Energy Policy Initiative

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, ...

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.

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.

Journalist Lisa Margonelli, director of the energy policy initiative at the New America Foundation, will discuss the environmental, economic, moral and political cost of gasoline at 7 pm Jan. 6, a First Friday event at the Mill Valley Library. ...

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.

As well it should: a recent report from the New America Foundation estimated that Americans will spend nearly half a trillion dollars on gasoline this year, up 25% from 2010. (See if gas-powered cars are more fuel-efficient than you think.) ...

Until September of 2010, Pam Boucher’s life was small. Living in Brunswick, Me., a rural town of 21,000, she was dependent upon others to move. At the time, she used crutches or a walker to get around and seizures prevented her from driving. She’d get rides to medical appointments from a social service agency. Trips to buy groceries, or visit her husband in a nursing home, required the help of her adult sons or scheduling a social service staff member. A trip to the local Wal-Mart would cost $28 in taxi fees. Socializing outside her apartment was pretty much impossible.

So far, we haven't faced any true problems of scarcity of oil or other fossil fuels. What we have faced are high prices, which are the result of constraints in fuel production, shipping and refining around the world. Finding more oil will not necessarily bring down the price of gasoline in the U.S. unless supply significantly exceeds demand — and there's no incentive for oil producers to make that happen. What's more, U.S. refineries now export around 536,000 barrels of gasoline a day — more than we have since World War II — so U.S. consumers pay the world’s going rate for gasoline.

That's the frustrating conclusion of a new report from the New America Foundation called The Price-Induced Energy Trap: Exploring the Impacts of Transportation Expenditures on the American Economy. According to the report, by the end of 2011, ...