Lisa Margonelli: All Related Content

It’s not just a feeling: Power outages have become normal in the United States. Last month’s heat and derecho storms that left more than 300,000 people in the Mid-Atlantic states without power (some for as long as a week) are part of a larger trend. In 2008, according to the Eaton Blackout Tracker, there were 2,169 power outages in the U.S. affecting 25 million people. In 2011, there were more than 3,000 outages affecting 41.8 million people.
 

As gasoline prices passed $3.50 a gallon nationally, the politicking predictably kicked into overdrive. “There’s no reason we can’t get gasoline down to $2 and $2.50 a gallon,” said Newt Gingrich, who in February promised he would accomplish this via an agenda he called “Drill here, drill now, pay less.” Two days later three prominent Democrats, including Representative Ed Markey, called for President Obama to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices.

Lisa Margonelli, a fellow at the New America Foundation, said she's baffled by the pronouncement that Iran would cut off oil shipments in advance of the new sanctions going into effect. Though she pointed out that just one Iranian news agency said the ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lisa Margonelli discusses with WTOP her new research, dubbed the "Energy Trap," that paints a troubling picture of the middle class burdened by rising gas prices.

Original article

Consumers also have a role to play if we're going to shift manufacturing back home, said Lisa Margonelli at the New American Foundation. “We're going to have to come to terms with a new sense of what globalization mean to us. ...

Bashing green energy has recently become a major Republican talking point. Darrell Issa, once a champion of green-job stimulus funds for his district, held a House oversight committee hearing titled "How Obama's Green Energy Agenda Is Killing Jobs." Rush Limbaugh says green energy is a "slush fund" that takes money from unwitting taxpayers under the guise of saving the planet and rewards Democratic donors.

Last week gas prices around the country dropped substantially, with prices below $3 a gallon in places, including parts of Michigan, Missouri and Texas. After four, join Ben Merens and his guest as they discuss the crude oil market. Lisa Margonelli is an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and the Director of its Energy Policy Initiative. She is the author of Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline.

Original article

... On today’s Backstory, Lisa Margonelli, director of the Energy Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation, explains what lessons the Solyndra bankruptcy can teach us about federal investment in green energy and how countries like Germany and China are bolstering their green energy sectors.