The Daily Five: Saturday, 17 May, 2008
Get set for even higher crude oil prices; a renewable energy bill is headed for consideration by the U.S. House next week; and do you Twitter? Start your weekend with up-to-date CleanTech news from EcoTech Daily.
When Goldman Speaks, People Buy Oil: When brokerage house Goldman Sachs started talking about $200 a barrel oil prices a few weeks ago, many market analysts dismissed the prediction as somewhat self-fulfilling. In any case, the bulls have since dominated petroleum trading. Crude rose to new record prices yesterday, up $2.17 to $126.29 a barrel at Friday’s New York close. Goldman Sachs believes crude will break $141 a barrel sometime in the second half of the year. (Forbes)
Renewed Life For Renewable Energy: A renewable energy bill which would continue billions of dollars in tax incentives for solar power, wind energy, and biomass research cleared committee by the end of last week and is headed to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. As it currently stands, the bill earmarks about $54 billion worth of green energy subsidies. It also contains money for deeply controversial “clean coal” research and post-Katrina cleanup. The bill could be brought up for a vote next week. (Envirowonk)
Is Corn Ethanol Lowering Gas Prices at the Pump? : Food-based biofuels are taking plenty of heat for spiking food prices — especially staples at the base of diets common among low-income populations. But a paper published at Iowa State last month points out all that hunger means a 29 to 40 cent per gallon break at the pump. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Iowa clocks in as the nation’s top corn producer. (CleanTech Blog)
A Cool Trick for Solar Cells: Now IBM is getting into the solar derby. The computer manufacturer says they’ve adapted a heat conductive bonding compound for use with concentrated solar photovoltaic power. The compound was originally used to help keep chips on IBM motherboards from overheating. Concentrated solar exposes photovoltaic cells to tremendously high temperatures — and the cooler a chip remains, the higher its efficiency. (Technology Review)
Tweets of the Week: Max Gladwell’s social media and green living blog is one of the sites in our overworked RSS reader here at EcoTech Daily. Gladwell is an enthusiastic Twitter user, and regularly posts a collection of his favorite messages. Catch his current roundup while you can. And if you’d like to keep track of EcoTech Daily via Twitter, subscribe to the Green Living tweet stream or the feed of ETD publisher Chris Baskind. (Max Gladwell)
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The Daily Five: Wednesday, 23 July, 2008
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You were talking about Goldman Sachs. I'm very concerned about all the trading that's been happening on futures. Not only is it impacting the oil prices, but it is having a huge effect on grains prices, which is impacting the world food crisis. Poor people in places like Haiti are seeing their food prices go up 60 plus %!
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Today's runaway oil prices are, unfortunately, just a taste of what will happen as supplies really begin to thin out.
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