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Canada's Business News Network (BNN) talks to John Kingston, global director, news, Platts, about Platts' annual global energy forum and the feasibility of clean energy.

Click here to watch the video.

I watched in amazement Sunday night as the CBS news icon 60 Minutes conspired with Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon to present a distorted promotion of US natural gas shale exploitation as our nation's answer to dependence on OPEC. McClendon told the prime-time audience that US shales hold the natural gas equivalent of two Saudi Arabias worth of oil while veteran correspondent Leslie Stahl failed to ask him how that factoid translates into refined gasoline for our cars.

I've never been big on conspiracy theories. Let me rephrase that: I think conspiracy theories are the refuge of very small minds. I'd like to rephrase that again, but we do have rules of decency here at The Barrel.

So when somebody sent me the following link about the death of Matt Simmons, I was just stunned. I guess if you see the world through a prism of CIA plots and Big Oil conspiracies and Zionist plots, anything is possible.

On Platts Energy Week, we gave a slightly less breathless summary of Matt's career. Time restraints in TV being what they are, there was hardly enough time to capture it all. But we tried.

Although a jury of ousted castmates rejected his claim on the $1 million prize for this season's Survivor: Samoa show, oilman-turned-TV-villain Russell Hantz was vindicated when the larger TV audience voted him its "player of the season" with a $100,000 consolation prize.

But Hantz was still arguing his case at the season finale ("Oilman-turned-TV villain Hantz eyes $1 million 'Survivor' prize," The Barrel, December 18, 2009) Sunday night, where he offered the $100,000 to winner Natalie White if she would just acknowledge his stature as the show's true sole survivor.

Oil industry representative Russell Hantz has secured a spot in the three-hour season finale for the CBS Survivor: Samoa reality game show scheduled for Sunday night, after lying and cheating his way into the final five. 

The 36-year-old Hantz ("Meet the oil industry's newest high-profile villain," The Barrel September 22, 2009) runs Hantz Tankering in Dayton, Texas, but he may well have found his true calling on the Survivor show, where he has emerged as one of the franchise's most memorable villains of all time, according to numerous Survivor fan web sites.

Oil industry representative Russell Hantz has secured an important early advantage toward winning this season's Survivor: Samoa reality TV show with discovery of the all-important hidden immunity necklace in an unorthodox fashion, CBS revealed Thursday night on the second installment of the show.

Hantz's discovery of the necklace emerged as the leading highlight from the show, which covered life among the contestant-castaways last summer on days four through six of their competitive 39-day adventure.  Possession of that immunity necklace will likely prevent any of his tribemates from banishing him from the show until deep into the season, securing Hantz a powerful advantage toward claiming the $1 million prize that comes with designation as the "ultimate survivor."

The oil patch boasts a new high-profile "villain," but this time we won't be seeing him in a perp walk outside a federal courthouse somewhere. Nope, in this case you can catch him every Thursday night on TV working maliciously to upset the rhythm of the iconic CBS reality show Survivor. And the Platts Oil Barrel plans to follow along, reporting his weekly antics as he attempts to "outplay, outwit and outlast" 19 other Survivor contestants vying for a prize of $1 million that goes to the last one standing sometime near the end of the year.

His name is Russell Hantz -- owner of Hantz Tankering in Dayton, Texas, near Houston. He's made no secret of his strategy for this season, which debuted last Thursday in Samoa.

It's been said in recent years that to get the pulse of what America is talking about, check out the monologues of Jay Leno and David Letterman.

Here's what Jay had to say this week about a particular oil issue.

One thing is clear from the first episode of the new cable TV show, "Black Gold," on truTV: working on an oil rig in the Permian Basin (or anywhere, for that matter), is more dangerous than writing about oil in a Washington office (or anywhere for that matter).

truTV, formerly Court TV, has reinvented itself as television's "destination for real-life stories told from an exciting and dramatic first-person perspective." Not reality TV, it claims, rather "actuality," which actually is pretty much the same thing.