The New Republic

Nate Silver thinks it would be a political coup for Barack Obama to sign onto the "Gang of Ten" energy compromise bill in the Senate, and Joe Romm argues that even substantively, the bill is a good deal for Democrats. They both make strong cases. READ MORE >>

Readers of the Post already know that campaign contributions from large oil companies fairly gushed into the coffers of team John McCain after the candidate's June 16th flip flop on the moratorium on offshore oil drilling. READ MORE >>

The Obama campaign is hitting McCain hard for being in the pocket of Big Oil after Exxon Mobil reported an eyeball-popping quarterly profit of $11.7 billion today. READ MORE >>

One of the emerging bit of conventional wisdom on the right, it seems, is that oil prices are now falling all because Republicans are simply talking about drilling for oil off shore. READ MORE >>

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there are roughly 90 billion barrels of maybe-possibly-who-knows "recoverable" oil in the Arctic circle, and even more natural gas lurking beneath the ice—we're talking one-fifth of the world's as-yet-undiscovered oil and gas reserves. READ MORE >>

So the Senate held a test vote yesterday on a bill to regulate "speculation" in the oil futures market, and it passed 95-0. Now, it seems unlikely this bill's going anywhere, seeing as how Republicans want to tack on a slew of drilling amendments that will no doubt bog the whole thing down—in fact, I'd give even odds that Congress doesn't pass any new energy bill before the August recess. READ MORE >>

As a former director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, Senator Ken Salazar probably knows more about the subject of oil-shale development than any other member of Congress. So it's worth reading his op-ed in the Washington Post today for a balanced, realistic take on the prospect for commercial-scale shale development in the West. READ MORE >>

We're in the sixth year of war in Iraq, and journalists can still write stories about how most Iraqis only get a few hours of electricity per day. (What's that like? READ MORE >>

Via the WSJ's Keith Johnson, this new oil forecast from Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets is genuinely shocking, especially with its prediction of $7/gallon gas in the United States by 2010. READ MORE >>

All the coverage of President Bush's energy speech today is focusing on his call for ending a federal ban on offshore oil drilling, two days after John McCai READ MORE >>