Climate change headline of the day: “Great tits cope well with warming”

From the BBC. Oh British humor.

Assorted links

1.  The Lieberman-Warner bill has a rough road ahead.

2. CBO Director Peter Orszag testifies on infrastructure spending.  Ryan Avent summarizes.

3. Why isn’t transit a bigger part of the national discussion on energy/climate change/congestion?

4. The 230 MPG car.

Reforming carbon offsets, a continuing series

The World Bank Carbon Finance Unit has released its annual report on the state of the carbon market. The report summarizes the broader carbon market, with primary focus on two areas: the allowance market in Europe (the EU Emission Trading Scheme, or ETS) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the primary global offset market. As part of their discussion the authors note some of the criticisms and problems the CDM has faced, and recommend improvements. I’m going to focus on two of their critiques and one of their suggestions. I’m then going to synthesize these to argue that for some types of projects — particularly energy sector projects — we should move from an offset model to a straight subsidy payment model.

I’ve written previously about the problems with the CDM, including the idea that it is often tricky to measure when offsets are ‘additional’ since we can’t observe the counterfactual — a world without any carbon offsets.

The concept of additionality also becomes problematic when the baseline is unacceptable, or even perhaps immoral. The report authors write:

As clean energy projects begin to dominate the CDM, their developmental benefits are a lot more direct and visible than in the case of so-called “industrial gas” projects. Energy efficiency and renewable energy projects are now emerging as the most common type of CDM projects and this development should be encouraged. Many projects in Africa, likewise, have finally been transacted and this momentum too should be encouraged…

This has been a chief criticism of the CDM up until now. Most projects have been done in the more-developed poor countries — Brazil, China, India — while almost none were conducted in Africa in the first few years. And how could they be? If the ‘baseline’ is the absence of any grid-based electricity, how many emissions do you save installing a wind farm? An Africa with a renewable energy project is better than one without electricity at all, but it is hard to get support for it through the offsets market since there isn’t anything to offset. This is the first critique.

The curse is broken?

Why hasn’t this been reported more widely?

The correlation between resource dependence and slow growth and conflict, therefore, does not imply causation from the former to the latter. Instead, causality appears to be running from weak institutions and conflict to resource extraction as the default sector, which produces resource dependence as the final outcome. Resource dependence appears as a symptom, rather than a cause of underdevelopment.

The authors argue that previous research on the ‘natural resource curse’ has been unable to correctly identify which way causality runs:

The standard resource variable used by Sachs and Warner, as well as by Collier and Hoeffler, is primary exports divided by a measure of national income. It thus captures the resource dependence of economies, rather than abundance. A negative correlation between this variable and growth could mean that resources lead to slower economic growth, as suggested by the curse proponents. Alternatively, it could mean that poor economic development policies–leading an economy to become dependent on its primary exports–dampen growth. Similarly, although a negative correlation between the resource variable and institutional quality may imply that resources undermine institutions, it might also capture that the resource sector is the “default sector” in the absence of decent institutions when nobody is willing to invest in alternative forms of capital. Finally, a positive correlation between the resource variable and conflict may indeed mean that resources trigger conflict. But it may also be the case that conflict makes countries dependent on resource extraction–the default activity that still takes place after other economic sectors (more mobile or, perhaps, better linked to the rest of the economy) have come to a stop. If so, resources are not a curse to development, but rather a safety net to support people and economies even under adverse circumstances.

They argue that economic dependence on natural resources is endogenous in exactly this way and use data on resource endowment — rather than resource exports — as an explanatory variable for economic growth.

When using the new World Bank variable to proxy for resource abundance, we find that the direct effect of resource wealth (particularly the subset of mineral resource wealth) on income growth is positive and significant. All things considered, an increase in subsoil wealth by one standard deviation–roughly the difference between Senegal and Sweden–would have brought Senegal’s growth performance on a par with that of Mozambique or Kenya; not a huge improvement, but certainly not a growth curse.

Similarly, resource wealth also attenuated the risk of conflict. This is due to a positive indirect effect: Resource wealth raises income, and higher incomes, in turn, reduce the risk of conflict. Again, although the aggregate impact of resource abundance is slight–amounting to less than a 5% reduction in the risk of war in case of a standard-deviation increase in resources–it is still statistically significant.

If this result holds up it will be a significant finding in development economics and could overturn almost 2 decades of conventional wisdom on the curse of natural resources.  The full text is here (gated); a non-gated version is here.

Feel good clean energy video of the day

You can read more at William’s blog.

FutureGen quote of the day

Sen Kit Bond (R-MO) compared DOE’s change of heart to leaving the project “at the altar choosing three younger, cheaper women.”

Wow. The Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee is having a hearing on FutureGen this week. The witnesses are Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and FutureGen Chairman Paul Thompson. I think this quote indicates that it’s going to be nothing if not entertaining — stay tuned for a first-hand account.

For interested DC readers, the hearing is Thursday at 9:30am at 192 Dirksen Senate Building.

H/T: Shalini.

Short run vs. long run

A brief anecdote:

Yesterday, I was spending time with a friend who lives in rural Maryland, and he mentioned that he’d just sent his resume out in DC looking for a job so he could move into the city. His reason? High gas prices. Driving around Montgomery County every day has simply become too pricey.

We discussed this as he filled up with $3.81/gal gas. It was fascinating seeing short run price inelasticity juxtaposed so immediately on long run price elasticity.

Path dependency

Geoffrey Styles makes a great observation about the recent run-up in gas prices:

A big part of our problem is that most Americans are still driving cars that were purchased when gasoline was under $1.50/gal., to commute between work and home locations that were chosen when fuel was even cheaper.

He also makes a nice comparison:

As of this week, nominal US retail gasoline prices have gone up by 25% in the last year and by 130% in the last five years. How does that compare to other countries? Well, motorists in the UK are experiencing prices that are now 25% higher than the average of last year, and 42% higher than five years ago, but gas hasn’t been cheap in Europe for more than a generation. Buffered by the strong Euro, gasoline in Germany has increased by a smaller percentage, 19% vs. the 2007 average and 29% over five years.

Hear that? Gas hasn’t been cheap in Europe for more than a generation. Europe’s development path — decisions about land use and urban planning and transit decisions — was determined in an environment with much higher gas prices. Not only are current price increases in Europe smaller in relative terms, but consumers there live within a system that makes it easier absorb the absolute increases as well.*

America could do its future self a big favor by realizing that expensive gas is very likely here to stay. Pricing carbon — a near inevitability in the near future — will make gas prices higher. Consumers can switch to more fuel-efficient cars but the big changes — in how we plan our communities or develop our transportation infrastructure — are going to require some policy changes. And these policy changes should include the recognition that gas will — and should — be much more expensive in the future.

You can read great arguments for these types of policies — more density in development, more investment in mass transit, etc. — almost every day over at Ryan Avent’s superb blog. Or to grab a great suggestion from Matt Yglesias,

if we were to raise the gas tax, then rebate half the revenues to citizens on some kind of flat per person basis, and make the other half available to fund transit projects, there’d be no net burden on the population, you’d create an incentive to use alternative forms of transportation where they exist, and you’d have a pool of revenue available to create alternative forms of transportation.

*Of course I realize there is an endogeneity problem here: higher gas taxes in Europe were politically tractable in the first place because Europe was already more dense and less car-based. But it doesn’t alter the fact that a counterfactual Europe with much lower gas taxes for the last 25 years would look very different.

Nuclear power

The CBO just issued a new study on nuclear power in America. Via the CBO Director’s blog here are a couple highlights:

Carbon dioxide charges of about $45 per metric ton would probably make nuclear generation competitive with conventional fossil fuel technologies as a source of new capacity and could lead utilities to build new nuclear plants that would eventually replace existing coal power plants. At charges below that threshold, conventional gas technology would probably be a more economic source of baseload capacity than coal technology. Below about $5 per metric ton, conventional coal technology would probably be the lowest cost source of new capacity.

A carbon price of $45 per ton of CO₂ is very likely higher than the U.S. could (politically) implement in the near future. Current emissions prices in the EU are around $35/ton right now.  If the U.S. passed a bill with similar stringency to Lieberman-Warner — a big political ‘if’ — then the EIA says the 2020 price would be around $30/ton, while the EPA analysis suggests higher, $40-50/ton.  If I was guessing I would say it is much more likely that any politically acceptable bill will result in prices of $10-30/ton in the near term.

But I think this is actually the most interesting point about nuclear power right now:

Uncertainties about future construction costs or natural gas prices could deter investment in nuclear power. In particular, if construction costs for new nuclear power plants proved to be as high as the average cost of nuclear plants built in the 1970s and 1980s (adjusted for inflation), or if natural gas prices fell back to the levels seen in the 1990s, then new nuclear capacity would not be competitive…

And this is very possibly the state of the world we are in.  Check this recent post from the EU Energy Policy blog.  Power plant construction costs have more than doubled since 2000, with much of the rise in the last two years and much of it very related to nuclear construction costs.  China particularly is consuming so much cement and steel that global prices for construction commodities are going through the roof.

A couple years ago I was relatively sanguine about the prospects for nuclear power but I am much more skeptical now.  I think the big problems are:

1. In the short run the price of global commodities and NIMBYism mean that it is both very expensive and very difficult to build new plants.

2. In the long run bad news about climate change could make nuclear look much more attractive but here proliferation worries me.  The long run is all about China and India and other not-so-stable parts of the world.  Fine, you can nuke up the U.S. or Europe completely (a la France) but this doesn’t make a huge difference because those places aren’t the future of the emissions anyway.  To really make a dent in the emissions trajectory you are talking about a huge number of plants in parts of the world where there are major religious and ethnic tensions (Jammu and Kashmir, western China) or where governments are authoritarian or (perhaps worse) incompetent.

Essentially I think the U.S. and Europe should be thinking now about which energy technologies they’d like to export 20 years down the road.  In this regard I’d rather us do a bunch of carbon capture and storage research than try to reinvigorate the nuclear industry.

Here is the MIT study on nuclear power, recommended.

Tight

Yes, this McCain-Clinton idea to suspend the gas tax is stupid. I think the best quote I’ve seen so far comes from Len Burman via Greg Mankiw:

Yesterday I was on the NewsHour to talk about the gas tax holiday. I asked if there was another guest and the producer said, “We tried, but we couldn’t find anyone to argue the other side (that the gas tax holiday made sense).”

The more interesting part of the discussion is not the piling on — though certainly people should be pointing out how mind-bogglingly stupid this proposal is — but the discussion about tax incidence. Most commenters are arguing that producers will benefit more than consumers from the tax holiday, because summer oil supply is very tight. As Greg Mankiw describes it:

What you learn in Economics 101 is that if producers can’t produce much more, when you cut the tax on that good the tax is kept . . . by the suppliers and is not passed on to consumers.

Or here’s Paul Krugman:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount.

But Tim Haab is not so sure that supply is less responsive than demand. He nails the theoretical explanation. In fact, if you really want a great straightforward description of tax incidence, see this pair of posts he wrote just last month. Pay particular attention to the chart in the second post, which graphically depicts what he says here:

Only two cases are clear cut. If buyers are price insensitive and and sellers are price sensitive (top right panel), the buyer will bear the burden of the tax. If sellers are price insensitive and buyers are price sensitive (bottom left panel), sellers will bear the burden. In cases where both are sensitive or both insensitive, the results are unclear and depends on the relative sensitivities.

But in arguing today that producers are more price sensitive than many people may think he gets some facts badly wrong. Specifically he uses this chart to argue:

So when will supply of gas be perfectly inelastic? The most obvious answer to me would be when refineries are running at full capacity over the relevant range of prices. That is, regardless of the market price, refineries can’t keep up. Is that the case? The chart to the right gives U.S. refinery capacity and gasoline consumption in gallons per day from 2002-2007. On average, U.S. refineries produce at about 50% capacity. (emphasis added)

No. Just… no.

The problem is Tim compares refining capacity data to gasoline consumption. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Capacity is measured by the input — crude oil — and this is being compared to a specific output, gasoline. But refineries produce many things besides gasoline — jet fuel, home heating oil, etc. — and even if every U.S. refinery were optimized to make gasoline (which isn’t the case) there would still be losses from the refining process itself.

As it turns out the EIA* actually publishes weekly data on refinery capacity margins (or “percent operable utilization” as the EIA calls it). I downloaded the series to create the chart below. Note that with the exception of Katrina (September 2005) that refineries have run at 80-98% capacity over the last few years (most typically from 85-95%). Note that there is also a seasonal pattern: utilization usually declines in winter and peaks in summer. This would imply less elastic supply in summer. Note also, however, that refineries are entering this particularly summer with the lowest capacity utilization rates we seen in spring in awhile, around 85% instead of 90-95%.

What would I conclude from all this?

1. If you wanted to maximize the portion of this tax ‘refund’ that went to oil companies, you should make the gas tax holiday during summer, when supply is most inelastic.

2. Compared to previous years, producers would probably benefit less from the gas tax holiday this year, since capacity margins are down.

3. Despite the factual errors and the incorrect implication that summer gas supply is fairly elastic, Tim is probably right when he says, “maybe the tax holiday might have some effect on both consumers and producers.” Why is that? Remember, demand for gas is also very inelastic. In other words, which world are we in? I say the bottom right case in this chart.

This guy sums it up pretty well when he says,

the gains of the tax cut will be split evenly between producers and consumers… I’m not saying that the gas tax cut is a good idea. In fact, I think it’s horrible pandering that wont help anyone in the long-run.

*Public service announcement: when using energy data about the U.S. to back up any argument, please avail yourself of the EIA. If you can’t find what you need, look again. Still not sure? Check a third time. The EIA is amazing. Use it.

The real impact of gas prices

From the Washington Post:

In Kokomo, Ind., last week, Kathy Spier said the rising cost of gas is to blame for the 50 percent drop-off in sales at her three exotic lingerie stores. “They don’t have extra money to spend on frivolous things,” she said.

Tim Kaine gets it

Meaning that he understands that driving imposes external costs on society. Gov. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is calling for a hike in gas taxes to cover a transportation/infrastructure budget shortfall. Not a perfect incentive structure — I’d prefer real-time road usage charges — but it’s not a perfect world. At any rate it’s a gutsy call to make, though there is a one-term limit on VA governors, so what’s at stake is his approval rating and the party’s image in state government. I mean, we’re living in a high oil price world, on the cusp of summer driving season, and close to (if not already in) a recession. Kaine is providing a breath of fresh air in the context of the recent gas tax pandering by Clinton and McCain.

Your mileage may vary

From the inbox:

A new website, www.fueleconomy.gov maintained by EPA and the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is probably of interest to everyone here. It’s one stop shopping for information otherwise available in various EIA, EPA and news sources.

An entire section is devoted to gas prices. Besides gas mileage tips, it gives fuel economy information for new and used cars and light trucks back to 1985. It also provides links to sites showing the cheapest gas in your area. It has historical gas price information and helps you compare gas prices in your area with other areas.  It also has information on tax incentives for purchasing hybrid, alternative fuel and electric vehicles.

There’s also an interactive component: you can report your the mileage for your own vehicle and see how it compares to the mileage others are getting. And you can get a detailed Energy Impact Score for a vehicle showing average mileage, petroleum consumption, pollution tally and safety information. You can also compares data on up to four vehicles.

H/T: Chris Clotworthy, RFF librarian

Energy subsidies in the U.S.

Have I mentioned recently how absolutely amazing the Energy Information Administration (EIA) is? As much as researchers frequently run into problems getting exactly the data they need to do the analysis they want, it’s pretty remarkable to live in a time and place where such incredibly detailed information about energy in the U.S. is available at your fingertips.

The EIA’s latest feat is this new report on federal energy subsides. I’m pretty sure I’ll be revisiting this report frequently, but on first glance two things stood out.

1. What the heck is “refined coal”? Based on a cursory reading it sounds like coal used to produce synthetic fuels. It is getting a huge portion of federal energy subsidies (check out table ES1): around $2.4 billion of the $16.6 billion total. Part of my confusion though is that the EIA analysis classifies most of this subsidy under electricity generation (so is it a synfuel or coal?) and this makes refined coal the biggest subsidy recipient on a dollar-per-megawatthour ($/MWH) basis (see table ES5): it receives $29.81/MWH, versus $23.37/MWH for wind, $1.59/MWH for nuclear, and $0.44/MWH for (regular) coal. (These are the only electricity generating technologies which receive more than a $0.3B in federal support.)

2. Besides refined coal, who’s the other enormous hog at the trough? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. That’s right, ethanol/biofuels chewed through $3.2 billion in 2007. The metric used to report subsidy payments here is dollars per million BTUs (table ES6), and ethanol is more than double the nearest competitor at $5.72/mBTU. It’s a little tricky comparing this subsidy level to the subsidies for electricity, since electricity is a more valuable form of energy than heat, but a simple back of the envelope calculation using standard conversion factors suggests that this is in the ballpark (slightly lower) than the dollar-per-output subsidies for wind I listed above.

So, to summarize, just with those two items, one-third of federal energy subsidies are going 1) to the most polluting fuel used today and 2) to a form of liquid food that is driving up world prices and at best is saving us a tiny bit of greenhouse gas emissions. Awesome.

Unsurprising unpleasantries

I don’t want to throw too much cold water on my co-blogger’s enthusiasm for the NHTSA’s newly proposed CAFE schedule. But two things need correcting. The first is clerical; the other is substantive.

First, be very careful anytime you read quotes about percent changes in fuel efficiency. Due to America’s weird fascination with reporting fuel efficiency in miles per gallon, and also because of her citizens’ nigh universal numerical illiteracy, reported percentages are nearly always wrong. An obvious example comes courtesy of the Green Car Congress post Rich linked previously:

The 35 mpg target for 2020 represents a 31% increase above the 2007 new fleet average of 26.7 mpg.

Green Car Congress a great source for environmental and energy news and it is written by some very smart people. But this is just plain wrong.

The problem is that fuel efficiency should actually be measured in how much gas it takes to go a mile rather than in how many miles you can drive on a given amount of gas. To illustrate, your crappy old car that gets 26.7 mpg will require 3.75 gallons of gas to go 100 miles. Your shiny new 35 mpg car can go those 100 miles on 2.86 gallons of gas. This is better — but it is only 24% less fuel than your old car required, not 31% less.

The second — and much more important — point comes courtesy of Geoffrey Styles. He reminds us that the improvements in efficiency being proposed should not be compared to current regulation, but rather the world as it actually is (and will be):

Turning to CAFE, the proposed timetable for implementing the 35 mpg standard that was signed into law last December would raise the overall fuel economy of the new car fleet, including SUVs, to 27.8 mpg by the 2011 model year and to 31.6 mpg by 2015. … That sounds quite aggressive, until you realize that … based on the sales mix reflected in NHSTA’s January 2008 CAFE report, the combined 2007 new car fleet delivered an average of 27.2 mpg. With SUV sales having fallen back below 50% from their 2004 high of 53%, it’s a reasonable bet that the shifting sales mix alone would allow the fleet to achieve the 2011 goal without any changes in vehicle performance. In that context, the 2015 milestone goal of 31.6 mpg overall looks more like a 2% per year average improvement over the next seven model years, rather than the 4.5% cited by Secretary Peters.

Hmm, sounds like we are already basically at the 2011 standards right here in ol’ 2008. Wonder what could be causing that?

Of course whether you think it’s a bad thing that the new CAFE standards may not actually be much of a stretch relative to a counterfactual world without them depends largely on what you think of regulation in the first place.

But we should keep this in mind before we go too far praising either Congress or the NHTSA for their “courage”. If oil prices go where some people are predicting, we’ll probably look back and wonder why we ever thought about driving those 35 mpg gas guzzlers — or should I say 2.86 gallons-per-100-miles guzzlers — in the first place.

For once, a pleasant surprise

This week the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for new vehicle fuel economy standards. While the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 set the fuel economy target of 35 mpg by 2020, implementation of this goal actually resides with NHTSA. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to learn that NHTSA had frontloaded the requirement, achieving more than 50% of the increased fuel efficiency in the first 5 years. Under the proposed plan, “Fuel efficiency standards for both passenger vehicles and light trucks would increase by 4.5 percent per year over the five-year period ending in 2015 – a 25 percent total improvement that exceeds the 3.3 percent baseline proposed by Congress last year.”

H/T Green Car Congress.

Underserved markets

Or is it now an overserved market?

For the convenience of our bicycling fans, Nationals Park offers a FREE bike valet located in Red Garage C at the corner of N & 1st Street, SE. Access to the valet is on N Street just left of the entrance.

I am very curious about how much this service is used so far. And who do they get to serve as bike valets? Might they start offering a service where you can you get your chain oiled and brake pads aligned during the game?

I am going to my first game at Nationals Park today but I don’t think I’ll be riding my bike. The problem is that I don’t really want to ride home in the dark. I suppose I could take my bike home on Metro but I am pretty sure this is not a great way to make friends with the 15,000 other people who will all be jostling for Metro space after the game ends.

But someday I am using this service — Saturday afternoon game anyone? — at least if it doesn’t disappear first.

Today’s best person in the world: Peter Orszag

Today the Director of the CBO is testifying before the Senate Finance Committee on the implications of a cap and trade program. In addition to the full testimony, you can read Orszag’s summary comments on the CBO blog. As I read them, two points stood out.

First, Orszag says that the CBO believes a tax is generally more efficient than a cap because of its flexibility. We’ve already debated this issue too much. I’m merely pointing this out to chalk Orszag up in the pro-tax column on the proverbial scoreboard.

The real bombshell comes in the final paragraph:

CBO has concluded that the federal budget should record the value of allowances that are given away by the government if the recipients of the allowances could readily convert them into cash. In particular, the budget should record the value of those allowances, when they are distributed, as both revenues and outlays. That procedure, which CBO has already applied in its estimates for S. 2191, underscores that giving away allowances is economically equivalent to auctioning the allowances and then dedicating the proceeds to the recipients.

It’s one thing for economists and eco-bloggers to point out the reality of pass-through. It’s quite another for the CBO to recommend codifying it in the calculation of the federal budget. This is going to be controversial on the Hill, but if anyone can explain it simply and convincingly to Congress its Orszag.

Today’s best person in the world: Peter Orszag.

Reforming carbon offsets, first in a series

How well is the carbon offset market working? Not as well as might be hoped; the Wall Street Journal has done much recent reporting on how the architects of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) — by far the largest carbon offset program in the world, and a key part of many countries’ strategy to achieve compliance with the Kyoto Protocol — are struggling to determine which offset projects should be eligible, to keep pace with demand for new offsets, and to clamp down on questionable projects.

Now Michael Wara and David Victor have a new working paper with some recommendations for reforming the system:

We argue that the U.S., which is in the midst of designing a national regulatory system, should not to rely on offsets to provide a reliable ceiling on compliance costs. … We suggest that the actual experience under the CDM has had perverse effects in developing countries — rather than draw them into substantial limits on emissions it has, by contrast, rewarded them for avoiding exactly those commitments.

Offsets can play a role in engaging developing countries, but only as one small element in a portfolio of strategies. We lay out two additional elements that should be included in an overall strategy for engaging developing countries on the problem of climate change. First, the U.S., in collaboration with other developed countries, should invest in a Climate Fund intended to finance critical changes in developing country policies that will lead to near-term reductions. Second, the U.S. should actively pursue a series of infrastructure deals with key developing countries with the aim of shifting their longer-term development trajectories in directions that are both consistent with their own interests but also produce large greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

There are many interesting aspects to the paper, and to this topic more broadly. I am going to try to write several posts about it over the next week or two. For this post I’m going to discuss one of the fundamental problems in offset markets that the authors identify.

Categorical statement of the day

Not that I disagree, Tim:

The inevitability of spring. Flowers bloom. Thunderstorms roll. I sneeze. Gas prices rise. And politicians think they should do something about it.

“House Republican leaders on Tuesday challenged Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to release a plan to lower gas prices that they say Democrats touted when they were in the minority.”

Instead of rewriting past posts, I’m going to just cut and paste my post from May 17 of last year below(one of my better, if I do say so myself). That post draws on the same ideas from a post in April/May 2006. Noticing a pattern? While the legislative proposals are different, the analysis is the same. All politicians are idiots.

This on the heels of John McCain’s gas tax holiday plan? To quote Charlie Brown, “AAAAARRRRRRGH!”

Update:  From Tim’s post, I think this is a superbly clear explanation of gas prices:

High gas prices might be uncomfortable while we search for viable long-term solutions, but they’re more comfortable than the alternative:  no gas and no solutions.