Every once in awhile, one of the newsroom staff members falls ill. It happens, like any other workplace. Today, it was our editor, who left mid-morning to visit the doctor. That means it fell on me to design/paginate today’s front page. I love doing layout — Adobe InDesign makes it easy simplifies the process, and [...]

Kevin (who, like me, says he hasn’t written anything on peak oil lately) links to this LA Times story: Production at Mexico’s largest oil field is slipping faster than projected and officials see few options for quickly replacing the main source of the nation’s oil riches. The struggles of the world’s No. 5 oil producer [...]

Newsweek International has an article online detailing seven methods of conservation for the future: When a slump in business travelers forced Ulrich Römer to cut costs at his family-owned Hotel am Stadtpark in Hilden, Germany, in 2002, he found that he didn’t have to skimp on comfort for his guests. Instead, he replaced hundreds of [...]

According to the International Herald Tribune (hat tip to Laura Rozen) it seems like that’s the case: Saudi Arabia, which benefited immensely from record oil prices last year, has sent signals in the past two weeks that it is committed to keeping oil at about $50 a barrel — down about a third from the [...]

John Fleck, comments on this Washington Post story on the price of corn in Mexico: We subsidize ethanol so we can use it instead of gasoline in our cars. The price of corn rises. Poor folk in Mexico can’t afford their staple food.

Heath Haussamen was up early this morning: Most of New Mexico’s leaders in Washington were critical of at least some of the proposals President Bush made Tuesday in his State of the Union address. Oh really? On energy independence and climate change, Bush called for reducing the nation’s gasoline usage by 20 percent in the [...]

Eclipse Aviation, which is based in Albuquerque, recently saw its Eclipse 500 ranked at the bottom of a comparison of private jets. The kicker: the bottom was the place to be. The Helium Report recently conducted a study on offsetting carbon emissions while flying on private planes (the way TerraPass will help you offest emissions [...]

The Associated Press is reporting that Gov. Bill Richardson is trading up to an ethanol-fueled SUV: Gov. Bill Richardson’s hybrid sport utility vehicle just wasn’t big enough. So the 6-foot-2 Richardson has traded it in for a bigger SUV that can run on a blend of gasoline and ethanol, a spokesman told the Albuquerque Journal [...]

The Albuquerque Tribune, via Headwaters News: The Supreme Court ruled against the oil and gas industry today in a dispute over how many years into the past the government can reach to collect money for leases on federal land. In a 7-0 decision, the court refused to limit the number of years the government can [...]

Blogging at Washington Monthly, Zachary Roth writes: The Washington Post reported over the weekend that plans for a new nuclear weapons program will continue, despite the finding that existing stockpiles will remain reliable for almost the next century. One of the reasons that the program–known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program–looks set to move ahead, [...]

We’ve received a lot of calls today from people wondering if we had heard about the Freeport-McMoRan buyout of Phelps Dodge. I assure you, we did. I’m still trying to gather my thoughts. Both of my parents worked for Phelps Dodge (my mom was communications director for NM Operations before she left for her D.C. [...]

Via Headwaters News I saw this post over at New West: You know an industry is heating up when you start hearing the word “bubble” tossed around. That’s the verdict of this week’s cover story (sub. req.) in the influential British newsmagazine The Economist, which finds that the renewable-energy sector, boosted by high-flying venture capital [...]