TV News LIES

Ten years after the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, the country’s oil industry is poised to boom and make the troubled nation the No.2 oil exporter in the world. But the nation that’s moving to take advantage of Iraq’s riches isn’t the United States. It’s China.

America, with its own homegrown energy bonanza, isn’t going after the petroleum that lies beneath Iraq’s sands nearly as aggressively as is China, a country hungry to fuel its rise as an economic power.

An obscure federal regulator of electricity markets has emerged as a tough cop on the beat, taking on Wall Street banks and big energy firms alike for market manipulation. That aggressive approach stands out when it’s compared with that of the regulator in charge of looking for manipulation in the oil and gasoline markets.

Whether manipulation accounts for volatile oil and gasoline prices in recent years is a hotly debated topic since prices began their steep climb in late 2005. Last year’s West Coast price spikes amid ample supplies added to the urgency in determining whether excessive financial speculation is driving price volatility.

U.S. nuclear power plants must upgrade ventilation systems at 31 reactors with designs similar to those that melted down two years ago in Japan, under a Nuclear Regulatory Commission order that stops short of requiring filtered vents, as some safety advocates and NRC's staff had urged.

The filters are required in Japan and much of Europe, but U.S. utilities say they are unnecessary and expensive.

A grotesque collision of fossil-fuel-laden vessels happened in a bayou south of New Orleans on Tuesday evening, where tug-boat operators crashed a barge carrying crude oil into a submerged natural-gas pipeline.

The result was predictable: A spectacular conflagration erupted that injured two of the four members of the tug-boat crew, including the captain, who reportedly suffered burns covering more than three quarters of his body. Emergency crews on Wednesday were scrambling to contain spilled oil spreading south of the accident.

Royal Dutch Shell announced Wednesday that it will not drill in the Arctic Ocean this year, declaring a cease-fire in one of the nation’s fiercest political battles over energy development and environmental protection.

Shell Oil President Marvin Odum described the decision not to conduct exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in a statement as a “pause.”

With U.S. natural gas production having risen more than 25 percent from its nadir in 2005, natural gas producers are pushing for an end to limits on U.S. natural gas exports. The growth in supplies comes primarily from previously inaccessible shale deposits deep in the Earth, a development that has convinced many people that the country is now entering a new era of natural gas abundance.

Trouble is, the United States remains an importer of natural gas. Through November 2012 the country imported 12.5 percent of its natural gas consumption for the year, mostly from Canada. That's down from an average of 15.7 percent for the previous 20-year period. But it's not exactly energy independence.