Folks, don't forget the tip jars to reward Cry Wolf's hard work with more eyeballs by using the link farms and link referral services.

What we mean by this is sending and rating these links at reddit, digg, del.icio.us, /., fark, stumbleupon, metafilter, and the like.  Reddit, Digg, and del.icio.us are available up in the little icons under the title.  These services only take a moment to sign up for...so please, if you liked this piece, make sure to spend a few seconds and help this information get spread around--and make sure to hit the European sites for this one.

Small suggestion, but maybe a good approach would be to submit the story to digg when its added to TOD - then provide a link through to digg the story directly from TOD. That way the story is already submitted and its easy for people to digg one specific instance of the story.

See this blog entry for how it can be done.

Frankly, these people operate with a perpetual optimistic bias, but in this case a little bit of optimism my be in order if they let the market work (which is one enormous IF).  There are quite a few independent producers building positions in the north sea.  Their objective is to do to the North Sea what has been done to the Gulf of Mexico.  It is possible, actually probable, that they will be successful if the governments stay out of their way and allow them to run their business.  We will see.  Whether they can arrest the decline will have to be seen, but they certainly can slow it.
One of the things the UK governement has done is to add 10% to corporation tax payable by North Sea operators - twice - that's 20% additional tax - not much of an incentive?