America and the climate sceptics | Edward Luce, Financial Times | Commentary | Business Spectator

The first, and least foreseen, development since 2008, is that America is rapidly turning from a consumer into a producer nation. On economic grounds, its expanding energy horizons are manna from heaven. When Obama was elected, the US was importing almost two-thirds of its oil. That number is down to below almost half and falling. In 2008, King Coal still dominated US electricity production. Last month natural gas supplanted coal as the largest source of US power supply.

So dramatic are America’s finds, analysts talk of the US turning into the world’s new Saudi Arabia by 2020, with up to 15 million barrels a day of liquid energy production (against the desert kingdom’s 11m b/d this year). Most of the credit goes to private sector innovators, who took their cue from the high oil prices in the last decade to devise ways of tapping previously uneconomic underground reserves of “tight oil” and shale gas. And some of it is down to plain luck. Far from reaching its final frontier, America has discovered new ones under the ground.

Twitter / Jeff5mith

Chomsky: indigenous populations are the most serious about climate change -- why Bolivia has strongest laws. http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/

Twitter / tan123:  [For a 22-year period, Revkin claimed to believe in the global warming hoax, yet never got around to getting a full energy audit of his own house]

@Revkin I know you eventually did the audit. Why didn't you do it until 22 years after Hansen's 1988 global warming hoax testimony?