NYTimes.com Times Select

It's busy season for gas station attendants -- with prices for a gallon of regular unleaded bopping around $3.11 nationally, they need to change their signs at least once a day. Many drivers hate these price changes, and I see their point: Not only are rising gas prices a financial burden; they also function as a sort of emotional baseball score -- an index of American economic health. When prices are high, anxiety… more

If you want to move four million gallons of gasoline from a refinery in New Jersey to gas stations in Baltimore, you'll need a 400-foot-long double-hulled barge and a 5000-horsepower tugboat to push it. Then to pilot the load, you'll need a crew of people willing to be away from their families for two weeks at a time while working six-hour shifts around the clock. And you'll need about a billion dollars worth of liability coverage.

One morning this… more

Whenever I receive e-mail from people I met while traveling in Chad, I worry. I visited the deeply poor central African country in 2003, just after it became the world's newest oil exporter. Back then, kids in the streets told me oil was a "blessing," and women wore new dresses reading (in French) "Chad, Our economy is petroleum." Chad's oil project was the product of a innovative collaboration between the World Bank, Exxon Mobil and the Chadian government, and the… more

Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed to spend $65 billion from the government's general fund to double the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For most Americans, the reserve, where 700 million barrels of oil have been stored since the late 1970s, is mostly an article of faith: Few know that it's located deep underground in four sites on the Gulf Coast, and because those sites are considered vital to national security, hardly anyone… more

This is what I wish President Bush would say about energy in his State of the Union message:

In 2001 I said we needed to increase energy supplies, and in my State of the Union speech in 2002 I said we needed to increase energy production at home to make America less dependent on foreign oil. That was wrong. I'm sorry. The United States has only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, so it's obvious that we… more

In the history of accidents, the March 2005 explosion at BP's Texas City, Tex., oil refinery might have been another Exxon Valdez -- a catastrophe that changed the way we perceive and regulate the industry. But the BP disaster hasn't captured the public's imagination the way the 1989 Alaska oil spill did, even though the explosion killed 15 people and injured 180 more. Yesterday James Baker, the fix-it man for both the Iraq war and BP's safety record,… more

The Detroit Auto Show, which is going on right now, is full of cars purporting to solve the problem of the moment: the political, economic and environmental damage done by America's dependence on oil. GM is showing off an electric Chevy; Ford has an adorable diesel hybrid that gets 65 miles per gallon, and Toyota is parading not only its hybrid Prius but also a huge truck that next year will be available in a model that runs on ethanol.… more

"In America it's bling bling, but out here it's bling bang," says Leonardo DiCaprio's character in the movie "Blood Diamond," explaining how diamonds on American fingers play a role in conflict and death in Africa. Thanks to this film, diamonds are the taboo commodity of the moment -- "All who touch it are left with blood on their hands," intones the voice-over in the preview.

But many Americans don't realize that the oil in our gas tanks,… more