Losing electricity is no fun, whether it is momentary (sensitive equipment can get fried) or for days or weeks, as many of us Houstonians experienced in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

News accounts from Hawaii report that the vacationing President-elect Barack Obama was without power from the early evening until morning due to storms. The Washington Post reported: …

For several years now, a number of peak oil advocates such as Matt Simmons, T. Boone Pickens (aka “I believe in free markets, but give me subsidies”) and Ken Deffeyes have been arguing that May 2005 was the peak of world oil production.  They arrived at this by noting that crude plus condensate (excluding natural gas liquids, biofuels, etc) peaked and declined in that month.  Matt went so far as to wager with me that we would never surpass that amount. 

Aside from the fact that C+C production has peaked and dropped several times in the past 2 decades, only to recover, it has, on preliminary data, surpassed that again this July.  However, there is a distinct possibility that the numbers will be revised downwards leaving May 2005 as the highest point to date. …

T. Boone Pickens is holding a town hall meeting on the Pickens Plan tomorrow at Rice University. His presentation, hosted by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, deserves some hard questions and frank answers. Here are some suggested questions. …

After agreement was reached in December 1997 on the Kyoto Protocol, its supporters pronounced that major carbon reductions were feasible and probable. Just do it, as the Nike commercial said. Build it and they will come, as the Field of Dreams movie said. And during the eight years of George W. Bush, Kyoto supporters complained mightily that we were leaving dollars on the ground, so to speak, while running out of climate and time.

Now under Obama…