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The International Energy Agency will publish this year’s World Energy Outlook on 7 November - but in advance of then, executive director Nobuo Tanaka has been giving a sneak preview at the Oil and Money Conference in London. As the FT’s Ed Crooks has it, he said:
“Despite five years of high oil prices, market tightness will actually [...]

From the Onion:
Political scientists at the Cato Institute announced Monday that they have inadvertently synthesized a previously theoretical form of government known as megalocracy.
“We were attempting to recreate a military junta in a controlled diplomatic setting, and we applied too much external pressure,” said head researcher Dr. Adam Stogsdill, a leading expert in highly reactionary [...]

William Lind has been ruminating about the renewed importance of sea power in a less secure world.

We [the US] need naval supremacy because in a world where the state is weakening, water, and transport by water, grow in importance. People today think of land uniting and water dividing, but that became true only recently, with [...]

Regular readers will know that we’ve been watching food prices rise steadily over the last few months with increasing concern - see the Scarcity category of posts for the backstory, and also this excellent in-depth analysis piece that the FT published last week.  Today, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s head, Jacques Diouf, had some blunt [...]

One addendum to Alex’s discussion of the new paper from Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker, which argues that we will never really know how much warming we are letting ourselves in for…
Isn’t that exactly why climate change is frightening? We’re poking a complex and poorly understood system with a very big stick - and we [...]

From the Chicago Sun-Tribune, via Crooked Timber:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s No. 2 official apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions. … FEMA announced the news conference at its headquarters here [...]

Two scientists, Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker, have a paper in Science this week which is a must read for everyone in climate policy. Here’s the abstract:
 Uncertainties in projections of future climate change have not lessened substantially in past decades. Both models and observations yield broad probability distributions for long-term increases in global mean temperature expected [...]

Most commentators on the Congressional resolution commemorating the Armenian genocide have adopted a US-centric view. Andrew Sullivan describes the move as “foolish in the extreme” because it will antagonize a key US ally. The University of San Francisco’s Stephen Zunes supports the decision because it is vital for the US to uphold its “longstanding principles.” [...]

As I am sure you are all aware its Islamo-Fascism awareness week on US campuses:

By the way, the enemy is now climate change, not just Bin Laden:
The purpose of this protest is as simple as it is crucial: to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on [...]

Reading through today’s New York Times coverage of the fires in California that have caused half a million people (and counting) to flee, I came across this line which induced a double take:
The state’s corrections department also has more than 2,640 trained inmate firefighters actively battling the southern California wildfires today after being deployed by [...]

(Hat tip: techpresident.com)

Here’s a story that seems to have gone virtually unremarked outside the US. Atlanta is running out of water: not in some long term “by 2050″ kind of way, but in about 75 days’ time. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it in an article on 11 October,
That’s three months before there’s not enough water [...]

My thoughts on evolution, the US and its presidential campaign on the Telegraph blog, Brassneck.

How many other developing country opposition leaders can take to the FT when they need to rally support?
I did not come this far in life to be intimidated by suicide bombers. There is a battle raging in Pakistan for the hearts and minds of a new generation. It is a battle for the future of [...]

Amid the blizzard of coverage following the bombing on Benazir Bhutto’s convoy in Karachi last week, two pieces that are worth a look:
First, for a big picture view of worries in the Beltway about Pakistan, see this excellent news analysis article from yesterday’s New York Times. While David Sanger and David Rohde found the [...]

Here’s the graphic from the auction Alex blogged about earlier - not just a lot of money, but over 100,000 people popped by to have a look…

Much sniggering on the US right as shock jock Rush Limbaugh executes an expert piece of political aikido on his political opponents. The story goes like this:
After Limbaugh referred to Iraq war veterans criticial of the war as “phony soldiers”, 41 infuriated Democrat Senators sent him a stiff letter of complaint. “Although [...]

Who’d have thought it? UNCLOS - the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, hardly the sexiest multilateral environmental agreement around - has become a cause celebre for both the the progressive end of the US blogosphere and the Pentagon. What gives?
Here’s the story so far. UNCLOS, which covers issues [...]

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin has an alarming story this morning, picking up on a new 10 year long study from the University of East Anglia. The headline: the amount of carbon dioxide soaked up by the world’s oceans halved between the mid 1990s and 2000-2005.
This is really bad news. Prior to the period [...]

 Talking Points Memo:
Mitt Romney pulled off an interesting bit of U.N.-bashing today, calling upon the United States to withdraw from a United Nations council that the United States isn’t a part of to begin with.
“The United Nations has been an extraordinary failure of late,” Romney said during a South Carolina campaign stop. “We should [...]

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