Jeremy Martin

On April 5, there was an explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia; 29 lives were lost. Fifteen days later, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico; 11 lives were lost. These two human and environmental tragedies share more than just the month of April. They both, sadly, provide important headlines that pull back the curtain on the extent of our national energy appetite. And they should be a stark wake-up call for the large numbers among us who take for granted our access to reliable and affordable energy as to the complexity of our nation’s energy DNA. (more)

Ministers of energy from across the Western Hemisphere will descend upon Washington this week. While they may be able to catch the cherry blossoms, their principal reason for visiting is not tourism. Instead, they have been invited to Washington by Energy Secretary Steven Chu to forge a new chapter in energy cooperation and collaboration in our hemisphere. (more)

Exploratory oil drilling began this week in waters off a set of islands in the South Atlantic where sheep have long outnumbered people. British oil concern Desire Petroleum’s rig arrived in the Falkland Islands to much fanfare and commenced a long-anticipated drilling campaign. Potentially important from an energy perspective, the drilling has stoked long-simmering tensions over British control of the islands and neighboring Argentina’s sovereignty claim on the archipelago. (more)

In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s energy policy came to be summed up by an article of clothing: a cardigan sweater. More recently, we’ve been told that we are “addicted to oil” and that we need to “drill, baby, drill.” President Obama’s first State of the Union address seemingly melded them all together. (more)

Three days before Christmas, Luis Francisco Cuellar, governor of the Colombian province of Caqueta, was found dead, his throat slashed. He had been abducted the day before from home by Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerillas, an insurgent group in Colombia notorious for drug trafficking and organized crime. (more)

Every Sunday, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez takes to the air and radio waves for Aló Presidente. It is, to put it mildly, a key ingredient in the cultivation of his persona and pet issues for his Bolivarian Revolution. The show, complete with its own web site, often transmits from carefully selected locations to emphasize the president’s booming rhetoric of the day–oil fields when announcing nationalization of the oil industry or new schools and clinics when aiming to brag about the gains of  21st Century Socialism in Venezuela. Or along Venezuela’s border with Colombia when he desires to rail against two favorite targets: Colombia and the United States. Lately, the rants against Colombia have focused on a possible armed conflict – to avoid war we must prepare for war President Chavez declared. (more)