Oil supplies may fall short of demand by 13 million barrels a day by 2030, according to a study led by former Exxon Mobil Corp. chairman Lee Raymond and based on forecasts from the world’s largest oil companies

Data collected from as many as 12 international oil companies showed global production may reach 105 million to 110 million barrels a day by 2030. That’s as much as 11 percent below US government forecasts for 118 million barrels a day of demand. The report was approved yesterday by the National Petroleum Council, an advisory group that conducted the study in response to a request from US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

“We need energy efficiency, we need to moderate the rate of growth of demand,” Bodman said after the report was released. “We need diversity of suppliers and of supplies.”

Al-Qaida is using its growing strength in Pakistan and Iraq to plot attacks on U.S. soil, heightening the terror threat facing the United States over the next few years, intelligence agencies concluded in a report unveiled Tuesday.

At the same time, the intelligence analysts worry that international cooperation against terrorism will be hard to sustain as memories of Sept. 11 fade and nations’ views diverge on what the real threat is.

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: “Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo.”

Proponents of “peak oil” – the theory that global crude oil production has hit its zenith and is headed for a steep decline – are steamed with a U.S. oil industry group’s findings that the world has plenty of oil.

Next week the U.S. National Petroleum Council – a board of high-level U.S. oil industry executives – releases its study titled “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy,” conducted at the behest of Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.

According to the report’s executive summary obtained by Reuters, the world is not running out of oil but there are “accumulating risks” to securing supply through 2030.

People in Philadelphia would swelter through as many as 30 days over 100 degrees each summer. The entire Northeast ski industry except western Maine would likely go out of business. And spruce and hemlock forests – as well as song birds such as the Baltimore oriole – would all but disappear from New Jersey to the Canada border.

These are some of the conclusions of a two-year study by the public interest group Union of Concerned Scientists of the effects of global warming in the Northeast if current greenhouse gas emission patterns around the world continue unabated. Winters will be on average 8 to 12 degrees warmer by the end of the century, and summers 6 to 14 degrees hotter.