Green Trap

Chapter One Gasoline Prices Expected to Climb Higher WashingtonThere's pump shock at every corner gas station, with prices well over $7 a gallonand the government says you'd better get used to it. The Energy Department projects high gasoline prices at least through next year as producers struggle to keep up with demand, which has not slackened appreciably despite rising prices. Crude oil prices climbed to an all-time high of $112 per barrel yesterday, triggering a 634-point drop in the Dow-Jones Industrial average on the New York Stock Exchange. "We can expect to see gasoline prices soar as high as nine or ten dollars a gallon this summer," said James Dykes, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. "Gas prices have nowhere to go but up." Energy Department officials blamed the climbing oil prices on the growing demand for petroleum by China and India, two of the fastest-growing economies in the world, coupled with the fact that global oil production has peaked and is unlikely to increase. "There hasn't been a major new oil field discovered in well over a decade," said Roberta Groves, head of Gould Energy Corporation's explorations division. "With global oil production flat and global demand increasing steadily, oil prices will continue to climb for the foreseeable future." Financial News Tucson: The Mirror Lab Paul Cochrane dreaded leaving the Mirror Lab. Set beneath the massive slanting concrete of the University of Arizona's football stadium, the lab was only a three-minute walk from Cochrane's office, but it was three minutes in the blazing wrath of Tucson's afternoon sun. It was only the first week of May, yet Cochranewho had come from Massachusetts less than a year agohad learned to fear the merciless heat outside. As he limped down the steel stairway toward the lab's lobby, he mentally plotted his course back to his office at the Steward Observatory building, planning a route that kept him in the shade as much as possible. He was a slim, quiet man in his mid-thirties, wearing rimless glasses that made him look bookish. Dressed in the requisite denim jeans and short-sleeved shirt of Arizona academia, he still wore his Massachusetts running shoes rather than cowboy boots. And still walked with a slight limp from the auto crash that had utterly devastated his life. His hair was sandy brown, cut short, his face lean and almost always gravely serious, his body trim from weekly workouts with the local fencing group. Although his Ph.D. was in thermodynamics, he had accepted a junior position with the Arizona astronomy department, as far from Massachusetts and his earlier life as he could get. He reached the lobby, nodded to the undergrads working the reception desk, and took a breath before plunging into the desert heat outside the glass double doors. He saw that even though the window blinds behind the students had been pulled shut, the hot sunlight outside glowed like molten metal. His cell phone started playing the opening bars of Mozart's overture to The Marriage of Figaro. Grateful for an excuse to stay inside the air-conditioned lobby for a moment longer, Cochrane pulled the phone from his shirt pocket and flipped it open. His brother's round, freckled, red-haired face filled the phone's tiny screen. Surprised that his brother was calling, Cochrane plopped onto the faux leather couch next to the lobby doors. "Hello, Mike," he said softly as he put the phone to his ear. "It's been a helluBova, Ben is the author of 'Green Trap ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780765309242 and ISBN 0765309246.