Monday comes way-too fast!

And with that ugly shit out of the way, there’s some good news/bad news on the energy front — fuel costs at the pump may not be as bad as predicted earlier this year, but less cash means more driving, which means more pollutants into our struggling environment.
Seasonal forecasts are thumbs up even though appearing out on a limb: The EIA says that gasoline prices should average $3.71 per gallon for all of 2012, down 10 cents from April’s estimate. The EIA’s forecast for next year is $3.67 per gallon.

Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities: “It’s almost like a tax cut.”

Yeah, a cut about neck high.
After the massive bullshit in February and March, these reports indicates that no one really knows what the shit is going on fuel wise, and maybe otherwise.

Yesterday, after my weekly visit to the laundromat, I put another $20 in the old Jeep with the pump price remaining still at $4.49 a gallon for regular — stuck at that level for weeks.
We’re still higher than the rest of California, but the state itself will be higher than the rest of the country even still because four of our refineries are partially shut down, and another in Washington state is struggling to restart.
California’s average price for a gallon of regular has jumped 9 cents since the end of April: It reached $4.25 on Friday, according to the AAA automotive club, which tracks gasoline prices daily. Average prices in San Francisco and San Jose jumped 4 cents overnight to hit $4.34 and $4.27, respectively.

All this as oil prices fell on the horror stories in the Eurozone: Crude for June delivery fell as much as $2.48 to $93.65 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest front-month intraday price since Dec. 19.
Brent for June settlement tumbled $1.78, or 1.6 percent, to $110.48 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange.

In the midst of the decline, the International Monetary Fund reports oil prices could double in the next decade, but the results are based on money and not geology.
From the UK’s Guardian:

“This is uncharted territory for the world economy, which has never experienced such prices for more than a few months,” the report warns.
…
Undertaken amid mounting concerns about “peak oil”, the IMF study does not presume that there is a constraint on how much oil can be taken out of the ground.
It prefers to believe that extraction rates will depend on the price that will be able to be charged for the final product.
“While our model is not as pessimistic as the pure geological view that typically holds that binding resource constraints will lead world oil production on to an inexorable downward trend in the very near future, our prediction of small further increases in world oil production comes at the expense of a near doubling, permanently, of real oil prices over the coming decade,” argues the report, entitled The Future of Oil: Geology v Technology.
…
It says that its oil market “models” have been significantly more accurate than others in a world where predictability has been historically low.
But it adds: “Our empirical results also indicate that if the model’s predictions continue to be accurate as they have been over the last decade… the future will not be easy.”

No shit, sherlock.

No only do we have the horror of climate change itself, but the assholes who deny it.
In the US, all that’s coming from GOPers is shit:

Rick Santorum described belief in climate change as a “pseudo-religion,” while Ron Paul called it a “hoax.”
Mitt Romney, the apparent Republican nominee, has said, “I can tell you the right course for America with regard to energy policy is to focus on job creation and not global warming.”

In an interview SpiegelOnline, Kumi Naidoo, head of Greenpeace, says time might have already run its course.
A few snips of the interview:

For millions of people, especially in Africa, it is already too late.
They are already feeling the impact of climate change, which is not to say that through adaptation and mitigation they, and the rest of the world, cannot avert the worst consequences or relieve the suffering.
But we need to act now and start doing all we can to protect the climate.
We are definitely not powerless, but we need support.
Other interests — such as the oil lobby — have access to vastly more financial resources than us, and this is what we’re up against.
…
We are addicted to dirty energy, it is true.
And it is an addiction, which, like all addictions, can be cured.
But it’s not easy.
Maybe what will wake us up is the fact that we’re talking about a dramatic increase in catastrophic weather events: about the country of Kiribati, which is slowly sinking into the ocean due to rising sea levels; about water shortages and the collapse of agricultural systems in some countries; about millions of climate refugees from Africa that will be heading for Europe; about devastating economic, social and ecological damage that can be prevented.
Our leaders are big losers.
Whereas they should be looking after the interests of their citizens, instead they are making deals with big business — and thereby accepting catastrophe with their eyes wide open …

Pumping fuel into the old Jeep don’t help.