?Plug-in planes and ships: During a recent panel discussion in Houston about the future of energy, hosted by BBC World News and Shell USA, Houston mayor Bill White noted that the most efficient method for storing energy is in hydrocarbons. When talk turned to electric cars powered by solar and wind, White pointed out, “We cannot plug flying airplanes and ships at sea to electric sockets,” driving home the fact that oil and gas energy will continue to be the favored form of energy for commercial transportation.


When asked if Houston might be resistant to the idea of turning away from oil as an energy source, he said, “Our city doesn’t depend on only one industry.”


Also, “Houston’s major goal, as a city, is zero growth in energy consumption, and that is overwhelmingly accepted. People get this.”


Meanwhile, “there is no easier place to raise capital than in the energy alternatives market…Houston is the capital of energy and also is the largest city-consumer of wind energy in the country.”


As for the suggestion that government is to blame for not enforcing automobile fuel standards in the past, the mayor said, “There have always been fuel-efficient cars available to the market. There will be more government policy for standards, but consumer demand ultimately will drive change.”


The panel included Marvin Odum, president of Shell USA; Amy Myers Jaffe, senior fellow at the James Baker Institute at Rice University; White, former assistant the U.S. secretary of energy; Vijay Vaitheeswaran, author of “Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future;” Dominique Thormann, senior vice president of Nissan North America; and Matt Frei, presenter for BBC World News America.

Twilight zone: “The oil market seems to have entered something of a twilight zone, in which strands of time have become jumbled,” says Barclays Capital analyst Paul Horsnell.


“In general, policies seem to be seeping out from the past, while price signals are a stark warning from the future that energy supply and demand are on an unsustainable path. In some respects, there is an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, while in other respects, outcomes that once looked like something from the far distant future, have turned up in the present. The policy debate in response to higher energy prices in many consumer governments seems to have been drawn straight from the 1970s.


“In addition, a growing climate of blame shifting and accusation within Washington seems in some ways to invoke some more distant echoes from the 1950s. Likewise, geopolitical influences on the oil market and the policy choices involved, particularly in regard to key Middle East producers, could be seen as harking back to the 1970s in terms of rhetoric and to the 1950s in terms of intent.


“Across the OECD, the slow movement of decades towards the greater acceptance of less governmental intervention in energy is now facing a challenge. Indeed, while the market mechanism is signaling the need for some significant structural shifts in the dynamics of both supply and demand, the immediate political response has often been the old but expedient one of considering steps to dampen or remove those signals.”

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