From the Fed to the top business periodicals, analysts are trying to unravel the underlying explanation for an economy pushing past a Dow 14,000 with oil in the $80 per barrel range. Conventional energy- economic wisdom had it that the latter would kill the former.
Talk of an alternative energy "bubble" started percolating in the trade and cyber-press over the past several months. The fact is, the staid Dow Jones industrial average has done as well or better than most alternative energy indexes. So, hot, or not? Since global energy demand is rising unabated, the core question is, how big…
It seems inevitable when Congress returns that there will be new energy legislation. Understandable. Civilizations cannot survive much less thrive without abundant, reliable energy supplies. The bellwether energy commodity, oil, is at prices at or near record levels, and turmoil continues in the Middle East, from which the world gets over one-third of its petroleum.
Once upon a time, a century ago, Americans competed with their transportation for food. Back then, almost 30% of the nation's verdant farm land was used to grow food for fuel–feeding horses, of course, our bio-chemical transportation infrastructure, instead of today's thermo-mechanical horsepower. Those days are gone.
Most investors have no idea that there is currently a mad speculative scramble going on in the commodities markets over the future price of uranium. Yellowcake, the raw unrefined uranium oxide from mines, has jumped from $10 per pound five years ago to $138 per pound recently. A year ago, yellowcake was selling for $45…
A half-dozen years ago, an Internet eternity, the green punditocracy actually saw the World Wide Web as a tool that was virtually energy-free. Some even said the Web would just piggyback on the "existing telecom" infrastructure, surf along existing wires, sipping electrons.
