Michael Specter of the New Yorker, as he tends to do, files a brilliant article on a subject that you would think has been beaten to death: climate change and carbon footprints. It's a must read. (I still recommend his 2006 article on water scarcity to anyone remotely interested in development.)

Even though the article isn't just a fact barrage, there are some salient factoids worth pulling out:

• It is actually more "green" for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck.
• The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised 50 miles away.
• By one calculation, half of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions come from just 700 million people, or nearly 10 percent of the population.
• If you figure in deforestation, Indonesia and Brazil are the 3rd and 4th largest emitters of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere (still falling short of perennial emissions powerhouses, United States and China).  

KYSTVERKET/AFP/Getty Images

Over the last few weeks, there's been a lot to digest in the oil world, particularly as presidential candidates traveled through cold New Hampshire with heating oil futures pushing $2.70 per gallon. And, of course, the infamous $100/barrel crude oil price. 

The debate over the role of trading will not go away, particularly because it appears that a trader overpaid slightly to push the price into the triple digits and claim to be the first to buy $100 oil. With that in a mind, here are a few threads to think about.

While oil prices have fallen from their highs, the supply outlook in two key producers doesn't look so hot. Russia looks to stay roughly flat this year. And it appears that Mexico's production is unlikely to pick up to the say the least, as the state-run Pemex appears to be in dire straits. Pemex General Director Jesus Reyes Heroles says: "The situation of Petróleos Mexicanos is critical and merits immediate attention."  

The upstream (getting it out of the ground) segment of the oil industry today is shaped by resource nationalism, high prices, and supply constraints. These three things together mean that oil rich countries want the latest in upstream oil technology but would rather not deal with the western oil majors. BusinessWeek has an excellent story on Schlumberger, a high-tech oil services firm that is thriving in this new environment. 

Just to keep you on your toes, John Cassidy argues in Portfolio that the dynamics of supply and demand will push oil prices down to $50 within the next three years. That's not an extreme position, as I'm sure some would argue that a recession in the United States could make $60 a reality this year. 

But if prices continue to stay in this general high-ish area, keep an eye on the budgets of developing countries with fuel subsidies. India is running up a huge subsidy bill already, and Indonesia and Malaysia feeling the pain as well.

On Tuesday, CNBC's popular stock-picker Jim Cramer discussed oil supply constraints at length, explaining why he likes ConocoPhillips because it's one of the few firms that really thinks oil prices are staying high and is investing accordingly. Most companies tend to evaluate projects for viability at around $40 per barrel of crude. That's mainly because the rise in oil prices has been moving higher than the supply-demand fundamentals suggest they should, which we have discussed recently (here and here). Cramer thinks ConocoPhillips is "ahead of the curve" and is well-positioned to take advantage of the current market.

In making his case, Cramer read a quote from a recent presentation by ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva that I think is significant coming from an industry leader, given that is sounds a lot like a measured endorsement of peak-oil theory:

Talking a little bit about the supply challenge. This is a slide that's been prepared by International Energy Agency and it just shows if you take all of the oil production around the world today, say, 86 million barrels a day, the natural decline on average is about 8% a year.

"So, if we're going to stay with 86 million barrels a day, we've got to be out there adding 6 or 7 million just to stay flat. So the question is, where is that all going to come from when you see Saudi, Arabia saying they're going to go to 12 million to 12.5 million and maybe up to 15 million barrels a day? How is this going to happen? It's not so important just what I think or say, but I know we've been saying for the better part of nearly 12 months. Personally, I don't think we're going to see --- for three reasons, I don't think we're going to see the supply go over 100 million barrels a day. The reason for that is, where is it all going to come from?

"Second, it's going to be from a climate change greenhouse gas emission? I'm not so sure that the world, even if you could get up to those levels, would allow us it be done. So we have -- Demand maybe going up, but it's going to be constrained by supply." 

The transcript of the presentation is unfortunately not available online, as it comes from the November 2007 Merrill Lynch Global Energy Conference.

An Indian official telling a New York Times reporter he'd like to see the trade in crude oil banned from the New York Mercantile Exchange is kind of extreme, but not surprising given the context.

One of the unique features of this period of high oil prices is that oil derivatives (basically contracts such as futures and options) are now being traded on a massive scale. Like never before, paper oil is changing hands, to the point where crude oil has become an asset class. You've got to have it in your portfolio the way you have to own gold, stocks, and bonds. Back in the 1970s, there was no IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) where oil was traded globally. Nor were there as many different ways for investors, such as exchange-traded funds, to play crude. Around 85 million barrels were actually consumed in the world Wednesday. But on the same day, over 600 million barrels worth of crude futures were traded via ICE (adding up the contracts for two kinds of crude traded, West Texas Intermediate and Brent).

With so many factors affecting prices—not least the fact that oil is a commodity denominated in the declining dollar—there's a big debate among energy analysts about whether and to what extent all this trading is responsible for the high prices we've been seeing. Many people in developing country behemoths such as China and India certainly think it is. On a recent visit to China, I met with several energy analysts and policymakers who perceived the massive trading volumes as distorting prices upward. Same in India. They look at the supply and demand fundamentals and don't believe that they justify nearly $100 per barrel.

Most market analysts would probably concede that at least some of the upward pressure is due to derivatives trading. What really captured this were comments Wednesday by Addison Armstrong, a leading energy-market watcher. He said that although he thinks oil should be around $60 on the supply-demand fundamentals, he thinks it's going to $109 before it cools off. Why $109? Because it's a "technical level" (derived from market data) that would signals traders to sell. It'll be interesting to see if he's right.

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

The coal market isn't as sexy or as global as oil, so it often works outside the media spotlight. But when it comes to understanding how the U.S. energy-security-enviro challenge is shaping up, coal is an excellent place to look because, in America, coal is cheap, plentiful within the country, a huge provider of jobs and megawatts, and a tremendous source of greenhouse gases. 

The global outlook for demand is strong, as Asia's appetite for electricity grows. This year, China became a net importer of coal. As for the United States, part of its energy challenge is improving security of supply — reducing dependence on the understandably dreaded "foreign oil." Making liquid fuels using our own American coal sounds appealing. And perhaps no consumer is more interested in coal-to-liquid (CTL a.k.a. "Fischer-Tropsch") than the U.S. military, which has huge transportation fuel needs and few alternatives to oil (it's kind of hard to build a jet that runs on electricity).

For the coal industry, getting access to the American gas tank would be a tremendous boost, giving it a whole new market outside of power generation and heavy industries like steel. The WSJ filed a must-read report last week, "Coal Industry Hopes Pentagon Will Kindle a Market," that really gets at the key issues. CTL is a huge emitter of carbon dioxide, and the process uses between 5 to 7 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel it produces. But those inconvenient facts aren't dissuading some folks:

The effort nevertheless has some backers at the Pentagon. The Air Force, which consumes the most fuel of the military services, supports using coal-to-liquids fuel. It recently certified the B-52 bomber to run on a blend of Fischer-Tropsch fuel and normal fuel. The Air Force plans to do the same for its entire fleet by 2011. The Air Force intends to buy about 400 million gallons annually by 2016. The service supports legislation that would allow it to sign 25 year contracts for supply, even at historically high prices above $50 per barrel, said William Anderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and logistics.

"If the legislation helps spur on a market that is necessary, we believe, to ensure our long term national security, we believe it's something that has a lot of merit," Mr. Anderson said.

According to Jeff Goodell, the author of Big Coal, the rise of Wyoming coal is one of the key industry dynamics fueling the CTL push. At 18:05 minutes into this excellent June interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Goodell explains how Wyoming coal, in comparison to Appalachian coal, is easier to mine, makes less of an environmental impact, contains less sulfur, burns cleaner, and requires utilities to spend less on scrubbers at coal fired power plants (but it has a lower heat content, so you have to burn more of it). You can practically "dig [it] out with a spoon" in Wyoming, Goodell says.

In contrast, Appalachian coal has been mined for over a century, and because much of the easy-to-mine coal has been extracted, the coal remaining is in thinner seams and is more expensive to extract. So part of the push for CTL, Goodell says, comes from eastern coal states, for which CTL could be a huge boost. Sen. Byrd of West Virginia has likened American coal to "acres of diamonds under our feet." A large federal backing of CTL hasn't come yet, but keep your eye on it. China, like the U.S. Air Force, is in the process of building CTL capacity. And we know how much U.S. legislators like to keep up with China.

It never hurts to check up on what T. Boone Pickens is saying and doing. The Texas oilman, corporate raider, and philanthropist has serious cred, and it's unlikely that he's giving interviews in order to pump up his investments. His portfolio is well known, and, as he says, "There isn't anybody who can talk a commodity market up more than three or four minutes. The fundamentals will take over at some point."

In a recent interview with the Houston Business Journal, he reiterated his view that global oil production has already peaked:

PICKENS: I think you'll see $80 oil before the end of the year. There's no question in my mind that oil has peaked. If you've already peaked, you'll start to decline. Can you replace it? Probably not.

There's obviously a lot of disagreement on this, but Boone's position is worth noting. Moving on to electrical power generation, he voiced concern on natural gas:

Q: Here in Texas we're struggling with our long-term power-plant needs, trying to pick among coal or nuclear or natural gas. I guess you'd pick nuclear to fuel the Texas plants?

PICKENS: Yes. You've got to get nuclear in because you don't have the other fuel to supply it, unless it's coal. You're not going to have enough natural gas. 

You would think that Texas would have access to plenty of natural gas, but Pickens's calculations must show that it won't be enough for a serious ramp-up of gas-fired power plants. Pickens, a stalwart Republican and big fundraiser for presidential contender Rudy Giuliani, has recently endeared himself to greens with plans to build the nation's largest wind farm near Amarillo in west Texas, a burgeoning center for wind energy. 

Pickens summed up his emerging ethos to the WSJ recently:

I'm an environmentalist because caring for what we have is a reality that is going to be on page one a long time. We have got to pay for that, and I think we can do that without damaging our economy."

I think that's a sentiment that will resonate on both ends of the political spectrum.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images News

With announcements of new energy technologies coming out constantly, it's sometimes difficult to figure out which ones are actually worth getting excited about.

A power-plant scrubber highlighted in Tuesday's Financial Times is a case in point. The Sugarland, TX-based WOW Energies has developed a device that reduces CO2 emissions in a big way, the company claims:

Daniel Stinger, Wow chairman and inventor of the technology, says standard scrubbers can remove 50-60 per cent of mercury from emissions, while third party testing has shown his technology removes 85 to 95 per cent of heavy metals pollutants, including mercury. In addition, its pilot projects demonstrated carbon dioxide reductions of up to 85 per cent - not even the original aim.

85 percent CO2 reduction? Wow (no pun intended). Although it hasn't been proven on a large scale, this is impressive. Oddly, the WOWClean results (pdf) have been out since December, yet we're only reading about it now. There has to be a catch. The FT reports that WOW energy hasn't found much interest from utilities:

In the six months since Wow began marketing the technology, [WOW's CFO Martin] Brau has found utility groups have little interest in spending money to reduce emissions unless forced by legislation, preferring instead to "chip away" at emissions as new requirements gradually come into effect."A lot of them simply don't want to know," says Mr Brau. "Unless they are forced to, they won't stop. They have a grandfathered right to pollute."

Could the catch be that WOWClean captures the CO2 so that it can be stored somewhere or sequestered underground (boring) rather than eliminate CO2 emissions through some chemical process (potentially very exciting)?

I emailed Brau to get clarification on this. Brau responded:

What we mean is that the CO2 is converted into a stable bicarbonate, such as baking powder, it is not sequestered as a liquid gas.

This is awesome ... but it's probably unwise to get too excited until more work is done to test the large-scale performance and viability of this technology. In energy, there's always a catch. But definitely keep an eye on this. Power plants account for 40 percent of CO2 emissions in the United States, so progress in this area is crucial to major emissions reductions.

It's no secret that ramping up (pdf) corn ethanol production has been rife with problems. The net energy gain from corn-based ethanol is pretty small at best—its corrosive impact on most pipelines usually requires you to truck it to market. And, of course, the use of corn for fuel has been driving up food and feed prices.

But I think it's best to think of corn as the beginning of the ethanol journey, not the destination. There is a furious R&D effort to develop enzymes—the bug or bugs—that can be used to break down cellulosic materials cheaply.

Now, Craig Venter, the man best known for his controversial for-profit contribution to the human genome mapping race, claims to be on the brink of producing a synthetic bug that can do just that, and more. BusinessWeek reported last week that Venter "believes he is within weeks or months of creating the world's first free-living artificial organism in his laboratory." His bug could potentially clean up dirty fossil fuels and help make ethanol.

In his typical down-to-earth fashion, Venter jokes that he's "going from the gene king to the oil king." It's unlikely, though, that any concrete application for his new bug will emerge for quite some time.

But this is about much more than any particular technology, or even the energy business as a whole. Some say Venter is out to become the "Bill Gates" of artificial life, which has huge ethical and legal implications. Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, tells BusinessWeek that synthetic biologists may be "manipulating nature without knowing where they are going.... There are arrogant scientists, and our friend Venter may be one of them." Time will tell if Caplan's fears are vindicated.

In the last week of May, ExxonMobil's CEO proposed shelving plans to build a natural gas pipeline from Canada's Mackenzie Valley to the existing pipelines in Alberta, which continue down into the United States. The cost projections for the project have apparently shot up, in large part due to rising steel prices.  

If the project ends up nixed or shelved, it could be a rather big deal. According to energy analyst Andrew Weissman, this is the "biggest energy story of the year" thus far. He told MarketWatch:

About 10% of our future natural gas supplies will disappear as a result.... It's like we know there's a hurricane coming into the Gulf of Mexico that will wipe out all the natural gas there. The gas will just sit in the ground."

It's clear the United States will need to import more natural gas. U.S. natural gas production has basically remained flat for the last decade, fluctuating between 511 and 555 billion cubic feet between 1996 and 2006 (PDF). Even if that number rises, it probably won't offset the need for more imports.

Another big reason this story could (or should) get more attention is that natural gas is the main substitute for coal in electricity generation. Replacing coal with cleaner-burning natural gas is probably a good idea as Congress and presidential candidates consider policy options on climate change.

All that said, the talk about nixing the project could just be a negotiating tactic to get more Canadian government subsidies to build the pipeline. The Globe and Mail's initial report on ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson's comments make it seem as though a juicier subsidy package could change Tillerson's mind. 

Take a time out from your Monday routine and spend five minutes with a geopolitical nugget about chinks in Iran's petro-armor from the latest issue of BusinessWeek.  

...Iran has a surprising weakness: Its oil and gas industry, the lifeblood of its economy, is showing serious signs of distress. As domestic energy consumption skyrockets, Iran is struggling to produce enough oil and gas for export. Unless Tehran overhauls its policies, its primary source of revenue and the basis of its geopolitical muscle could start to wane. Within a decade, says Saad Rahim, an analyst at Washington consultancy PFC Energy, "Iran's net crude exports could fall to zero."

In a recent issue of FP, Newsweek's Middle East editor Christopher Dickey wrote about this very problem in "The Oil Shield." His argument: Iran knows its oil leverage is running out, especially because the Saudis are looking to reassert their power in the energy markets. That small window of influence is what drives Iran's timetable for a nuclear shield, he writes, because without its oil shield or the cover of diplomatic protection, Iran begins to look very vulnerable. 

Don't miss Jackson Diehl's column today:

The Western allies have no idea what to do about Putin. Five years ago the energetic former KGB colonel was regarded as a strategic partner for NATO and its members. Now he is generally understood to be an autocratic imperialist whose political enemies suffer from a high rate of sinister poisonings. Bush and other NATO leaders aren't ready to act on that understanding, or even to state it out loud.

The current issue of Resources is dedicated to America's oil addiction. The writing is a little heavy, but there's some great stuff in it, especially for you policy aficionados out there. 

Here are a few excerpts, all from the pdf available at RFF.org. There's also a great chart looking at the pros and cons of different policy approaches.

Expanding Oil Supplies, by Joel Darmstadter and Robert J. Weiner:

There are three potential reasons why the social value of additional oil and its price may differ: increased production may lower the world oil price, increased production may enhance resilience to supply disruptions and price shocks, and increased production risks environmental harm.

Replacing Oil: Alternative Fuels and Technologies, by Raymond J. Kopp:

In the near-to-medium term, biofuels are poised to be competitive. In the longer term, hydrogen and electricity offer the technical potential to completely wean the United States from petroleum use.

The Economics of Improving Fuel Economy, by William A. Pizer:

Imagine a $10 technology that can save $15 in fuel. If that same technology can be used to provide an increase in power or size that is worth $20 to consumers, the market will push technologies toward power and size over fuel economy.

Retired public servants often cut loose in interviews because they can finally say what they think. Their careers no longer depend on hedges, nitpicks, and caveats. But in his legacy-protection effort, Henry Kissinger is still complicating interviews with mind-numbingly tortuous answers, as a must-read New York magazine profile wonderfully shows. 

Here's one of several tap dances reporter Joe Hagan is subjected to:

When I bring up a comment he made on CNN in 2004 remarking that "they want to believe that Iraq could be occupied in the same manner" as Germany and Japan during World War II, but it "turned out to be wrong," Kissinger suddenly doesn't recall who "they" are: "I have no idea," he says. "That was a general view that one could read. You will not get me to talk about any individual."

The profile follows up briefly on Bob Woodward's reporting on Kissinger's impact on the White House. (It gives us another opportunity to ponder a supposedly neocon president being a "big fan" of the super-realist Henry Kissinger, signaling that the ideological labels may need updating, or that the players aren't who they are made out to be.)

Kissinger at first told Hagan that Woodward's report that Kissinger told President Bush not to "give an inch" on Iraq was false, calling it "totally untrue." Later in the piece, Hagan writes: 

Weeks have passed since Kissinger and I first spoke, and he is still obsessing over Woodward's "Don't give an inch" quote. "To what is it I said we shouldn't give an inch?" he asks. "To whom shouldn't we give an inch?"

Reading the whole article is the right thing to do, but here's one nugget that couldn't go un-excerpted: 

Four years ago, Barbara Walters, who calls Kissinger "the most loyal friend," was entertaining Kissinger and his wife at a dinner party for a D.C. politician when ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who died last year, suddenly piped up, "How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?"

Ouch. And of course, there's a 2008 angle: 

Unprompted, McCain, who has known Kissinger since 1973, says of their friendship, "I'm not at all embarrassed about it; I'm proud of it." (But during the 2000 presidential race, his handlers opted not to have the two appear publicly together, fearing the legendary obfuscator would taint the image of the "Straight Talk Express.")

Asked if he'll support McCain if he runs for president in 2008, Kissinger says, "Very likely." Then he corrects himself: "Almost certainly. I don't have to qualify that."

It's the most unequivocal thing he's said to me yet.

Diyana Ishak 

• 'Remember Trotsky!' by Neil Barnett, The Spectator, Nov. 25, 2006. Barnett writes about his conversations with the poisoned former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, and his criticisms of Russia that allegedly led to his death.

Travis Daub

• Going for a blast into the real past, by Tom Paulson, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. University of Washington physicists John Cramer and Warren Nagourney specialize in quantum physics—the kind of physics even Einstein found daunting. If their new process works, they'll receive a signal before they send it, effectively sending it back into the past. 

• Tons of mercury could hit market, U.S. agency considers selling toxic stockpile, by Michael Hawthorne, Chicago Tribune.

• Justices to hear key greenhouse gas case, by H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press. 

Mike Boyer

• Philip Rosedale: Building a world entire, by Tom Colligan, Esquire, December 2006.

• No Country for Old Men, a novel by Cormac McCarthy

Christine Chen

• One Spoonful at a Time, by Harriet Brown, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 26, 2006. A truly heartbreaking story of a mother trying to help her teenage daughter recover from anorexia. 

• The Most 100 Influential Americans of All Time, The Atlantic, December 2006. John D. Rockefeller, #11. Albert Einstein, #34. Seriously?! 

Jai Singh

• Data suggest oil industry squeezes supply, by Jeff Donn, Associated Press.

• The Security Trap by G. John Ikenberry, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Fall 2006.
  

Mark Levenstein

• Two great pieces in the Washington Post: Energy Firms Come to Terms With Climate Change and On the Move to Outrun Climate Change. 

• How to Get a Nuclear Bomb by William Langewiesche, The Atlantic, December 2006.

There's an interesting Bloomberg story on the oil outlook for 2007. One Lehman Brothers analyst predicts the per-barrel price to rise to $72 next year. Another analyst, T. Rowe Price Group's Tim Parker, tells Bloomberg that he thinks oil prices will stay around today's level for about a year, thanks to more output from non-OPEC countries, and then begin to rise. By the end of next year, he says, $60 crude will "feel more like a floor than a ceiling [...] It'll be difficult for non-OPEC supply to consistently meet demand growth."

And, of course, no oil-price-prediction story is complete without Boone Pickens, the oil billionaire and hedge fund manager (who has apparently signed on to support Rudy Giuliani's '08 bid). He thinks the price of oil has bottomed out: "I keep thinking we're right at the bottom on oil [...] I don't see why the run is over if the global economy continues to grow."

Though some argue that Pickens is pumping up his own investments, he's been correct about prices before, and his statements alone can't account for the price increases we've seen over the last three years.  

It seems like years ago that legislators in Washington were tripping over themselves trying to quell public dissatisfaction with high prices at the pump. And even after gasoline prices fell and stabilized, the national conversation about energy continued, with debates on drilling in Congress, and a proposition in California on renewables. It'll be interesting to watch the debate heat up again when (or if) gasoline prices rise in 2007.

Robert Kaplan argues in the Washington Post that realism, even after Iraq, won't prevail in American foreign policy: 

Hard-core foreign policy realists (the kind who say this country should rarely intervene again, anywhere) are hoping that in the wake of our comeuppance in Iraq things will be going their way.[...] This is nonsense. Our foreign policy is about to experience an adjustment, not a flip-flop.

Middle East

Snipers are not as effective in fighting insurgency as we had hoped. And a bomb goes off inside the Green Zone in an attempt to kill the (Sunni) speaker of parliament. The Brits say they'll be able to hand over Basra to the Iraqis in the spring.

David Ignatius offers lessons from Saudi Arabia:

Like the Saudis, the Iraqis will have to save themselves, working within the authentic political framework of their culture, religion and region. The more we try to substitute our will for theirs, with more American troops or exhortation, the more we enfeeble them. As in Saudi Arabia, we must move slowly but deliberately out of the spotlight and into the shadows, with a sustainable mission of training and advising Iraqi troops.

In Lebanon, yesterday's assassination has produced a fresh crisis. Gemayel is being mourned in the streets. And, to nobody's surprise, Washington's tensions with Syria and Iran have risen. 

Elsewhere 

Following up on the post from yesterday on India and China, Pankaj Mishra offers up his assessment of India: "Gaining Power, Losing Values." 

A new oil exporter in Africa: Sao Tome and Principe. We've seen this movie before: "Sao Tome's elected officials portray the oil discoveries as an antidote to the entrenched poverty and flourish grand development plans once the oil starts flowing in a few years' time."

A new report sheds light on incompetence at DHS. 

The Bull Moose, aka Marshall Wittmann, has left the DLC to be Sen. Joe Lieberman's spokesman.  

Soros warns Germany about its reliance on Russian natural gas.

The U.S. Army makes a new pitch to potential recruits.

Not sure where to start on Chinese President Hu's visit to India.

There's a joint statement that has a lot of diplomatic blah-blah, but something had to get signed (Blair and Musharraf recently went through the routine). In the statement, there's something about nuclear cooperation, but it looks vague enough for nobody to really follow up on it.

I'm sure the statement drafters had some translation issues when they came up with "parternship for mutual benefit." Awkward.  

The two countries agreed to double trade. There has been inevitable commentary on the intricate calculations involving India, China, Pakistan, and United States.   

As a backdrop: The sell-outish quality to India's softening stance on Tibet. Hu slammed the Dalai Lama for the massive protests of Tibetans in India. One Indian headline read simply: "Nobody cares for the Tibetans Anymore."

There's a lot of talk about how the India-China border dispute is going to be solved. The tiny province of Tawang is a key part of all the possible settlements, and the people there are hoping India won't transfer their land to China, even though there would probably be more economic opportunities under Beijing's reign.  

Reading reports out of New Delhi, it seems like the main message was probably to lighten the very heavy talk of rivalry and competition, especially in the wake of the U.S.-India nuclear deal:  

The "body language" so far has been of a business-like visit, lacking personal warmth, but at the same time the two leaders have unmistakably relayed a message to the world community that they are neither rivals nor competitors but intend to be partners assiduously searching for cooperation to mutual benefit.

In the TNR Iraq symposium, George Packer focuses on what will happen to the Iraqis who have cooperated with coalition forces in Iraq, and the need to save their lives before we leave. "To me," he writes, "the relevant historical analogy is not the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, leaving thousands of Vietnamese to the reeducation camps. It is the systematic slaughter by the Khmer Rouge of every Cambodian who appeared to have had anything to do with the West." Accordingly: 

If the United States leaves Iraq, our last shred of honor and decency will require us to save as many of these Iraqis as possible. In June, a U.S. Embassy cable about the lives of the Iraqi staff was leaked to The Washington Post. Among many disturbing examples of intimidation and fear was this sentence: "In March, a few staff approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate." The cable gave no answer. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad does not issue visas. Iraqis who want to come to the United States must make their way across dangerous territory to a neighboring country that has a U.S. Embassy with a consular section. Iran and Syria do not; Jordan has recently begun to bar entry to Iraqi men under the age of 35. For a military translator to have a chance at coming to the United States, he must be able to prove that he worked for at least a year with U.S. forces and have the recommendation of a general officer--nearly impossible in most cases. Our current approach essentially traps Iraqis inside their country [...] 

We should start issuing visas in Baghdad, as well as in the regional embassies in Mosul, Kirkuk, Hilla, and Basra. We should issue them liberally, which means that we should vastly increase our quota for Iraqi refugees. (Last year, it was fewer than 200.) We should prepare contingency plans for massive airlifts and ground escorts. We should be ready for desperate and angry crowds at the gates of the Green Zone and U.S. bases. We should not allow wishful thinking to put off these decisions until it's too late. We should not compound our betrayals of Iraqis who put their hopes in our hands.

There's a giant cloud looming over the world of energy investing. Somehow, someday, to some extent, carbon dioxide is going to get a price tag from the U.S. government. Until then, huge, long-term investments worth billions of dollars are going to be bets placed on what that price tag -- the regulatory policy -- is going to look like. (TXU has already placed its bet.)

We're sitting on tons and tons of coal here in America, and there's a lot of energy we can get out of it. We can pulverize it -- the traditional way we've been generating electric power -- we can gasify it, and we can make liquid fuel out of it. And it's cheap. The problem is that it very cheaply cooks the planet. 

But as a recent BusinessWeek article noted, it's new technology, not just global warming, that is changing the way we think about coal's competitiveness in the energy mix. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who backed the failed prop 87 in California earlier this year, may offer a glimpse into investments to come. 

Khosla is taking a hard look at the economics of electric power and says he has come away "totally shocked." The era of coal may be ending, he declares: "Nobody in their right minds should be building a coal plant."

Has Khosla gone off the deep end? If so, he's not alone. "It's the definition of financial insanity to invest in a new coal plant," agrees Marc Brammer, head of research for consulting firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. Even some utility executives see big risks. "It's very likely the investment decisions many are making, to build long-lived high-carbon-dioxide-emitting power plants, are decisions we'll all live to regret," warns Vice-President Gary Serio of Entergy Corp. (ETR ), which owns several coal plants.

... 

Without coal, where will power come from? Khosla's grand vision is to repower the U.S. via solar plants in the American Southwest. The idea: Use thousands of acres of mirrors to focus solar energy, heating water to drive turbines. An analysis of new Australian solar technology suggests that it is cost-competitive even with today's coal plants. "I'm almost convinced that the cheapest plant would be solar thermal," says Khosla.

A WaPo business section story today struck a similar tone on solar, seeing it as potentially competitive without government subsidies.

Jerry Beilinson reports for Popular Mechanics on his visit to a General Electric plant in NY state. It's a nice little update on what's going on:

...Nuclear energy is doggedly making an image comeback. And returning to the stage are wind power, solar, conservation, and gasification of coal and other fuels. All of these have been energy darlings during one era or another (gasification goes back to the 18th century, and in its modern form to World War II) and all of them received attention yesterday as a group of reporters and academics were led around the labs in Niskayuna.

It's a bit ironic, but the dirtiest of these technologies could have the biggest impact. Gasification is the process of taking one fuel—coal, often—and turning it into a gas (syngas) that can be burned, plus a bunch of other chemicals. An "integrated gasification combined cycle" (IGCC) system burns the syngas in one turbine, as though it were natural gas, and uses excess heat to boil water for a steam turbine.

While windmills look like glowing harbingers of a clean utopia, a gasification plant looks like a cross between an oil refinery and a coal-burning plant. Oh, well—let's not be squeamish. IGCC plants are very efficient. The other advantage is that you get to capture most of the pollutants that would go up a smokestack if you were simply burning the coal. And it doesn't have to be coal. You can gasify grass clippings, cattle slaughtered after a mad-cow-disease scare, old tires—nearly anything.