Lisa Margonelli: All Publications, Events and Press

Minding the Gap

Kirsten Gilbert — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:15:00 -0500

A New America Event
12/02/2009 - 9:15am

For the first time in more than a generation, President Obama is rewriting America's energy policy through a wide-ranging hodgepodge of initiatives including: stimulus funds, the rescue of the auto industry, EPA regulations, FERC initiatives, domestic climate change legislation, international agreements like the Copenhagen round, biofuel and plug-in hybrid mandates, and many smaller tax incentives and subsidies. The piecemeal nature of these changes makes them seem smaller than they are, and makes their impact--both positive

Lisa Margonelli on Climate Legislation | New America/Politico Live Chat

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:13:00 -0400

Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain and director of New America's Energy Policy Initiative, takes questions on the current state of the energy and climate debate in this week's New America/Politico Live Chat ...

Cap and Trade Bill Stirs Controversy over Jobs in US | Xinhua

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:14:00 -0400

Lisa Margonelli, fellow at the New America Foundation, another Washington D.C. think tank, countered that the government has invested in young industries before and that this time around is nothing unusual.

Zero-Emission Cars Run Well | China Daily

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:42:00 -0400

Zero-emission vehicles could have a strong future in China as "pollution limits China's growth", said Lisa Margonelli, a New America Foundation Fellow who has written widely about alternative energy in China. In one article, she pointed out that ...

Don’t Pay the Rich to Scrap Their Cars

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 16 May 2009 08:15:00 -0400

As someone who drove a clattering old pickup in the slow lane for nine years, I watched with interest earlier this month as House Democrats reached a compromise on “cash for clunkers” legislation that would give people vouchers worth as much as $4,500 to replace their older cars with new ones. But the plan, which would cost $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion, is a huge disappointment; any program that expensive should deliver much better mileage.

Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:35:00 -0400

The unincorporated community of Mountain Pass, California, has little to recommend it to tourists. A scraggly outcrop of rocks and Joshua trees alongside Route 15, it has no kitschy landmarks like the 134-foot-tall thermometer that nearby Baker, California, installed in the Mojave Desert, and no casinos like Las Vegas has an hour up the road. But behind a Band-Aid-colored industrial gate lies an attraction of sorts: a 55-acre open-pit mine created by a 21st-century gold rush, one result of the effort to keep the world from getting hotter than it already is.

Underreported: Neodymium and Green Energy | WNYC

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:31:00 -0400

Neodymium is a rare earth metal and important component in the electric car engines and wind turbines that are being touted as the future of alternative energy. But, neodymium is not without it’s problems. We'll look at what neodymium is and why we may soon face a global shortage of it with New America Foundation Fellow Lisa Margonelli. Link to audio

CA EVENT: California, the Crisis and the Next Social Contract

Elizabeth Wu — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
02/09/2009 - 8:00am

Beyond the Haze

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:14:00 -0500

Even as my plane was landing in Jinan, the capital of China's heavily industrialized Shandong province, I could see cranes. By the time I got to the city center I'd counted 76 more construction cranes along the way. There were probably more, but in the city proper the smog was so thick I couldn't see any farther than the sidewalk. When I visited, just a few weeks before last summer's Olympic extravaganza kicked off, Shandong had just been named to the Chinese EPA's "green blacklist" for its

Energizing the New Narrative

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:36:00 -0500

A Green Stimulus for the People

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:57:00 -0500

By proposing a $100 billion "green stimulus" package to create jobs and cut carbon emissions, President-elect Obama has wisely decided not to let the economic crisis get in the way of addressing climate change. He may even see the crisis as a way of tackling climate change faster. In September his campaign's energy adviser, Jason Grumet, told a Harvard crowd that the conversation about climate change would be transformed when legislation addressing it is seen as "the next big American stimulus package."

Practical Routes to Meeting Climate Change, Energy Goals | Biloxi Sun Herald

Communications — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:12:00 -0500

Finally, Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation writes in Energy Security for American Families that helping moderate-income households invest in ...

The Plug-In Paradox

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:56:00 -0500

With its quirky vintage cars and grease-stained floor, pat's garage looks like a typically hip San Francisco auto repair shop. Until you notice that the street outside is overweighted in Toyota Priuses and inside, against the wall, stands a stack of $10,000 batteries made by A123 Systems. Drop one of these 185-pounders into the spare tire well of the Prius, get garage owner Patrick Cadam and partner Nicholas Rothman to tinker with it overnight, and you've got a hybrid that can be plugged into any outlet for maxing your gas mileage. Rothman, fluent in Japanese and a certified Prius technician, says he's performed more than 100 upgrades and is "addicted" to keeping the car's fuel economy at 99.9mpg, which is as high as its display goes.

Plug-in hybrids use 60% less gasoline than nonhybrid cars. Despite their high sticker price, they've earned powerful fans, including former CIA director James Woolsey, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and California's Air Resources Board, which has ordered that 58,333 be produced by 2014 as part of the state's climate change policy. In September GM unveiled its Chevy Volt, capable of driving 40 miles on battery power before the battery needs a recharge from the gasoline engine. The Senate also managed to find a place in the $700 billion bailout for a $7,500 tax credit for plug-ins.

Plug-ins are ready to hit the highway, but are drivers? Their behavior has a huge influence on the performance of the technology under the hood. Rothman can get 99.9mpg, but an average driver will get 80, an aggressive one, 60 and a negligent one, who forgets to plug in the vehicle the night before and then drives like Dale Earnhardt Jr., less than 40. Argonne National Lab found that a bad driver who turns on the air conditioner can squash the plug-in's performance by reducing battery range from 40 miles to 15, which won't get most commuters to work and back.

UC, Davis anthropologist Thomas Turrentine and engineer Kenneth Kurani have spent 19 years looking at how the wiring in drivers' heads interfaces with the engineering under the hoods of alternative vehicles. Their interviews with drivers have flipped conventional thinking on its head more than once. While everyone knows how much they pay at the pump, none of 57 households surveyed kept track of annual gas spending. None of the Prius buyers they talked to had ever looked under the hood. One engineer told them he'd done an elaborate spreadsheet of costs for different vehicles but ultimately bought a Ford Escape Hybrid, the car that made the least financial sense, because he wanted to let Detroit know what kind of cars he wants them to build.

Plug-ins may be an entirely different story from hybrids like the Prius. They offer far higher efficiency, but no one knows how to use them or make the most of them. "There's a big behavior variable with the benefits," says Turrentine. To measure that variable, he and Kurani got a two-year, $1.8 million grant this summer from California to upgrade ten Priuses at Pat's Garage and place them in 80 commuter households. The cars will record every plugging-in, every trip, speeds and fuel use. Some dashboards will have screens offering drivers extra feedback to increase their gas mileage. Afterward the profs will interview drivers.

The only thing the researchers can conclude at this stage is that, despite knowing very little about plug-ins, the public is bonkers about them. Hundreds of families volunteered for the study. They sent résumés and photos of their solar panels. One engineer offered up data he'd been gathering on his own driving for two years. There was even an awkward moment during a meeting when a state official asked to be part of the study.

UC, Davis Ph.D. candidate Jonn Axsen designed an online game last year to measure how 2,373 new car-buying households would weigh tradeoffs between cost and fuel efficiency. He found that while nearly 62% of those surveyed wanted a car with gas mileage near 125mpg, only 12% were comfortable with leaving gas behind altogether with an all-electric vehicle, probably out of fear of running out of juice. This emotional trigger could fade as more drivers experience plug-ins. "It's unavoidable that the world will change while we're doing this research," says Kurani.

Google is seeking early answers, too, and doing so through its forte: social engineering. This is a company that decorates the inside of its bathroom stalls with productivity tips. (Example: how to increase type size in a Java program.) The company has a fleet of six Prius plug-ins, averaging 94mpg, and two Ford Escape plug-ins averaging 49mpg, all from Pat's Garage. Even though all the stats are up for public inspection at rechargeit.org, there is no system of shaming for poor mileage. "The more Googley thing to do is to set up a contest for getting the best mileage," says Google engineer Rolf Schreiber. No such contest is planned, but members of the company's climate-change group have an informal rivalry to exceed 105mpg. "I could totally see something erupting in social networks where people compare driving styles," he adds.

Google has bigger plans than improving gas mileage. Like other plug-in champions, Google wants to make hybrids a form of distributed storage, pushing and pulling power to and from the electrical grid to make it more resilient to fluctuations in demand. But simply substituting coal-fired electricity for gasoline is not particularly Googley, hence the giant solar panels that hover like comic-strip thought balloons over its hybrid parking lot. A study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy suggests that in some states with heavy dependence on coal-fired power, using plug-in hybrids releases as much greenhouse gas as driving unimproved Priuses.

"When you look at the horizon, there are chances for big changes here," says Schreiber. "West Texas wind blows in the middle of the night, when the electricity is almost worthless!" Hybrids plugged in at night could capture that electricity and redirect it to the morning commute or feed it back onto the grid at noon when it's worth something.

Willett Kempton, a professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware, who runs its carbon-free energy program, says owners of plug-ins should be given an incentive to make their batteries available to the grid. Frequency regulation--the minute-by-minute balancing of electrical current on the grid--is already a service worth $40 per megawatt-hour delivered. He estimates that some plug-in drivers could earn $2,000 a year by making their batteries available as reservoirs. Now he's studying databases of driving habits to see if some groups of people would be better candidates than others. "Some people have very erratic and bizarre driving patterns, like volunteer firemen," says Kempton.

For decades Americans have embraced the cognitive dissonance of sitting in traffic during punishing commutes while claiming that what they value about their cars is the sense of independence and the open road. Are we ready to let rationality intrude on our sacred relationship with our cars?

Nonfiction Review: 'Steaks' as Cattle Showbiz

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:03:00 -0500

Before I read Betty Fussell's "Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef," I thought I knew enough about America's quintessential meal. After all, I wolfed down quite a few myself. And I'd read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "Fast Food Nation." And there was some additional experience in 4-H. At 12 I wrestled 200-pound calves at the county fair's Calf Scramble. The next year I was back at the fair with a 1,200-pound steer I'd trained to walk on a leash and tolerate having his tail braided with vinegar and water to give him the perm of a Sarah Palin-era beauty contestant when it was brushed out.

But there is much more to be learned in Fussell's rangy, inquiring book about the cultural, political and environmental aspects of the steak. And while the subject of beef may seem pretty well-chewed, Fussell goes where no Pollan or Schlosser has gone before.

The author of nine other books, including "My Kitchen Wars," Fussell is a writer of an idiosyncratic but rigorous stripe. She doesn't just read about slaughterhouses, she takes a class in commercial butchering. She details a recipe for disaster (the government's failure to test rigorously for mad cow disease) alongside actual recipes for White Dog Cafe's Philly Cheese Steak and Steak Diane, among others. The only problem is that by the time you get to the recipes you may feel queasy about eating the beef.

"Raising Steaks" starts with a rewriting of the history of the settling of the West through steak. "Like a movie Western, steak ritualizes our appetite for violence and purges us of its needs," she says. As with the Western, the steak's purity and naturalness turns out to be an illusion.

In the early part of the book she combines historical research with visits with modern-day cowboys and cattlemen who discuss the pros and cons of different types of rangeland feeding. Although these portraits are interesting enough, none are deep or critical enough to create a narrative beyond where on earth Fussell, who is in her 70s, is going to go next.

But perhaps that is one of the lessons. Fussell observes as she traces the history of the rodeo and the cowboy, "That the cattle business is a form of show business was apparent from the start." Without the sizzle, would we care about the steak?

"Raising Steaks" hits its stride in Greeley, Colo., home to the largest concentration of cattle feedlots in the country, and also the former home of Fussell's grandparents: "strict teetotalers, farmers, and colonic irrigationists." She traces this concentration of the country's cattle ( just 2 percent of America's feedlots supply 85 percent of the beef ) through its baroque history, mentioning that some of the feedlot cows receive not just antibiotics, growth hormones and corn, but also chocolate bars, popcorn and Tater Tots junked by nearby factories.

"What I saw ... intimately was the history of these feedmills and how they grew from innocence to monstrousness," she says, observing pointedly that critics like Michael Pollan have failed to understand how the feedlots reflect what she calls "the human face of men who'd grown up with cows and cared about them. ..."

Through this she comes to what may be the book's real contribution to the beef debate: "I came to feel that if you must single out any single element of the contemporary beef industry in order to condemn it, it should not be corn or feedlots per se, it should be industrial scale."

Later she mentions that the beef industry's opposition to testing for mad cow and E. coli seems rooted in a fear that the "rugged individual, maybe even America itself, is no longer in control of his destiny." I think she's on to something, and I wished she'd pounded the point home with a sledgehammer.

But a few pages later, Fussell is off to the slaughterhouse to make a different point about how the USDA's grading system has almost nothing to do with consumer preferences and everything to do with the beef industry. Soon she's sneaking into a beef industry conference to dissect its politics, which include suspicion of "the East," environmentalists and "Marxists" as potential agents of bioterrorism, or Nazi storm troopers "persecuting" the industry. Marxists in the meat supply! She ends the book, fittingly, with a recipe for eating steak raw.

CA EVENT: Green Assets

Communications — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:30:00 -0500

A New America Event
11/18/2008 - 12:00pm

Volatile energy costs are a concern for every California family-particularly the millions of households for whom every extra dollar spent on energy comes at the expense of other necessities and the ability to save. For these families, securing affordable energy would result in savings that could be used for short- or long-term investments. In a cruel twist, the people most in need of relief from high energy costs are those least able to afford the longer-term investments that… more

Lisa Margonelli on CSPAN2's BookTV | 'Bubblin' Crude - The Life and Times of Oil'

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:53:00 -0500

Panel on the history and politics of oil with Lisa Margonelli, Alexandra Fuller, and Robert Bryce. Following their remarks, the panelists took questions from audience members. LINK to video

CA EVENT: Turning Crisis into Opportunity

Communications — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
11/06/2008 - 6:00pm

The California Latino Legislative Caucus Foundation, in partnership with the New America Foundation, invites you to a special policy summit intended to educate legislators and Californians on the most pressing public policy issues facing our state.

Little can be more important to California's emerging Latino majority and Californians as a whole than the health and vitality of our economy. This is a vital issue for today and for the future. In this summit we will bring together members of the Legislature and… more

Lisa Margonelli in Grist Magazine | 'Bailout We Can Believe In'

Communications — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:39:00 -0400

There's a way we can do both those things at once: energy efficiency. The lower you are on the income scale, the higher a percentage of your income you spend on energy costs. A coordinated national program to boost the efficiency of our housing stock would benefit those most in need: struggling homeowners in danger of going under. (It would also, incidentally, reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.)

What might such a program look like? Glad you asked. Lisa Margonelli at the New America Foundation just released a proposal for Energy Security for American Families initiative, which gets into the details of this kind of effort. LINK

Energy Security for American Families

Communications — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
09/24/2008 - 12:15pm

On September 24, 2008, the New America Foundation’s Next Social Contract Initiative and Economic Growth Program hosted a panel discussion about the latest proposal in New America’s “Big Ideas” series: NAF Irvine Fellow Lisa Margonelli’s “Energy Security for American Families Initiative” (ESAF). New America’s Frank Micciche moderated the panel, which also included Dr. Mark Cooper, Research Director of the Consumer Federation of America; Therese Langer, Transportation Program Director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy; and… more

The Energy Security for American Families Initiative

adminn — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:11:00 -0400