Here are the figures from the Department of Energy for the top six oil importers to the U.S. November, 2007, a typical month.

CANADA 1,919
SAUDI ARABIA 1,530
MEXICO 1,484
VENEZUELA 1,227
NIGERIA 1,215
IRAQ 508
ANGOLA 408
(thousands of barrels PER DAY)

This is just to help you follow along as the arguments swirl over policy toward Venzuela, the war in Iraq, the border with Mexico and our relations with Saudi Arabia. Gotta love those peaceful Canadians, huh?

And think of all the oil tankers out there in the ocean, every day and every night.

Exxon claims it’s won a round in its court battle against Venezuela. Venezuelan assets are now frozen in Britain and Netherlands. A lawsuit is in court int he U.S. as well. Exxon claims total Venezuelan assets valued at $36 billion dollars are now frozen.

In turn Venzuela is threatening to retaliate by cutting off oil exports to the U.S. in what it terms an economic war. Bet they won’t have any trouble selling that oil elsewhere.

Of course nothing like a good slam-bang international oil crisis to set up another upward surge in crude oil prices which have now once again gone over $90 per barrel. Exxon v. Venezuela trumps recession fears for now. And this is another full employment act for lawyers. Evene V’s socialist regime will have to pay international law firms. And we American gas guzzlers will help pay Exxon’s legal team every time we say “Fill ‘er up.”

This battle has been decades in the making and these lawsuits will be years in court. Venezuela’s just one of many countries moving toward more national control of assets long dominated by corporations from capital-rich nations. When Venezuela nationalized major oil fields there, Exxon went to court for payment. Russia, Iran, Ecuador and Bolivia will all be watching closely to see how this plays out.

The Environmental Protection Agency (Orwellian doublespeak in its current incarnation) seems to be having its own lame duck problems during the final months of the current American regime. The latest two attacks come from the non-executive parts of the federal government itself.

A federal appeals court decision said the EPA was wrong in its lenient rules on mercury from power plant emissions. Looking at the EPA’s decision to allow higher mercury pollution into the atmosphere, the court wrote, “This explanation deploys the logic of the Queen of Hearts, substituting EPA’s desires for the plain text.” The court said the EPA violated federal laws by allowing power plants to put out too much mercury. We have long known mercury poisoning can lead to “mad hatter” behavior. Perhaps those EPA adnministrators have been sniffing too much power plant emission?

Meanwhile both branches of Congress are after the EPA and its internal records. This is the on-going battle over states’ rights to have tougher anti-pollution laws than those of the federal government. In the past Califonria and other states have passed anti-emissions standards tougher than the national, but this time around the EPA refused to grant California its waiver to continue that practice. Both the U.S. House and Senate are now investigating, and demanding records concerning the EPA ruling and communications with the White House.

The EPA has refused to release such records, of course. It’s now known that the EPA staff recommended the agency approve California’s waiver. The EPA staff concluded vehicle emissions are contributing to global warming. The political appointees running the EPA overlooked the staff report and ruled against California. Now the battle over the EPA’s secret records is going to the subpoena stage.

This battle over vehicle emissions is reaching across the political landscape of America. It may be the lawyers’ full employment act. Florida just became the 17th state to join the lawsuit against the EPA and on the side of California which sued on January 2nd to uphold its state law against the EPA waiver denial. But the EPA got some more help on its side as well. You’ll never guess who’s joining the EPA…well, maybe you will. It’s the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers. They don’t want to have to build the same cars for America that they already have to build to suit regulations in Japan and Europe.

BLOGOSPHERE AND THE EPA

It shouldn’t be surprising that the intense political wrangling over air pollution would finally waft into the blogopshere. After all, even we bloggers breathe once in a while. Air R us.

Well, an EPA blogger just got massive flame from an activist group of scientists. You can see this EPA-hosted blog here, with nearly 600 comments, thanks to the concerted blogottack. All brought on by the EPA’s refusal to let California be California. Not to mention New York, Florida, et al.

If you want to give yourself a little bit of a reality check on a grey Northeast winter morning, check out the Cyberhomes Web site.

Fundamentally, the technology behind the site is meant for someone to gather basic data on a home or neighborhood where they’re hoping to move. Mainly the stuff is pretty real-estate focused, but if you dare, you can run charts on the Air Quality, Commute Time or typical Ultraviolet profile, you can.

So I did.

Here’s an example of what one of the charts looks like.

The results are displayed on an indexed scale of 1 to 100, where a higher number is a good thing. This neighborhood does horrible in terms of air quality, and my neighborhood in New Jersey doesn’t fare so well in that realm either.

Strangely enough, my mother’s home in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, fares a whole lot better. Hmm. Mom, about that guest suite …

Today, a few words about Eltek Valere, a maker of Direct Current power infrastructure technology that is giving the green movement a great big bear hug.

Eltek Valere’s biggest customer focus is the telecommunication industry, which Eltek Valere Chief Marketing Officer Greg Fasullo hasn’t been much discussed as a consumer of enormous amounts of electricity. According to stats cited by Fasullo, telcos used somewhere north of 1 percent of all electricity consumed in 2007. For one of those mindboggling analogies that I love so much, this is more than 160 billion kilowatt-hours annually, or more than the power consumed in a year by a company like Norway.

The company also figures that about 60 percent to 70 percent of that electricity goes into powering the telecommunications network and that about 10 percent of that power is wasted in the conversion between Direct Current (DC) and Alternating Current (AC). And therein lies its business proposition.

Eltek Valere has developed a high-efficiency line of AC-to-DC conversion equipment that Fasullo said cuts the power wasted in the conversion process in half. The example cited in its latest press release focuses on a mobile phone network with 20,000 base stations. Eltek Valere figures its new DC power systems would cut 34 million kilowatt-hours of wasted electricity, a carbon dioxide reduction of 27,360 tons and (more compelling to financial types) a cost savings of $5 million to the telco.

Here’s the complete rationale behind their technology in the form of a press release.

The first product in Eltek Valere’s new line is the Flatpack2 HE, a 2,000-watt, 48-volt rectifier for telco applications, which carries a price tag of about $450. The company claims that the new rectifier offers 96 percent efficiency in the conversion process, compared with the industry average of about 88 percent to 90 percent.

If you want to read more about DC technology options, check out my previous post about another DC equipment supplier (Validus DC Systems), click here.

I try to make a point of keeping promises, even though I may not always keep them right away. So, in response to a gentle e-mail earlier today from a kind reader, this is the first of a couple columns about using direct current (DC) as an energy option in the data center. (As opposed to Alternating Current, or AC.)

I’m writing about this issue for two reasons: First, because there seems to be some new innovation surrounding this technology and, two, it’s pretty clear that The Green Grid is starting to debate its own position on the topic as I mentioned in an earlier post. I don’t really know what that position is, because I wasn’t able to attend the organization’s Technical Forum this week in San Francisco. However, it’s something I hope to follow up on within the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, for some light reading (ha!), here is an article about some of the Green Grid’s earlier thoughts on AC vs. DC.

For the record, let me state that I don’t have an opinion about the AC vs. DC issue yet, mainly because I am not an electrical engineer and I don’t feel I’m adequately briefed to form one. I do know that DC is typically more often associated with batteries than anything else and that its historical challenge has been voltage degradation at distance. I am just writing about the options being presented to me in my capacity as a blogger on Green IT. To me, the whole thing is kind of like a VHS vs. BetaMax debate or substitute-your-favorite-format here argument, although the electric grid is a heck of a lot more ubiquitous and stands to have a bigger impact on our lives.

In any event, this first DC-related post is about a company called Validus DC Systems, which is in the process of introducing a new end-to-end integrated power infrastructure for data centers and for telecommunications companies. (More on telcos in my next post, when I report on my conversation with Eltek Valere, which creates power systems for telcos and industrial companies.)

Validus claims that its DC infrastructure technologies can help customers accommodate higher density data centers by distributing electricity throughout the data center more efficiently than AC designs. The company’s founder and CEO Rudy Kraus pitches the “Hybrid Power” design of its products, saying that they combine the best of the AC and DC worlds. Here’s a little backgrounder that outlines each of its modules. The bottom line: Validus believes that its technology can save up to 50 percent of the raised floor space in today’s typical data center and reduce the energy consumption.

By way of further making the DC case, Kraus notes that the internal guts of pretty much anything electronic these days — including computers, lighting and so on — run on direct current already. What Validus has done is make DC more scalable, he says. “If everything downstream is DC, why would we want to send AC?”

That’s actually a pretty good question, but one I’m not qualified to answer. How about you?

Finally, this is probably a sponsored report, but I’m going to share the link anyway, because it provides a good background on the AC/DC debate.

Next up: Highlights of my conversation with Eltek Valere.

Map of polar bear populations, courtesy USGS and IFAW. [Click image to enlarge.]

The auction’s over and the feds may rake in nearly three billion dollars for leases on land nobody will ever see. Land in the new oil and gas leases is far from shore and deep beneath the surface of the sea. A surface that may be rising because of global warming. But that did not stop oil and energy companies from bidding nearly $2.7 billion for exploration rights under the Chukchi Sea off northern Alaska. The cost to bring any oil to shore from there will be substantial.

Alaskan media morosely pointed out none of the lease payments will go to the state, only to the national government. Seven global oil companies bid. Royal Dutch Shell led with $2.1 billion in winning bids, followed by Conoco with more than $506 million. Other bidders included: Spanish firm Repsol, Italian-based Eni, and Norway’s Statoil Hydro.

There’s a review period during which the U.S. agency in charge will study the bids. Meanwhile political opposition is vocal and includes Native Alaskan groups and members of Congress. Some Congressmen had asked that the leases not be opened for bids until there is a final decision on the conservation status of the polar bear. But the Interior Department moved ahead.

One of Alaska’s two polar bear populations hunt in the Chukchi Sea where the leases lie. While one part of the Interior Department opened the leases for bid, another last month postponed a decision on whether to grant endangered status to the polar bear. There are currently about 2.000 polar bears in the Chukchi region according to the U.S.G.S. and the population is a target of widespread poaching along the Siberian shoreline. 2,000 is a small number. More people attend many high school basketball games. That’s how many bloggers can fit on the head of a pin.

Today I spoke with Program Officer Paul Todd of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. He indicated the polar bear may get hit with a triple whammy. Already the U.S. Geological Survey issued a report on the threat to polar bear, walrus and other arctic mammals from global warming and melting ice sheets. Todd wanted to explain why his group is worried that the two branches of the U.S. Interior Department are making decisions that could doom polar bears. He talked of how the oil exploration will necessarily mean disturbance of the ice sheets in the Chukchi Sea. That’s an important hutning area for one bear population.

If the next Interior Department decision is to NOT list the polar bear as endangered, it would leave the U.S. government a great deal of leeway in setting any bear protection regs for the Chukchi Sea. Merely “threatened” status would not necessarily limit what could be done in the bear’s hunting territory, said Todd. “Endangered” would carry some more specific limitations on what could be done by oil companies. Any bets on which way the current Interior Department will rule?

It’s noteworthy that the World Conservation Union put the polar bear onto its Red List in 2005, meaning it’s considered in danger of extinction globally. Of course, that’s a list based on science and population trends, ignoring the niceties of politics and the price of oil. You’ll be relieved to note that petroleum geologists and tech bloggers are NOT on the the Red List.

Another crucial issue for the survival of polar bears is trophy hunting. It’s illegal in the U.S. but allowed in Canada which has the most polar bears. In the U.S. polar bear hunting is blocked by the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Todd said Canada’s endangered species laws are weaker than those in the U.S. Anybody with enough money can get a license to hunt a polar bear in Canada. Some are killed by Native Americans but permits are also sold off for profit, in trophy hunting packages that can cost as much as $30,000. Of that only a $750 Canadian government permit fee goes to conservation. Nearly a thousand Americans have legally imported polar bear trophies in the past decade. Business as usual. Todd said the Russian polar bears are protected from hunters but not from the shrinking polar ice and may be the first populations to disappear.

If the polar bear is found to be endangered, that would in turn endanger trophy hunting. American citizens would NOT be allowed to bring dead bear claws or skins back to hang in the front hall. That would severely limit the market for those costly polar bear trophy hunts, and might incidentally save some bears.

Todd pointed out it was a Canadian university that studied trophy hunting and found it could increase the danger of polar bear extinction. Only large males are hunted and that could make it harder for mature females to find a mate, thus reducing their reproductive success at a time when climate change is creating severe stress on all polar bears.

One website headline summarized it thus: “Oil and gas companies win, polar bears lose.” Not just the bears, says Todd, but four species of northern seals, walrus and some Arctic dwelling whales that hunt beneath the ice. Of course, there’s already a lawsuit to block the leases. And it’s not likely to be settled before there’s a new resident in the White House and a new Secretary of the Interior.

There’s a new online calculator for businesses. Let’s you calculate greenhouse gas equivalencies. For example, if you an estimate of the amount of gasoline, natural gas or electricity your business consumers, the calculator will give you the greenhouse gas emissions that adds to the atmosphere.

Click here to check it out on the E.P.A. website.

If you click here you’ll go to the E.P.A.’s personal or household emissions calculator.

For those of you who couldn’t attend the Green Grid Technical Forum this week in San Francisco, here’s a useful link to some of the presentations and white papers that were debated on the opening day of the conference.

I already know that some of this stuff is pretty controversial, especially the position that the Green Grid has taken about the use of Direct Current power in the data center, which is an issue that I’ve started doing some research on this week. Sadly, the group’s new peer review of a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Study on Direct Current in the Data Center is one of the reports that The Green Grid has chosen NOT to make public at this link yet.

Nonethless, here’s some background information on the work that Lawrence Berkeley is doing. Hmmm. Can you smell controversy? Anyway, watch this space for updates on Direct Current Options as I get deeper information on what’s going on.

If you believe in global warming, the National Wildlife Federation is aggregating what’s known or expected to happen in your state in the U.S. Of course, for those who continue to deny global warming or see it as nature’s cleansing process, all of this is nonsense. What the earth needs is another good, healthy mass extinction.

Here’s the link to NWF’s website.

To pick s state at random, here’s some of what’s in store for Kansas, according to NWF: hotter weather brings more prairie fires, dries up wetlands and drives numerous species out of the state altogether. More tropical diseases and more respiratory diseases due to increased air pollution.

Maybe they should build those coal-burning plants right away while most Kansans are healthy enough to enjoy the air conditioning.