Escape from Oil ca traz

At an energy conference in a place called "Alcatraz" University near Perugia, Italy over the weekend, I had a conversation with a Swede about the country with the most agressive plan to almost completely phase out oil use.

EIA Presentations

The EIA has placed presentation materials from its recent conference on its web site. The materials are a little dry without the commentary from those presenting. For example, an excellent presentation given by Robert Weiner of George Washington University would be much improved if the superb live talk he gave were superimposed over the slides. Weiner's analysis of non-public CFTC data shows that large groups acting independently but in similar patterns ("herding" and "flocking") is not significant in oil markets. In other words, the analysis clearly shows that speculation is not a driver of oil prices. Fundamental physical supply and demand drive prices. The EIA recorded the presentations. Hopefully the recordings will be posted online.

Gasoline Taxes - The Future of Transport

(The future for many? A photo I took in 2005 near Jaipur, India)

A Simple Alternative to Gasoline Taxes
The reason I am proposing a Vehicle Efficiency Market is that gasoline taxes are not politically viable in the US. Here is a good summary from the New York Times today of the recent failed attempts by several individual US states to raise gasoline taxes.

The Future of Transportation
At the EIA conference in Washington D.C. earlier this week I thought that one of more thought provoking and entertaining presentations was that given by Lee Schipper (Precourt Institute, Stanford University). Here is a site he posts to.

The reason I thought Schipper's comments were so interesting is that he paints a fairly credible picture of the future of transportation by pulling together images from his travels. In a future where we must do more with less, Schipper envisions a world in which transportation involves many people (even in the developed world) riding motorcycles (as in India/China) rather than cars, bus rapid transit (such as the Metrobus in Mexico City and Bogotá's TransMilenio) and more sidewalks (even along highways) ensuring walkable roads.

At the conference, Schipper also made an observation that one of the primary infrastructure gaps discouraging push bicycle transportation is not a lack of cycling lanes, but that there are few safe places to store cycles at office buildings or rail stations.