… while the global downturn may have delayed it by a couple of years, peak oil—the point at which global production reaches its maximum—is no more than five years away. Governments and corporations need to use the intervening years to speed up the development of and move toward other energy sources and increased energy efficiency.

The next crisis: prepare for peak oil – WSJ.com

Over the next few days, Russia will change the world. It has completed a new oil pipeline and port complex that sets Russia up to become a more powerful oil exporter than Saudi Arabia. The ramifications for Europe and Asia are profound: The shape of the global economy—and the global balance of power—will be altered forever.

How Russia Is About to Dramatically Change the World | Columns | theTrumpet.com by the Philadelphia Church of God

Tehran denies Iraqi claim to borderline oil field, says troops are ‘on Iranian soil, as defined by known international borders’

Iran: Oil field is ours, not Iraq’s – Israel News, Ynetnews

The International Energy Agency Thursday revised it 2010 world oil demand forecast slightly higher, but warned that rising crude prices, if sustained, risk smothering the fragile economic recovery underway.

IEA Says Rising Oil Price Risks Derailing Economic Recovery – WSJ.com

Reporting from Beijing – A Chinese company’s gambit to drill for oil in U.S. territory demonstrates China’s determination to lock up the raw materials it needs to sustain its rapid growth, wherever those resources lie.

The state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, reportedly is negotiating the purchase of leases owned by the Norwegian StatoilHydro in U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico, the source of about a quarter of U.S. crude oil production.

China’s push for oil in Gulf of Mexico puts U.S. in awkward spot — latimes.com

The resource curse has gone global.

For years, oil wealth was mostly a danger to those, paradoxically, who possessed it. Resource-rich Middle Eastern countries, and their labor-exporting neighbors, failed for decades to invest adequately in their people or to diversify their economies. A massive influx of oil receipts and worker remittances discouraged investment in sectors conducive to steady long-term growth, fostered corruption and patronage, inflated regional real estate and stock markets, and provided irresistible incentives for governments to spend with wasteful, shortsighted abandon.

But today, the Middle East’s resource curse is spilling over into the international financial system.

How the resource curse went global – By Mahmoud A. El-Gamal and Amy Myers Jaffe | Foreign Policy

Last week, three dictators — from Iran, Libya and Venezuela — delivered lunatic hate speeches at the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Why do these anti-Semitic dictators feel so free to damn America from midtown Manhattan? Why do their abettors spurn our requests for help? And why do creepy regimes plot to get nukes and fund terrorists?

Easy. They do not fear, much less listen, to an indebted and energy-hungry America that needs either their cash or oil — or both.

Opinion: Victor Davis Hanson: U.S. must wean itself of oil supplied by lunatic dictators – San Jose Mercury News

Despite tough talk from Washington, China needs Iran’s oil too much to support sanctions that might actually bite.

But the kind of sanctions that would really hit Iran’s economy – sanctions against its energy industry – are thought to be off the table because China and other nations are too reliant on Iran’s oil.

Oil: Iran’s trump card – Sep. 30, 2009