Traffic deaths declined 20% nationwide during March and April, 2008 versus the same period a year ago as a result of high gasoline prices according to a study by Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute.  It pays to be cautious is jumping to conclusions based upon a few months of evidence, but having logged a lot of time on Washington's Beltway recently, I can assure you there's less traffic, and most of that traffic is travelling at slower speed.  The Washington Post interviewed area transportation experts who still see lots of traffic fatalities, particularly on motorbikes, but Sivak predicts we will drop below 40,000 fatalities nationwide in 2008 for the first time since 1961!

Andrew and The New York Times are right on this morning.  Washington energy policymakers pushed electricity deregulation starting in the 1970s without much thought to what that would do to the grid.  Deregulation did lots of good things:  lower prices; peak load pricing; more flexible generation; and more innovation.  Deregulation did lots of bad things too:  Enron price manipulation; reduced safety; and reduced investment in the grid, a collective good not owned by many of the deregulated electiricty companies.  This article gives an excellent overview.  We never seem to learn that every panacea has its downside that needs to be guarded against.

One of my overarching themes in this blog is Washington's incoherent energy policies.  This is a perfect example.  Senator McCain and Senator Obama have campaigned hard in support of alternative energy sources, many of which depend upon transmitting more electricity throught the grid.  Both also offer strong incentives for electric cars, which we won't be able to charge without big improvements in the grid. 

From The New York Times this morning, a sobering article on our antiquated power delivery systems:

Unlike answers to many of the nation’s energy problems, improvements to the grid would require no new technology. An Energy Department plan to source 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind calls for a high-voltage backbone spanning the country that would be similar to 2,100 miles of lines already operated by a company called American Electric Power.

The cost would be high, $60 billion or more, but in theory could be spread across many years and tens of millions of electrical customers. However, in most states, rules used by public service commissions to evaluate transmission investments discourage multistate projects of this sort. In some states with low electric rates, elected officials fear that new lines will simply export their cheap power and drive rates up.

The New York Times reports today about some possible corruption in the race to introduce wind power in rural communities in upstate New York:

Lured by state subsidies and buoyed by high oil prices, the wind industry has arrived in force in upstate New York, promising to bring jobs, tax revenue and cutting-edge energy to the long-struggling region. But in town after town, some residents say, the companies have delivered something else: an epidemic of corruption and intimidation, as they rush to acquire enough land to make the wind farms a reality.

“It really is renewable energy gone wrong,” said the Franklin County district attorney, Derek P. Champagne, who began a criminal inquiry into the Burke Town Board last spring and was quickly inundated with complaints from all over the state about the wind companies. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo agreed this year to take over the investigation.

The progress that some auto companies are making on alternative fuel technologies is fascinating.  Here's the latest overview of the Honda FCX Clarity, a zero-emission hydrogen-powered fuel cell car.

Okay, I know, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but that doesn't mean it just jumps into your car.  (My layperson's view has this sinking suspicion that too much reliance on hydrogen from water will put pressure on fresh water supplies.)  So what source is Honda advocating for its fuel cells?  Among others, the Home Energy Station:

Former House Ways and Means Chair Bill Archer (R-TX) sent the following in response to Monday's post on "The Windfall Profit Tax -- A Bad Idea":

Another windfall profits tax on oil has been proposed by Senator Barack Obama to fund a $1,000 per family energy rebate and $50 b. of economic stimulus.  Senator John McCain opposes a windfall profits tax on oil.  I worked on the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act of 1980 (P.L.96-223, enacted April 2, 1980), and I'm with Senator McCain on this one.

The 1980 WPT didn't work on many levels as shown in the Congressional Research Service's analysis of March 6, 2006:

Up on Capitol Hill today, talking to a senior Democratic Senate staff protege, I was asked "What can we do to counter the Republicans on offshore drilling for oil?"  My response was, "There is no short-term fix to our long-term energy problems.  Drilling won't do it because it will take years to land any oil."  "Yes, but the voters think it's going to help now."  I responded, "Now you're asking me for cosmetics, not a solution."

In a nutshell, that's why we're 58% dependent upon foreign oil.  Every time we have an energy crisis, in 1973, 1979, 1990, and 2008, we rush short-term expedients and cosmetics into law without doing much to solve the long-term problem.  If we were serious about the long-term problem we would never have allowed gas guzzling SUV's onto the road; we wouldn't have starved mass transportation; we would have developed much more renewable energy; we would have done a lot more conservation; and MOST OF ALL we wouldn't have allowed prices to decline after the crisis, killing energy saving investments and leading us right back to profligate energy consumption.

You're playing golf.  You're on the 4th hole.  It's a par 4 and you do it in 3.  (I know this is hard to believe; just work with me.)

You got a birdie on that 4th hole so, according to golf vernacular, you're "minus 1" or 1 below par.  But you actually have 3 more strokes than you had at the end of the previous hole, so you're actually "plus 3."

So which is it, minus 1 or plus 3?

I was asked the equivalent of that question yesterday during a presentation I was making on the 2008 election.  But even though I was the last speaker before the morning session ended and everyone in the room was about to head out with a box lunch for the first tee, the question was about gasoline prices rather than golf.

The question was why were Americans so angry about the price of gasoline when we were paying so much less than most of the rest of the world.

It seems like I'm not the only one talking about carbon emissions from air travel.  The New York Times reports today on the challenges of reducing emissions from low-cost airlines even as fuel prices rise.

The growth in emissions from air travel had “far exceeded growth by any other mode,” a European Environment Agency report issued this year said. Between 1990 and 2005, the last full year from which data were available, total carbon dioxide emissions from aviation in the European Union grew by 73 percent.

“This could threaten the ability of the E.U. to meet increasingly ambitious emission reduction targets,” the report’s authors said.