AP - BP gas station owners across the country are divided over whether the oil giant stained by its handling of the Gulf spill should rebrand U.S. outlets as Amoco or another name as part of its effort to repair the company's badly damaged reputation.

AP - Incoming BP CEO Bob Dudley was set to outline his company's long-term efforts to help the Gulf of Mexico recover from the oil spill Friday morning, and will be getting help from a Clinton administration-era emergency management official.

Reuters - Indian state firms have no immediate plans to revise petrol prices as international prices have not fluctuated significantly, the chairman of government-run Indian Oil Corp B.M. Bansal told reporters on Friday.

AP - Oil prices fell to near $78 a barrel Friday in Asia as the region's stock markets dropped on dour economic figures from Japan ahead of a key U.S. growth report.

AP - A Canadian company at the center of a huge oil spill in southern Michigan has a history of pipeline problems, including leaks, an explosion and dozens of regulatory violations.

Another week on and there has been no further leak from the BP Macondo well. Officials are now "optimistic" about preparations for a new attempt at a, with the initial step of pumping mud into the top of the well likely to begin as soon as Sunday. With the leak apparently under control, BP chose this week to announce the inevitable departure of its CEO Tony Hayward, whose replacement by the American Bob Dudley was vital for the company?s damage limitation efforts in the US...

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-Councils key to meeting UK's green energy target, report warns
-Property prices soar in the desert
-Clean Energy and the U.S. Handicap: One Man?s Story

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As elsewhere in western Europe, the advanced liberal consumer democracies are ever more unable (politically unwilling) to implement genuine change. Deutschland's rulers in Berlin firmly believe that techno-managerial innovation (and a hefty dose of financial risk-taking) will continue to provide cures for current ideas of what is unsustainable. As has happened time and again in Europa's history of nations, from the mid-19th century onwards, the costs of such 'revolutions' will be externalised elsewhere (east and south), and the ecological sustainability that Germany's admirable network of communes have long been admired for will remain out of reach of the country's policy and practice.

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?Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) is calculated as the ratio between energy inputs and energy outputs for an energy generating technology. A process that uses more energy than it produces is by definition unsustainable in the long term. Technologies which require fuel generally have a lower EROEI than those which can extract ?free? energy from the environment (wind, waves, tides, sunlight). As part of this study we have a carried out a review of published EROEIs and have found a high EROEI for marine technologies, lower EROEIs for solar and nuclear power, and still lower for coal and gas.

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New technologies, feed-in tariffs, and tax credits are helping propel the small wind industry, especially in the United States. Once found mostly in rural areas, small wind installations are now starting to pop up on urban rooftops.

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