Lisa Margonelli is a writer on energy and environment. She spent four years and traveled 100,000 miles to write her book, "Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank." More
Lisa Margonelli directs the New America Foundation's Energy Productivity Initiative, which works to promote energy efficiency as a way of ensuring energy security, greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and economic security for American families. She spent roughly four years and traveled 100,000 miles to report her book about the oil supply chain, Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank, which the American Library Association named one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007. She spent her childhood in Maine where, during the energy crisis of the 1970s, her family heated the house with wood hauled by a horse. Later, fortunately, they got a tractor. The experience instilled a strong appreciation for the convenience of fossil fuels.
I haven't read Chris Anderson's new book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," but I've been following the debate over Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker review and Anderson's response. Gladwell summarizes Anderson's basic argument as: The digital age is exerting inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things "made of ideas." This revelation is not unique to Anderson. I mean, hey, it's 6:30 am and I'm blogging for free about articles I read for free for you… More »
Making fun of clean coal has become a cottage industry for American enviro-media types. (For a classic example, check out this snarky ad by the Coen brothers.) But while we have been snickering, China is building a clean coal plant that will go online next year, and has two more in the works. Last year alone China built 90 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants, which means that if China decides to use its massive domestic market for carbon sequestration to develop… More »
Gas prices are famously up all over the country, but undoubtedly one of the most expensive places to buy gas in the lower 48 is the California town of Lee Vining, which is on the Nevada side of the Sierras, just outside of Yosemite National Park, where a gallon of unleaded will run you $3.45-$3.60. However, Lee Vining is also the site of my favorite gas station, the Tioga Toomey Gas Mart and Whoa Nellie Deli. This is a big Mobil station, set high on a hill--or… More »
As the debate over Waxman Markey Climate Legislation heats up, something big and scary from experts at 13 government science agencies has appeared: The Authoritative Assessment of National, Regional Impacts of Global Climate Change. As the name implies, this is an enormous, authoritative report, but it's certainly not the first. What is remarkable about the report is how it reflects a growing trend towards personalizing the impact of climate change. Hence slide… More »
Inverters are the devices that convert AC power to DC. Solar panels are equipped with them so that the DC current can be integrated into household AC circuits. And homes that store energy from the grid in batteries (more on them in a second) also use inverters. But inverters are one of the tiny components of our energy system that have the potential to change the way we use energy-if only we stopped treating them like little insignificant commodities. Kevin Bullis… More »
I was in Iran just before the US presidential election in 2004, and everywhere I went--but particularly within Iran's oil industry--Iranians said they wished that the world got to vote in the US election. In their opinion, the US president would affect their lives more than those of Americans, who would continue our lives of barbecues and driving to the mall regardless of who was in the White House. For Iranians, on the other hand, the outcome would influence their… More »
Uganda is a landlocked country of 32 million that's a bit smaller than Oregon. GDP: $1100. And, according to this report of a meeting with a representative of the US Department of Energy, may have reserves that "rival" those of Saudi Arabia. (For reference: Saudi Arabia produces well over 10 million barrels of oil a day and has reserves estimated at 267 billion barrels.) The DOE expert says Uganda could produce 3.5 million barrels a day, and possibly much more, and… More »
The connection between the Republicans and oil drilling was a cliche long before Sarah Palin lead the "drill baby drill" chants during the election, but it seems to be taking on a life of its own. A recent post in the WSJ's Environmental Capital Blog highlights the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, who's hitching his political wagon to the drillbit:"On energy, our opponents will say NO to offshore drilling, NO to clean coal, NO to… More »
Oil is up nearly a dollar this morning, making May's $10 rise the biggest since 1999. This is an argument for OPEC's curious ineffectuality: This week they refused to reduce quotas, admitted that members are cheating, noted that inventories remain ridiculously high--and still the price rose! Here's OPEC Secretary-General El-Badri saying that the rise is based on "sentiment." (He also pulls a lovely Orwell when describing quota cheating as 79% compliance.) So what… More »
We've come to expect that the "solutions" to Climate Change will be high tech--floating windmills, underwater generators, and nano solar in the Jules Verne/James Bond tradition--or at least high concept (carbon credit trading). But this week Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winner Steve Chu is in Europe extolling the benefits of ... white roofs. The concept is simple but the numbers he cites are massive: Making roofs and pavement more reflective could offset 44… More »
Here we are again, crude still bopping around under $60 and the market still glutty. Where is it coming from? A clue: The Middle Eastern Economic Review reports that OPEC is admitting that its members are cheating on their quotas, releasing probably an extra million barrels of oil a day into the market than the 24.8, they've agreed to. Meanwhile, the analysts over at Sanford Bernstein have apparently been poking around on Google Earth and have determined that China… More »
Oh how I love the daffy honesty of Jimmy Carter. I was in fifth or sixth grade when he introduced me to the highly advanced concept of "lust in the heart," later followed by understanding the macroeconomic impact of "wearing a sweater." (I'm not belittling those concepts--in the long run neither can be ignored.) And it was he who followed Nixon's lead and told the US that we needed to change the way we used energy. Carter's presidency is often described as… More »
(Please ignore the giddy grin on my picture for this post...) Over the last month or so I've been to several events that suggest that US scientists and government types are starting to seriously game out how disasters in energy security and climate change may unfold, interact, and multiply. At one event, people from various government departments, national labs, and, um, information gathering agencies sat around tables and tried to play out how, say,… More »
I happen to think oil markets are more exciting than opera, soap operas, Iron Chef, and high speed car chases combined. But even if I didn't, I'd probably still love reading Tom Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service for his hilarious analysis of myth and market in domestic gasoline prices. This week Tom talks about the cognitive disconnect of the Glut. The US now has more than a billion barrels of oil in storage, gasoline demand is flat, and diesel demand (the… More »
Welcome to strange scenes from the oil glut. A side show in the global recession is this surreal result of low oil demand: A floating pool of at least a hundred oil tankers wandering the seas, according to this Reuters story. The vision of 125 million barrels of homeless oil is amazing enough. One analyst even calls it "ethereal." But consider how different this is from a year ago, when the Nigerian militia named MEND attacked Shell pipelines that shut in just… More »
Hybrid cars and wind turbines need rare-earth minerals that come with their own hefty environmental price tag.
Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article on the significance of the Haynesville Shale, which contains 200 Trillion feet of natural gas, equivalent to 33 billion barrels of oil. Industry execs say the deep, and deeply unconventional discovery may be part of 2200 trillion feet of natural gas lying under the US crust. If you're a global warming worrier, this is great news. Generating electricity with natural gas is far better from both a pollution and… More »
The termite’s stomach, of all things, has become the focus of large-scale scientific investigations. Could the same properties that make the termite such a costly pest help us solve global warming?
