The agreement aims to stop theft, the cutting of secondary pipelines and other attacks faced by Petroecuador's production subsidiary Petroproduccion. Private companies in the country suffer similar circumstances.

Key decisions must be taken within five years on measures to tackle climate change if the world wants to cope with an expected doubling of energy demand over the next half century, the environmental group WWF said Tuesday.

Delays would expose the planet to dangerous warming within a lifetime or force even harsher and costlier measures that could cause significant damage to the global economy, WWF International said in a technical report.

2) a confluence of various events is acting to cause the Bottleneck;

3) some of those events are: the peaking of production and ultimate decline of cheap, readily available exosomatic energy resources; the economic bankruptcy of nations; the depletion of water, soil, critical minerals, sea life; etc.

Earlier this week, a message circulated on the Internet called upon people to refrain from buying gas today. The idea is that if enough people did not buy gas today, it would give the big oil companies a jolt in the range of $3-billion.

On December 11, 1992, a powerful northeaster coalesced off the eastern seaboard of the United States, and an eight-foot storm surge struck New York City. Seawater swamped the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to a depth of six feet, cascaded down PATH subway stairs in Hoboken, NJ, and forced LaGuardia Airport and many roads and subways lines to close. Had the storm been slightly stronger, a 10-foot surge could have devastated a far wider region, inundating low-lying areas like Coney Island and Manhattan's financial district and overwhelming the 14 sewage plants dotting the New York City coastline.

PARIS (AFP) - A pipeline deal signed at the weekend by Russia, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, giving Russia access to gas from the Caspian Sea, is bad news for Europe, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said here on Monday.

"Europe needs to diversify its energy sources and Europeans should take due note of this," Bodman told a press conference during a meeting of the International Energy Agency.