Light, sweet crude for June delivery rose as much as $3.31 to $127.43 a barrel in electronic trading Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange by afternoon in Europe. That tops the previous high of $126.98 a barrel set Tuesday.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A review of state records shows Duke Energy is shutting off service to more customers this year because they can't pay their bills.

The Charlotte Observer reviewed records on Duke, the largest utility in the Carolinas.

MINING giant Rio Tinto and oil producer BP have dropped plans to build a coal-fired power generation plant with carbon capture and storage technology in Kwinana, Western Australia.

Hydrogen Energy, a joint venture company between the two companies, has spent the past two years investigating a site in Kwinana for the project, which aimed to convert coal into hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Studies cite compounds in fertilizers, fossil fuels with cascading effects

WASHINGTON - While carbon dioxide has been getting lots of publicity in climate change, reactive forms of nitrogen are also building up in the environment, scientists warn in two new studies.

"The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world's peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge," University of Virginia environmental sciences professor James Galloway said in a statement.

Scientists, managers oppose plan that may allow for new power plants

The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.

The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to "Class 1 areas," federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation's most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia's Shenandoah, Colorado's Mesa Verde and North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt national parks.

Between a quarter and a third of the world's wildlife has been lost since 1970, according to data compiled by the Zoological Society of London.

Populations of land-based species fell by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29%, it says.

Biofuel is wreaking havoc with car engines. Due to Government rules, all diesel sold in the UK must be blended with the eco-friendly fuel.

But what the authorities didn’t bank on was the filth inside filling station tanks. With no rules forcing forecourt owners to clean them, the reservoirs are rife with bacteria. And when they come into contact with the vegetable or wheat-based fuel, the result is oil clots, which clog up engines.

Climate change will lead to a "fortress world" in which the rich lock themselves away in gated communities and the poor must fend for themselves in shattered environments, unless governments act quickly to curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to the vice-president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Prof Mohan Munasinghe was giving a lecture at Cambridge university in which he presented a dystopic possible future world in which social problems are made much worse by the environmental consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions. "Climate change is, or could be, the additional factor which will exacerbate the existing problems of poverty, environmental degradation, social polarisation and terrorism and it could lead to a very chaotic situation," he said

When President George Bush went to see Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in January to plead for higher oil output, he was politely rebuffed.

President Bush shares a laugh with Saudi Prince Salman, brother of Saudi King Abdullah The rematch is likely to be a great deal more strained.

New York: fifty years ago, Yankee Stadium had about 70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheapest seats. Capacity was reduced to about 57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating to about 51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in short order, to triple prices or more. The owners have learned that scarcity will fatten their wallets. The plan may discriminate against the lower middle class, but as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies, there may be little grounds for complaint.

Pakistan, which faces an energy shortfall of 4,000 MW, has twice before attempted to introduce daylight saving time but has failed on both occasions, Dawn reported Thursday.

Motorist group sees first decrease in holiday travel since 2002, with Americans at a 'travel tipping point.'

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- For the first time since just after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans plan to drive less on Memorial Day weekend than they did the year before, with high gasoline prices in a weak economy a prime reason, according to a AAA study released Thursday.

The number of Americans traveling 50 or more miles from home this holiday weekend will decrease by 0.9% to 37.87 million, the motorist group said in a statement. That will mark the first decrease in Memorial Day driving since 2002, when the nation was recovering from the shock of the attacks on New York and Washington.

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators would have more authority to monitor electronic energy markets and guard against market manipulation under legislation approved today as part of the congressional farm bill.

The provision would close what lawmakers have called the "Enron loophole," which was created in 2000 largely at the request of Enron Corp. It exempted electronic markets for large traders from government oversight.

(Bloomberg) -- Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, has drilled halfway through its offshore Carioca deposit and will need more time to determine its size, Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao said.

Carioca is part of Brazil's new pre-salt region, an oil district beneath as much as 2,000 meters (6,500 feet) of water and as much as 4,000 meters of seabed. It's also home to the Tupi field, which holds as much as 8 billion barrels of oil and is the largest Western Hemisphere oil discovery in three decades, Lobao said today in an interview in his office in Brasilia.

AMID an astonishing surge in food prices, which has sparked riots and unrest in many countries and is making even the relatively affluent citizens of America and Europe feel the pinch, faith in the ability of global markets to fill nearly 7 billion bellies is dwindling. Given the fear that a new era of chronic shortages may have begun, it is perhaps understandable that the name of Thomas Malthus is in the air. Yet if his views were indeed now correct, that would defy the experience of the past two centuries.

Malthus first set out his ideas in 1798 in “An Essay on the Principle of Population”. This expounded a tragic twin trajectory for the growth of human populations and the increase of food supply. Whereas the natural tendency was for populations to grow without end, food supply would run up against the limit of finite land. As a result, the “positive checks” of higher mortality caused by famine, disease and war were necessary to bring the number of people back in line with the capacity to feed them.

Not really. Although U.S. crude oil inventories have fallen, gasoline inventories are at their highest since March 1993, notes Tim Evans, an energy futures analyst at Citigroup's Futures Perspective. World oil production was up 2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007, while world oil consumption rose by just 2 percent.

The Norwegian government's budget surplus for 2008, benefiting from record oil prices, is expected to soar more than 23 percent over the original projections, the finance minister said Thursday.

Norway is a major oil and natural gas exporter and the government's regular six-month budget revision projected a surplus for the year of 424.2 billion kroner ($85 billion) compared to the 344 billion in the original 2008 budget.

At least 100 people have been killed during an oil pipeline fire in Lagos, Nigeria, the Red Cross has said.

"We have so far rescued more than 20 people with injuries and taken them to hospital for treatment," Sky News quotes a Red Cross official at the scene as saying.

Royal Dutch Shell said the failure of crude suppliers to keep pace with accelerating demand may prompt the expansion of renewable energy.

There's "plenty of oil in the world," Shell's Scenario Team said today on a Webcast led by Global Business Environment Vice President Jeremy Bentham. "The important moment is actually not a possible peak of oil production;" it's when demand exceeds supply, which may "come well before a peak" in output.

FRANKFURT -(Dow Jones)- Daimler AG (DAI) said Wednesday that United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) ordered 200 hybrid electric trucks and 300 compressed natural gas vehicles.

In a statement, Daimler said that this represents its largest of alternative- fuel and drive-train commercial vehicles to-date.