Lisa Margonelli isn't impressed. "The current dialogue is profoundly depressing and fake," she told me. "I think both candidates need to be more honest about our options."

Margonelli is a California-based fellow at the high-powered New America Foundation policy think tank in Washington and the author of the fascinating and immensely entertaining best-seller Oil on the Brain.

Published last year and issued recently in paperback with an essay updating some of her observations, Oil on the Brain is the result of three years of field reporting and research that took Margonelli across America and to China, Iran, Nigeria, Chad and Venezuela. She even wormed her way into the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Dotted with respectful and sometimes affectionate profiles of improbably colorful characters, the book documents how oil is discovered and recovered; how it's refined, wholesaled and retailed; how it's priced and sold worldwide as a commodity and as a financial instrument; how it's wound through the social fabric of America and the lives of individuals; and how it shapes politics, diplomacy, democracy, autocracy, psychology, sociology and economics...

... The energy debate has been disappointing, she said, noting the "theatrical approach to high gas prices" that involves talking about what amount to more subsidies and taxes to pay for more driving. We need to be talking about driving less, she said. LINk to Article