oil...

Trump vows to cancel the Paris climate deal, stop funding UN global warming programs and save the coal industry. Gotta love these plans. No wonder the big-government fans are apoplectic over Donald Trump as he paints targets on their most sacred cows. In Australia Bill Shorten, potential Prime Minister, called Trump: “Barking Mad.” Shorten, showing his diplomatic talent, was burning goodwill with a potential US president and 45% of voters in the largest economy in the world and our most important strategic ally. Below, the Trump plans this week: to use cheap energy; to stop trying to change the weather,...

Donald Trump has a simple formula to get America's energy industry back on its feet: regulate less and start drilling a lot more for oil and gas. In his first in-depth speech about energy policy, Trump on Thursday promised to make American energy "dominance" a strategic economic and foreign policy goal of the U.S. "America's incredible energy potential remains untapped. It's a wound that is totally self-inflected," Trump said during a speech at a North Dakota oil industry conference.

Trump's plan presents a stark contrast between the visions of Democrat candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Trump said, American energy dominance will be a strategic, economic, and foreign policy goal of the United States... "We will become, and stay, totally independent of any need to import energy from the OPEC cartel or any nations hostile to our interests...At the same time, we will work with our Gulf allies to develop a positive energy relationship as part of our anti-terrorism strategy."

y all conventional measures, 2016 is a good time to be a wind developer. Wind provided a record 4.7% of U.S. electricity last year and accounted for 41% of all generation capacity additions — well outpacing solar and natural gas, which each accounted for about 28%. That growth is expected to continue after the five-year extension of vital federal tax credits at the end of 2015. But as they phase out in the coming years, the extensions now appear to lead to unforeseen trouble. “The PTC has helped wind get to its current position, but a day of reckoning is...

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An oil strike has forced around a fourth of the country’s stations to close because of lack of gasoline. ___ Some 3,000 gasoline stations in France—around a fourth of the country’s stations—have had to close because an oil strike has shut off their fuel supply, Telesur reports. For the first time in more than five years, France is dipping into its strategic oil reserves, while unions block refineries. Those stations lucky enough to have fuel are under government orders to restrict the sale of diesel or gasoline to around $30 per customer. Unions are picketing French refineries in protest against...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A $37 billion bill to fund the Energy Department and water projects has crashed in the House, scuttled by a fight over LGBT rights.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump vowed Thursday to bring energy independence to America by getting rid of regulations aimed at curbing pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases, and he lashed out at Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton for planning to “unleash” the Environmental Protection Agency “to control every aspect of our lives.” “I think the federal government should get out of the way,” Trump said in what was billed as a major energy address. “We have so much potential energy people wouldn’t even believe it.” Trump also repeated claims that he would be able to revive the coal industry...

Donald Trump unveiled his energy vision for the United States at a petroleum conference in North Dakota Thursday -- vowing to cut off funding to U.N. climate change programs and attacking Hillary Clinton. "As bad as President Obama is, Hillary Clinton will be worse," Trump warned his audience at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference. "She will escalate the war with the American worker like never before and against American energy." Trump, who used a teleprompter, said that if elected he would kill certain policies including the Paris climate agreement, arguing the agreement "gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much our...