At the same time, the agency has also doubled its oil price forecast. Last year, it said the cost of crude would fall in the long term, but now it predicts an average of $100 per barrel until 2015, despite the deepening recession, and rising to $120 in real terms by 2030. It concludes that the era of cheap oil is over and that the recent extreme price volatility will continue.

Despite what some may think, the current Department of Energy isn't really about wind or solar power. It's not even about coal, oil or gas. Mainly, the agency is about nuclear - nuclear weapons to be exact.

1. Transporting Americans is and should be one of the most important functions our government must address. And because we are facing a massive economic, energy and environmental crisis, the new president and Congress must do what Franklin Roosevelt did when he was faced with a crisis (and ordered the auto industry to stop building cars and instead build tanks and planes): The Big 3 are, from this point forward, to build only cars that are not primarily dependent on oil and, more importantly to build trains, buses, subways and light rail (a corresponding public works project across the country will build the rail lines and tracks). This will not only save jobs, but create millions of new ones.

This is by no means a unanimous opinion.

Speaking at a South Shore Chamber of Commerce breakfast at Lombardo’s in Randolph, the Brockton native said that after speculators drove oil prices up, there is a chance that the market will overshoot on the way back down, resulting in much lower prices at the pump.

A hundred years past, markets ruled freely: fortunes were made, workers abused, bubbles blown. According to the Austrian School of economists, led by Ludwig von Mises, this was all as it should be: despite any temporary pain or inconvenience, the unfettered market always knows best how to allocate goods and organize investment and labor.

Langmuir described this planetary evolution as a series of steps and said there’s no guarantee that a planet will proceed from one to the next. Each step represents a moment of both crisis and opportunity. So far, the Earth has surmounted each step, while other planets, such as Mars, which may have once had microscopic life, failed to cross the evolutionary hurdle where life is sustained and becomes abundant.

Fellow Middle East producers in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have lowered OSPs in response to continued weakness in demand, and they have largely failed to adhere to the cartel's recent pledges to cut output.

Global oil demand will contract in 2009 as economic growth slows to its weakest since 1982, Merrill Commodity Strategist Francisco Blanch said in a report today. In October, when oil was around $100 a barrel, the bank predicted that prices may slide to $50. Crude traded at $45.30 in New York today, the lowest since February 2005.

Deep Reductions, Strong Growth: An economic analysis showing Canada can prosper economically while doing its share to prevent dangerous climate change, shows that governments - and Ottawa in particular - can no longer argue fighting climate change means job losses and declining standards of living.

...The new pattern of sudden climate change is characterized by "poleward atmospheric and oceanic heat transport," the authors write in the study, a transport which drives temperature increases in the Arctic. The discovery was made using specialized filters that allow one to follow changes to high pressure centers over time.

But there is urgent concern north of the border about a potential strategic threat. "We're fixated on Iraq and Afghanistan, but from a homeland security perspective, right here on our border, isn't this more important?" asks Fred Burton, a former State Department counterterrorism official, now a vice president at Stratfor in Austin, Tex.

"If our partners do not fulfil their agreements, we will reduce deliveries," Putin said in a televised question-and-answer session with Russian citizens, referring to Ukraine.

It is the latest in a drive to see the UK source a fifth of its energy needs from the new technology.