Portside

Supporting Native Americans and their tribes, environmental, climate protection, human rights, and many other groups joined the campaign against the pipeline. The Obama administration intervened to temporarily halt the pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline has become an issue of contention within organized labor. Why has this become a divisive issue within labor, and can it have a silver lining for a troubled labor movement?

Reader Comments: Standing Rock - Protest, Solidarity and Pension Funds; Hillary Right About Trump Supporters; GOP Manipulation and Voter Suppression; Class War by Other Means; Saudi Arabia; Women's Boat to Gaza Sets Sail; Facts and Numbers to Fightback With - EPI's new data crunching tool; Announcements: Virtual Book Discussion about `Because of Sex; 50-Year Rag Reunion & Public Celebration - Austin, Texas

Reader Comments: Lots of good stuff this week. What Does Black Lives Matter Want; Single-Payer Healthcare System Is Inevitable?; BLM and Palestine Solidarity; Oil Industry and Peak Oil; James Brown; Sex Workers?; and much more... Announcements: Triangle Fire opera; Women 9/11 First Responders Panel Discussion; The Left-Wing of the Possible - How Can the Sanders' Phenomenon Transform American Politics; Protect Pacifica Archives; Labor, Islam, and War...

Something strange and ominous is happening in the oil industry, and the “peak oil” debate, whether oil production has hit its peak, rages anew. There is still oil in the ground, but the cost of extracting it is increasingly prohibitive. Some ecologists had long argued for investment in renewable energy sources while energy profitability was still high, now they fear we must build “a bridge to the energy future, while the highway we’re on is crumbling beneath us.”

Petro-states are different from other countries because the fates of their governing institutions are so deeply woven into the boom-and-bust cycles of the international petroleum economy. Now, one thing is finally clear: the business model for these corporatized states is busted. The most basic assumption behind their operation -- that global oil demand will continue to outpace world petroleum supplies and ensure high prices into the foreseeable future -- no longer holds

Romero Jucá, recently appointed planning minister, was recorded saying: `We have to stop this shit. We have to change the government to be able to stop this bleeding - the corruption investigation. The motives and nature of the plot to remove Rousseff are apparent in the transcript of the phone conversation between Jucá - a ally of new president Michel Temer - and Sérgio Machado, former senator who until recently was president of the state oil company, Transpetro.

The judicial coup against President Dilma Rousseff is the culmination of the deepest political crisis in Brazil for 50 years. Dilma's second victory sparked a heated panic among the neoliberal and U.S.-aligned opposition. The fourth consecutive election of a President affiliated to the centre-left PT (Workers' Party) was bad news for the opposition, because it suggested that PT founder Lu¡s In cio Lula da Silva could return in 2018.

Two years ago this month, more than 300 residents of Kure Beach, North Carolina (pop. 2,000), packed town hall to voice their anger with then-Mayor Dean Lambeth's decision to sign a letter supporting seismic testing for offshore oil and gas deposits. The letter was written by America's Energy Forum, a project of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s leading trade association.

Fracking is a relatively expensive process—about ten times more costly than the $5 to $6 per barrel cost of drilling oil from conventional wells in Saudi Arabia. By letting the price of oil drop, OPEC, in which Saudi Arabia is the key partner, has been applying financial pressure on the fracking industry.