Heating Oil Weekly Roundup: Copenhagen, Peak Sand, and the Indiana Bat

Posted by Michael Hoven on December 11, 2009 at 4:58 pm

John Cole, the Scranton Times-Tribune via cagle.com. (image: cagle.com)

The Copenhagen Conference dominated energy news this week, shedding light on some of the peculiar habits of Denmark’s capital city. Even though the city is hosting a global climate conference, stores on the Stroget, one of Copenhagen’s most popular streets for window-shopping, leave their doors open to entice customers, reports Lars Kroldrup at the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog. Stores leave their doors open throughout the winter, freezing temperatures or no, letting heat and energy escape far more than any crack in the window.

Copenhagen’s mayor was worried that the city would set a bad example in a different way, and distributed postcards to 160 hotels in the city in an effort to curb prostitution, which is legal in Denmark, for the duration of the conference. Well, it backfired. As the Copenhagen Post reports, a sex workers interest organization in the city decided to offer free services to anyone who presented one of the anti-prostitution postcards.

Peak oil theory says that eventually even a country as rich in oil as Saudi Arabia will run out of the stuff, but even the most alarmist believer in peak oil might be surprised that Saudi Arabia is running out of sand. Stuart Burns at MetalMiner reports that Saudi Arabia has halted its sand exports, since it doesn’t have enough in places that would make it easy to export, which is in turn slowing down construction throughout the Middle East. Are we facing a future of “peak sand”?

It’s not just environmentalists who are eagerly hoping for cap and trade legislation—Goldman Sachs wants it, too. Bradford Plumer of the New Republic investigates the risks of creating a vast carbon market for huge financial institutions, but also why cap and trade, because it would bring in Wall Street geniuses, may be more successful at reducing emissions than the alternatives.

Construction of a wind farm in West Virginia has been halted, and it had nothing to do with big oil, corporate greed, or Americans’ attachment to their cars. It was stopped by the Indiana bat. As Maria Glod of the Washington Post reports, the Indiana bat is an endangered species and the wind energy project was mere miles away from limestone caverns that provide a home for many of them.