Muslim Tours Brazil’s Secret History of Southern Hospitality I pressed the buzzer to the gate on the crest of a steep hill and waited, not knowing who or what to expect. I hadn’t written or called, and didn’t really expect to find anyone home. Within seconds, though, a dapper white-haired man with black metal-frame glasses came walking down the yard's path in a chipper sort of way. He looked like Colonel Sanders’s twin, but without the goatee and moustache. After I fumbled something in Portuguese about my being an American and that I had come to write a story but wasn't sure that this was the right place, the man flashed a great big smile. “Well, yaw cum raht in,” he chirped excitedly. Say what? Six months earlier, I had moved to Brazil to work as a fledgling editor for an English-language newspaper in São Paulo, a sort of International Herald Tribune for Latin America. Surely, that account was more science fiction than real. What I was hearing didn’t sound like it came from someone of this generation, even of this century. With Mrs. “Dog?”
“North American energy independence by 2020″ Guest post by David Middleton GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently released an outline of his plan to achieve “North American energy independence” by 2020. While the white paper (1) is short on specific details, it does contain quite a few good ideas and some supporting documentation. So, without any further prologue, I’m going to jump right into some numbers. Can we “get there from here”? According to the American Petroleum Institute (2) the current estimate of undiscovered technically recoverable Federal resources (UTRR-Fed) of crude oil currently stands at 116.3 billion barrels. Figure 1. The UTRR-Fed are concentrated in areas close to existing exploration and exploitation infrastructure. There is no reason that these potential resources could not be exploited within the next few decades if the U.S. government adopted regulatory policies geared toward exploitation. Figure 2. Canada expects to double its oil production by 2030 (3). Figure 3. Does Policy Matter? Figure 4. EIA.