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Iran prepares to sell oil in euros
MehrNews (Iran)
TEHRAN - The Chairman of the Majlis Energy Commission, Kamal Daneshyar said here, on Friday, that preparatory measures have been taken to sell oil in euros instead of dollar, adding that such a measure is quite positive and should be taken as soon as possible. Speaking to the Persian service of Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), he went on to say that Iran should at the first phase sell its oil in both Dollar and Euro, and then gradually move toward Euro as the mere source.

As for the probable consequences of such a decision, Daneshyar said that when such a measure is taken, the United States would soon realize that it is not the one who can always inflict economic damages on the Islamic Republic and that Iran can also get even with it.

Daneshyar who also represents Mahshahr in the Majlis noted that prior to this the way was not paved for undertaking such a program, adding that fortunately the present government possesses the necessary management bravery to prepare the ground for taking such a measure.
(2 December 2005)

Energy costs hit N.C. plants
Vicki Lee Parker, News & Observer of Raleigh (US)
This winter, hundreds of manufacturing employees across the state will head to the unemployment office. Among them will be at least 150 workers from the Pine Hall Brick company. For the month of January, the Winston-Salem company will shut down half its production, chief executive Fletcher Steele said.

The culprit: high energy bills. ...

In August, the company paid $700,000 for the natural gas it uses to power the kilns that heat the raw materials used to make the bricks, Steele said. In October, the bill was $1.4 million. "It shocks a lot of people," he said. In 2001, Steele said, the company was paying just $200,000 a month. ...

The National Association of Manufacturers president, former Michigan Gov. John Engler, has lobbied Congress to take action to lessen the energy costs for businesses. Testifying in front of Congress earlier this year, he called energy prices "an immediate threat to the U.S. economy."

Engler pointed out that U.S. manufacturers use 33 percent of the nation's natural gas, which has doubled in price in the last year and now costs more than six times what it did in the late 1990s. ...
(4 December 2005)
Article isn't all bad news, also relates cases of innovative work-flow thinking by manufacturers and cost-savings from better use of input and 'waste' energies - worth reading. -LJ

How oil conservation hurts governments
Rick, The Oil Drum
In thinking through the role of government responses to Peak Oil, and I've come to a realization that wasn't obvious to me: Governments suffer financially when conservation occurs, because tax revenues drop. This gives most governments a disincentive to push conservation.

Direct Tax Losses

Direct tax losses are the biggest effect. Direct taxes include royalties on oil leases, and federal, state, and local taxes on oil products. If people or businesses buy more efficient vehicles, they get more miles per gallon, and hence pay less tax per mile. There is an inverse 1:1 ratio between conservation success and taxes: if consumption falls by 10%, taxes also fall by 10%. Governments can, of course, raise tax rates to offset the decline in revenue--but if the oil price is high enough to spur conservation, it's probably politically impossible to raise fuel taxes.
(4 December 2005)

In today's India, status comes with four wheels
Amy Waldman, NY Times
...India has become one of the world's fastest-growing car markets, with about a million being sold each year. It once had only two kinds, Fiats and Ambassadors. Now dozens of models ride the roads, from the humble, Indian-made Maruti to the Rolls-Royce, which has re-entered India's market some 50 years after leaving in the British wake.

Indians are discovering in cars everything Americans did: control and freedom, privacy and privilege, speed and status. Car showrooms, the bigger the better, are the new temples here, and cars the icons of a new individualism taking root. Foreign car companies, meanwhile, have discovered the Indian consumer - not to mention the country's engineering brain power - and are setting up plants across India.

The growing lust for cars also reflects India finally having roads decent enough to drive them on. It is making a historic effort to upgrade its dismal, mostly two-lane national highway system into four- or six-lane interstates, its largest infrastructure project since independence in 1947.

...India's state-run rail network may have been built by the British, but it came to represent a certain egalitarianism. Powerful and voiceless, rich and poor - all navigated the same chaotic, crowded stations and rode the same jam-packed trains, if not in the same class.

Cars, in contrast, reflect the atomization prosperity brings.

This is a far bigger change for Indian society than it was for America, which in many ways was founded around the notion of the individual. Indian society has always been more about duty, or dharma, than drive, more about responsibility to others than the realization of individual desire.

That ethos is changing. "Twenty years back one car was an achievement," said Maj. Gen. B. C. Khanduri, who as minister of roads from 2000 to 2004 helped shepherd the new highway into being. "Now every child needs their own car."

To him and others who grew up in a different society, that change bespeaks a larger, and troubling, shift. "The value system is finishing now," he said. "We are gradually increasing everyone for himself."
(5 December 2005)
Related story by the same NY Times reporter about India's new highway system: Mile by mile, India paves a smoother road to its future.

Bicycle boom pushes Zimbabwe inflation to 411 pct
Macdonald Dzirutwe, Reuters
HARARE - Zimbabwe's inflation has spiked higher on the back of the humble bicycle, according to government statisticians. The price of a bike in October was almost twenty times what it was a year earlier, as Zimbabweans frustrated by chronic fuel shortages opted increasingly for pedal power.

The 1,838 percent inflation in the two-wheeler market pushed overall annual inflation last month to 411 percent, the Central Statistics Office said on Thursday. The rise from 359.8 percent in September dashed any hope that the government would succeed in its aim of reducing inflation to 300 percent by year-end.

"We are selling more bicycles now than before ... Most people who come here do not complain about the prices, they believe it is a worthwhile investment," a Harare bicycle dealer told Reuters. "For us it is good business because demand is high." ...
(10 November 2005)

China refuses to cut energy use
Mark Coultan, Sydney Morning Herald (Aus.)
Montreal - CHINA has underlined the difficulties in forging a new international regime to limit greenhouse gases by declaring that its people barely use enough energy to make a living.

"You cannot live without using energy," Sun Guoshun, director of the Department of Treaty and Law at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Associated Press. He said it was unfair to expect China and India, with millions of people in poverty and without access to reliable power supplies, to cut back on energy consumption. ...

The worst performer in the industrialised world is the host of the conference, Canada, where greenhouse gas production has risen 57.5 per cent since 1990. It was a positively balmy 16 degrees in Montreal this week, 15 degrees above average.
(3 December 2005)

Right wingers going for the green
Mark Braly, Sacramento Bee
...The idea that a deliberate switch to clean, domestic energy sources and efficient energy use could create jobs and new wealth in addition to national security benefits emerged in the late 1970s. But it had few takers. I led a team of researchers who showed that Los Angeles could reduce the city's oil dependence about 20 percent by 1990, while bringing better air quality, thousands of new jobs, and cheaper energy bills. The Los Angeles City Council adopted the Energy/L.A. Plan as an element of the general city plan. The L.A. Department of Power eventually claimed it as its own and implemented one of the nation's more progressive conservation and alternative energy programs. But the issue faded.

No one could pinpoint the peak of global oil production, but Mayor Tom Bradley felt he could at least declare the end of cheap oil in his preface to the Energy/L.A. Plan. This proved to be spectacularly wrong for 30 years as oil prices famously sank to levels below those of bottled water.

...But something - be it the competition from China and India for petroleum supplies, the failing war on terrorism, the embarrassing stalemate on new energy legislation, honest-to-God fear of global warming, polls showing growing public concern - has created a focus of right-wing support for a new national energy economy. And, more surprisingly, people realize that the government needs to take responsibility for it.

Recently, former Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz and Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey called for a program to cut oil dependence ASAP. Operating under the name of the old Cold War vigilante group the Committee on the Present Danger, Shultz and Woolsey urged Congress and the White House to underwrite a half dozen existing, commercial technologies that could deliver "stunning" reductions in oil dependence in a relative few years. They ranged from plug-in hybrid vehicles to diesels burning homegrown bio fuels.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr., the fire-breathing neo-con essayist for the National Review and Washington Times, had a few months earlier put together Set America Free to link national security to oil dependence. Gary Bauer, former evangelical presidential candidate, and Daniel Pipes, the über-hawk Middle East policy analyst, joined him. The group set the price of significant oil freedom at $12 billion over the next four years. Almost concurrently, the Energy Future Coalition, whose movers include Nixon's General Counsel Boyden Gray and Reagan's National Security Director Bud McFarlane, joined in. The group laid out a program for reducing U.S. oil consumption by one third in 25 years for a modest $30 billion investment, yielding an annual return estimated at $22 billion.

These conservative initiatives included few moderates or liberals, but they seemed to build on last year's well-researched bipartisan efforts. ...

Mark Braly has followed environmental and energy issues for 30 years. He was director of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's energy office during much of the 1970s energy shocks. He sits on the City of Davis Plannning Commission and is a freelance writer.
(4 December 2005)

With oil prices off their peak, are supplies assured?
Jad Mouawad, NY Times
Hold on to your gas guzzlers - cheap oil may once again be just around the corner. Even as consumers worry about high gasoline prices and rising heating bills, oil executives in London, Texas and Saudi Arabia seem to be concerned about a prospect of falling oil prices.

In a recent speech in Singapore, Lord Browne, BP's chief executive, spoke of a possible sharp drop in prices and called current levels "unsustainably high." John Hofmeister, head of the Shell Oil Company in the United States, said in an interview, "This high price cycle is artificially inflated."

The notion of a steep fall-off in energy prices may seem far-fetched.

After all, in the last year, the market has experienced crude oil that touched nearly $70 a barrel; huge disruptions in the Gulf of Mexico; strong demand from the United States and from the world's fastest-growing market, China; continuing problems in producing Iraqi oil for export; and mounting tensions with Iran, a large OPEC exporter.

If anything, most of those situations would point to a sustained period of high energy prices. Indeed, most analysts expect crude oil prices to remain above $40 a barrel for the foreseeable future.

But throughout its history - ever since Edwin L. Drake discovered oil near Titusville, Pa., in 1859 - the business has witnessed a succession of booms and busts, and oil companies have found it impossible to balance their future production with the world's need for oil. Too much capacity, and prices fall; too little, and they rise.

Today, oil producers are again under pressure to increase production and refining, and to increase investments to bring more oil to the markets quickly. But oil executives and government ministers are concerned that if demand were to slow down, even a little bit, these investments might create a large oversupply of oil in two to three years, pushing prices down again.
(5 December 2005)