"I think it's fair to say the era of cheap energy is over," Buckee told his company's annual conference last week. And he should know.

Human activity is the main culprit, said researcher Corinne Le Quere, who called the finding very alarming.

Jamie Hampton and her fiance, Adrian Ortiz, like to get away by driving their Volkswagen van to a campground and leaving it parked while they bike nearby nature trails. They're in shape to do it because they bike almost daily to work.

WASHINGTON, May 16 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy says its Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium has started its first enhanced oil recovery field test in Illinois.

The test is designed to evaluate the potential for geologic sequestration in mature Illinois oil reservoirs as part of an enhanced oil recovery program. The process involves the addition of a gas, heat or chemicals to a reservoir to increase oil production -- primarily by increasing temperature or pressure or by lowering the oil's viscosity to improve its ability to flow through the reservoir.

SYDNEY (AFP) - New technology harnessing wave energy could be the "holy grail" for providing electricity and drinking water to Australia's major cities, Industry Minister Ian MacFarlane said Thursday.

The technology, developed with the help of more than 770 million dollars (636 million US) in seed funding from the government, works through fields of submerged buoys tethered to seabed pumps.

...Here is a guest post from a man who knows as much about this subject as anyone else in the world. And he bears bad news for those who had visions of driving around in algae-fueled transportation.

...The claims for biodiesel production rates being made by GFT, among many others in this field, exceed anything based on biological or physical theory, as also pointed out in this posting. They are truly bizarre.

The use of closed photobioreactors (>$100+/m2) for such applications is totally absurd.

NDP energy critic John Horgan introduced a new bill to try and regulate fuel prices. The Retail Petroleum Consumer Protection Act would allow the B.C. utilities commission to regulate the price at the pump, the way it can currently fix the price of natural gas and electricity.

High oil prices have helped Russian oil companies post record profits in recent quarters. Yet as output growth from Russia's main oilfields in western Siberia begins to slow, the country's oil giants are pushing eastward to tap new resources that sit under some of the world's most forbidding terrain. Without new production in regions like East Siberia, crude output in Russia, the world's second-biggest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, will flatten or decline, industry observers say. Although Russia is the world's largest crude producer, at 9.79 million barrels a day, much of its output goes to meet domestic demand.

LAGOS, Nigeria - Attackers blew up the country home of Nigeria's vice president-elect with dynamite Wednesday, authorities said, as violence escalated in the country's oil-rich south before a government handover this month.

Militant groups making an array of demands, including a greater share of government oil revenues, have carried out bombings, kidnappings and protests since 2005 that have already shut down a third of production in Africa's oil giant.

"Suburban development will have to come off the menu," James Howard Kunstler said in an interview this week from his home in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.

In a sign that energy costs will affect behavior, however, AAA said travelers are planning to stay closer to home and take shorter trips. Travel-related expenses for U.S. households are expected average nearly $600.

All of the plant's 64,000 barrels per day of gasoline and 44,000 barrels per day of distillate production is off line because of the problem. Distillate includes diesel fuel and heating oil.

That suggests gas prices will be vulnerable to refinery outages through the summer. And one expert said gas shortages are possible.

The Stern review on the economics of climate change was published to almost universal acclaim, and six months on, only a handful of economists have found anything to criticise. In one sense, Stern’s conclusions were entirely predictable. Now that climate change so clearly has a pistol at the head of our species, there could only be one response, irrespective of cost. But there was also a surprise: paying off the highwayman of climate change would not be extortionate. In fact, it would be an absolute steal. Stern concluded that if we do nothing, the effects of climate change could shrivel the global economy by as much as 20 per cent over the next two centuries. Avoiding that risk would cost only about 1 per cent of world GDP to 2050.