Business Insider: Natural Gas Prices Are Crashing

Natural gas prices fell to a two-year low in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Monday.

Futures prices fell to the lowest level since January 2013, according to Bloomberg's Christine Buurma. Natural gas for January delivery settled at $3.144 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Prices have declined 26% this year.

The Hill: Falling Gasoline Prices Break Record, Says AAA

AAA said on Monday that falling U.S. gas prices have set a new record.

The auto group said the national average price of gas has fallen for 88 straight days, the longest period of daily declines ever tracked by AAA.
Gasoline prices, which started falling in September, are now below $2.50 a gallon, AAA said.

Climate Central: Clues in Coral May Explain Global Warming Slowdown, and Looming Spike

Chemical clues in skeletons produced by coral growing at Kiribati contain a newly discovered warning. They caution of a global climate system that’s capable of drawing decades’ worth of hoarded heat out of the Pacific Ocean, and belching it back into the atmosphere.

A cryptic chemical weather log kept by Tarawa Atoll’s stony coral in the tropical Pacific archipelago has been cracked, helping scientists explain a century of peaks and troughs in global warming -- and inflaming fears that a speedup will follow the recent slowdown.

Added to a growing body of research, the newly published findings indicate that all it would take to trigger what could be an historically unparalleled period of rising global temperatures would be a shift in the winds. And that type of change in the intensity of Pacific trade winds appears to happen every twenty to 30 years or so.

Guardian: What’s It Like to Be a Woman Working in the Energy Industry?

Gender is an ongoing issue for women working in energy. Even after five years in the onshore wind industry, I am often greeted with some surprise when I arrive on site if the (usually entirely male) installation team I am working with haven’t met me before.

There are signs of progress in attracting and retaining women in the energy industry. A recent survey by Scottish Renewables found that more than a quarter of employees in the Scottish renewable energy sector are women -- a much larger proportion than work in the oil and gas or nuclear sectors. I believe the fact that renewables is a relatively young industry has an influence on these findings. It is a dynamic and exciting area to work in, and I am sure that’s what makes it attractive to women.

CNN: Is Space-Based Solar Power the Energy of the Future?

The United States, China, India and Japan all have projects at various stages of development that would see robots assemble solar arrays that could provide the Earth with massive amounts of clean and renewable energy delivered wirelessly.

Some variants of the idea could even see as much as 1 GW of energy beamed to receivers on Earth -- enough to power a large city.

According to Dr. Paul Jaffe, spacecraft engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the concept is scientifically sound.

"NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy did a study in the late 70s that cost $20 million at the time and looked at it in pretty great depth," Dr. Jaffe told CNN. "The conclusion at that time was that there was nothing wrong with the physics, but the real question is the economics."