Shares in Royal Dutch Shell continued to rise on Friday after climing 2.5 per cent on Thursday, helped by a note from Neil Perry at Morgan Stanley that has been attracting some attention. The argument is that after four years of "relentless" de-rating for the oil super-majors, "the large cap now represents the cheapest access to energy in the world."

That goes for BP and Total, but it is particularly true of Shell, which is sitting on a hidden $120bn in shareholder value, if only someone could find out a way to unlock it, say Mr Perry and his team. If you put sensible valuations on Shell’s downstream businesses such as refining and chemicals, at the current share price investors in the company get 8.4bn barrels of oil equivalent for free.

Well, maybe. If assets appear to be persistently mis-priced, there is generally a reason for it. It is hard to see any of the usual liberators of hidden value, such as private equity or activist investment funds, wanting to walk into the political and operational minefield of the big oil business. A merger between two majors, such as the BP / Shell tie-up kicked around a couple of years ago, would seem similarly likely to founder on the rocks of regulation, as BP concluded at the time.

That’s not to say that financial engineering is pointless. As Morgan Stanley suggests, some smarter management of Shell’s assets and liabilities could improve  its performance. But the fundamental challenge facing the majors - the ever more arduous quest for resources - cannot be magicked away. As this story demonstrates all too clearly.

The price of oil fell sharply on Wednesday (FT story here)  after US Energy Information Administration figures showed US crude stocks rising by 6.9m barrels to their highest for nine years. The figures have been challenged; a note overnight from Adam Robinson of Lehman Brothers asks: "Is the US refinery system broken, or are EIA surveys?"

But taken at face value, the data certainly support the Opec argument that there is no need for its members to raise production yet, because it is not a shortage of crude supplies that are driving gasoline prices higher, but low refinery utilisation. Whether the high level of stocks means the price of oil is going to fall, however, is another matter. It is often argued that refining tightness also pushes up the cost of crude, and even without that effect, the supply / demand balance for the second half of the year looks tight.

For now, meanwhile, the oil price is supported by the Nigerian general strike.  This threatens oil exports only if prolonged, my colleague Dino Mahtani writes from Lagos. Edward Meir of Man Energy argues: "expect another modest leg lower [in the opil price] if the government buckles and ends the strike by rolling back price increases, as we expect them to do."

However, at the Oil Drum blog, Jeff Vail, an energy analyst with a homepage here, warns against ignoring the importance of "above ground factors" such as political disputes, strikes and armed conflict. He writes: "What we should not do is think that ‘above ground’ somehow means either ‘temporary’ or ‘less serious.’

Now President Bush has gone wishy-washy, Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, is emerging as the leader of the sceptics about man-made climate change, with this robustly-argued piece in the FT. His views have been taken as a rallying cry by other sceptics, and now you have a chance to put your questions to him in an online Q&A. He will be answering those questions from 1pm British Summer Time on Thursday June 21.

One question for him: why is the Czech Republic taking the European Commission to court over its allocation of permits in Phase 2 of the EU’s emissions trading scheme, when the Commission is already planning to allow it to emit more on average each year from 2008-2012 than it did in 2005?

My colleague Lucy Kellaway has a characteristically brilliant - and almost persuasive - defence of the widely-discussed motivational email from David Greer, the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin Energy, who leant heavily on the words of General Patton (FT stories require subscription.) The email has also been published on www.royaldutchshellplc.com, an anti-Shell website run by a father and son partnership that has been a long-running thorn in the company’s side.

Lucy writes: "Not only is it not the worst motivational e-mail ever written, it is actually one of the better ones," commending Mr Greer’s honesty and plain speaking.

Many of the comments in the discussion about the memo support her view, and some criticise the FT for reporting the leaked email at all. Contributors who say they know Mr Greer speak highly of his commitment to the Sakhalin 2 project and his management skills.

Even so, the lesson of all this, it seems to me, is that email is by its nature a pretty rotten motivational tool. Even General Patton’s original address to the 3rd Army would have fallen flat if it had pinged into their in-boxes one morning.

Research from Iowa State University has sounded a warning about the viability of the investment currently pouring into ethanol production in the US. "We think the expected returns to an ethanol plant are zero or negative in 2008," said Bruce Babcock, economist and director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State, in Ames, Iowa, quoted on the Inside Greentech blog. Robert Rapier of the R-Squared Energy Blog is also quoted in the article; he expounds on his biofuel scepticism here. One of the less compelling arguments against biofuels is in the Washington Post: it says the current support for ethanol and other biofuels would cost $140bn if extended over the next 15 years. On the scale of the US budget, that’s a rounding error.

All the same, it goes to support the warning raised by the International Energy Agency that we reported in last week’s FT: biofuels are not going to wean the world off oil any time soon.

No news yet from the informal meeting of environment ministers in Sweden that began today, following the G8 agreement on tackling climate change, covered on this blog by Fiona Harvey here and here. But Hu Jintao, China’s president, has been in the country signing a deal for, among other things, sharing environmental knowhow.

Meanwhile, the bloggers have been reacting to the Heiligendamm agreement. 3E Intelligance describes it as a "climate compromise… which will not be mentioned in the history books," and Blueclimate.org is similarly sceptical. The funniest take is from Jon Stewart, at Gristmill (you may need to scroll down.)

But the most disappointed response came from the newspaper pundit Melanie Phillips on BBC TV, who lamented what she saw as president Bush’s capitulation to the "ideological Big Lie" of man-made global warming (she writes about it on her blog here.) Ms Phillips, a graduate in English literature, reports "a steady stream of public support since the programme from people who have also rumbled the scam." Her fellow dissenters, she writes, "are silently refusing to sign up to this demonstrable absurdity, and… are resisting it in the way that all peoples resist lies which are imposed on pain of social ostracism, professional exile or worse – in their minds, which no-one can touch, and where the flame of truth and freedom never dies."

She cites Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic as an inspiration; his views as a climate change sceptic are well-known. But his reaction to the G8 deal, as reported by the Prague Daily Monitor, is a less than whole-hearted attack.

Climate change negotiations among the world’s developed nations for the last 25 years have moved at glacial speed. But in the past ten days, entrenched positions have melted faster than the polar ice caps. For the sudden thaw we have one person to thank: Angela Merkel.

Her gradual build-up of pressure on George W Bush, at times so subtle it went almost unnoticed, on Thursday June 7 resulted in a notable shift in international relations on global warming. As of the G8 meeting, the Kyoto protocol – the only international agreement ever to contain legally binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, which scientists say is necessary on a huge scale to safeguard the planet - had been unexpectedly salvaged from its slow demise at the hands of diplomatic intransigence. The unlikely rescuer? President Bush.

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“Breakthrough” is not a word generally associated with international talks on climate change. Nor is “progress”. The words that most often accompany reports on global warming negotiations are “stalemate” or “deadlock” or “frustration”.

And from a first glance at the G8 declaration on climate change – all 38 pages of it – you would be forgiven for thinking that it was just more of the same.

But hidden on page 16, under item 52, is a quite remarkable change to the international landscape on climate change.

The US has agreed to start negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto protocol at a UN meeting in Bali later this year.

Why is that so remarkable? Because since George W Bush became president, the US has rejected the Kyoto protocol and blocked attempts to start negotiations on a successor to the treaty when it expires in 2012.

So is it a breakthrough?

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