Natural gas is a relatively clean and inexpensive fossil fuel which can be burned to produce a reasonable amount of energy. As of March 2008, California has some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world on the spot market. A lot of this is due to California’s ample supply of gas coming in from Canada and the Rocky Mountains.

Last semester Commissioner John Geesman of the California Energy Commission. Came and spoke in one of my classes. A large part of his talk focused on California’s increasing reliance on gas. As gas use expands California needs to secure reliable sources of gas to mitigate price risks; the old law of supply and demand suggests that the more supply we can secure, the lower our prices will be. One method of securing greater supply is by importing liquefied natural gas (LNG). LNG is cooled and compressed gas which is more suitable for shipping from distant countries (a liquid or solid state of a substance has approximately 1/1000th the volume of the gaseous state).
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Yesterday while checking my gmail I noticed a link in the RSS feed at the top of the page to an International Herald Tribune article described as something along the lines of “Chinese investors savvy in the art market.” I clicked on the link and it brought me to an article entitled, Souren Melikian: Art casualties from Tibet to Cambodia find an eager market. The article was interesting, but nothing like the description from the RSS. Instead the article was about two recent auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s of art from Southeast Asia and the finest examples coming from Tibet. The catalog for the Sotheby’s auction can be found here; unfortunately Christie’s does not appear to catalog their catalogs online.
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