New America in California

Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, says consumers will be vulnerable to rising prices until the US develops alternative fuels such as natural gas. For more information about reprints & permissions, ...

Steven Hill, who heads the political reform program at the New America Foundation, a liberal Washington think tank, has just published a book: Europe's Promise. Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Future, in which he blames the media ...

Since 2007, California has experienced a solar boom. Photovoltaic panels rest on 107,159 rooftops, as of this writing (the numbers are updated here every Wednesday). Driven by incentives that are bankrolled by every Californian who pays a utility bill, Californians now have more than one Gigawatt of solar capacity installed over our heads That’s a lot: one Gigawatt is roughly the size of one of the state’s four nuclear power plants, although solar PV panels do not produce power at the steady, even rate that nukes do.

We are told that in California politics and government, 2012 is shaping up as a very big year. That there will be — says Gov. Jerry Brown as he channels the philosopher Thomas Hobbes — "a war of all against all." That parties and interest groups are headed to the ballot with initiatives to gore one another's oxen. That we are about to decide the big questions of taxes and budgets and schools and maybe pensions.

Nonsense.

California political journalist and author Joe Mathews said the early contributions to Brown's proposal follows a pattern of political spending by California's more powerful Indian tribes. The tribes hope the contributions will pay dividends on future ...

Even northern California would be hard to ... blanket with the kind of battery changing stations that we need," said Lisa Margonelli, director of energy policy at New America Foundation. "We have, like, 150000 gas stations in the United States.

Yesterday, everyone involved in the support and opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline got what they wanted: Obama tossed a squib to environmentalist supporters whom he's previously disappointed, and Republican boosters of the pipeline got to turn the Obama's refusal (which they accelerated by attaching a February 21 deadline for approval to the payroll tax bill) into a talking point against Obama in the upcoming election. In a country without a greenhouse gas strategy or an energy policy, this is passing for political action, but it's really... nothing, a draw, a symbol of symbols.

Segment Transcript:

Kai Ryssdal: We're probably still a couple of lawsuits away from figuring out exactly how much power the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's eventually going to have. Senate Republicans say they're going to challenge President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to run the agency. The president says he did it because without a permanent director, the bureau couldn't do key parts of its job. One big part of which is regulating what're called non-bank activities -- check cashing, debt collection, payday lending.

Gasoline-wise, 2011 has been a very expensive year. Who knows what gas prices 2012 will bring? Rather than giving lovely gadgets that will only consume more energy, like everyone else, here are three ways to stuff the gift of *less gas* this holiday season.

"People often decide to go back to school and start a new career when the economy gets bad, but this recession has gone on so long that the job market is weak even when they graduate," said Anne Stuhldreher, a senior fellow at the New America ...