Word: petroleum
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...don’t go into issues of morality.”PETROCHINA AND USFew have experienced more campus backlash than investment bank UBS for the firm’s role as the lead underwriter for the Shanghai listing of PetroChina, a subsidiary of the state-run China National Petroleum Company (CNPC). CNPC is a business partner of the Sudanese government.UBS has defended itself by arguing that PetroChina itself has no operations in Sudan.Still, members of the Harvard Darfur Action Group (HDAG) have been present at several UBS recruiting events this fall, including one in mid-November, handing out fliers...
...fastest way to start a fistfight among environmentalists is to bring up the topic of biofuels - plant-based liquid fuels like ethanol that could potentially take the place of petroleum. Biofuel revolutionaries - like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla - see plant power as a way to break America's dependence on foreign oil, and produce auto fuel that doesn't kill the climate. Opponents dismiss biofuels - most of which are currently distilled from crops like corn and sugar cane - as a blind alley, one that drives up food prices without saving the earth...
...during the trials. Vogel and his colleagues showed that switchgrass yielded 540% more energy as a biofuel than the amount of energy used to grow, harvest and process it. (Corn ethanol yields just 25% more energy.) Greenhouse gas emissions from switchgrass fuel would be 94% lower than emissions from petroleum fuel - almost carbon neutral. Previous studies had come up with similar numbers in small-scale trials, but this was the first study on the level of a working farm. "The idea is that we won't be replacing food with fuel on prime land," says Vogel. "This study shows...
...High petroleum prices might hit your wallet hard, but $100-a-barrel oil has some environmentalists quietly celebrating. The more expensive oil gets, the more attractive alternative - and climate-friendly - fuels become. Biofuels that would be buried by $17-a-barrel crude - the price as recently as November 2001 - are suddenly competitive when oil is in the triple digits. Ultra-efficient cars, public transit, plug-in hybrids - they all become better investments as oil gets and stays expensive. Global greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed over the past few decades on the back of relatively cheap oil, but as the price...
...environmentalists, that's the risk. Oil has spiked in the past, prompting a wave of investment in alternative energy that crashed as soon as petroleum prices dropped. Transitioning from fossil fuels to clean power will be a long, fraught process, and investors - whether they're pushing ethanol, hybrids or something new - need long-term certainty that they won't be undercut by old, dirty fuels dipping down to cheaper prices again. "That risk [of volatility] makes consumers and investors alike very reluctant to bank on high prices," says Greene. It doesn't make sense to spend hundreds of millions...