The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of energy analysts think that U.S. gasoline sales will never surpass their 2007 record: Among those who say U.S. consumption of gasoline has peaked are executives at the world's biggest publicly traded oil company, Exxon Mobil Corp., as well as many private analysts and government energy forecasters... Many industry observers have become convinced the drop in consumption won't reverse even when economic growth resumes. In December, the EIA said gasoline consumption by U.S. drivers had peaked, in part because of growing consumer interest in fuel efficiency. US VMT trends through Jan …

As regular readers know, we've done a bit of cheerleading for the "cap and dividend" concept, which is also called "Cap-and-Cashback," since it would hand cash receipts from government-run carbon auctions right back to consumers. Cap-and-Cashback strikes me as a fundamentally fair climate policy, since it protects low- and middle-income families from the effects of rising energy prices. Yet some people criticize cap-and-dividend as being unfair, because they think it could benefit some regions of the country at the expense of others. I've even seen this issue described as a "fatal flaw" in Cap-and-Cashback. Strong words, indeed. The critics don't …

I keep looking for signs that the collapse in gas prices has started to have an impact on how much people drive. In a normal economy, you'd expect that as gas got cheaper, people would drive a bit more -- the reverse of the trend we saw last summer, when gas prices were reaching record highs and people were cutting way back on car travel. But this simply isn't a "normal" economy. Just as gas prices fell, family incomes started taking a beating too. So, sure, it costs a lot less to fill a tank now than it did last …

A few years back, Europe's cap-and-trade system, called the ETS, was taking a beating in the press. Some of the criticism was legit: the program really did make some silly missteps in the early years. The biggest bungles were tied up with how the ETS handed out emissions permits. First, they decided to give them out for free -- which, as Sightline has discussed ad nauseum, was a recipe for windfall profits for the firms that got free permits. And second, for lack of reliable emissions data, the ETS handed out more permits than firms actually needed. Ultimately, the glut …

Apparently, the U.S. Postal Service is considering cutting back on one day of mail delivery per week. Personally, I suppose I'm fine with this, since I get very little time-sensitive mail. But I imagine that there are some folks who'd see this as a real hardship -- yet another little blow, at a time when there are plenty of big ones to absorb. Regardless, someone just emailed me to ask how the service cutbacks might affect global warming. Sadly, I've got no time for a real answer. But Google gives me just enough information for a ballpark answer: as an …

Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, put out a report on how to get traffic moving faster. They considered lots of the standard solutions -- improving signal timing, clearing accidents quickly, encouraging telecommuting, and so forth -- and found that many of them could, in fact, provide some temporary congestion relief. But here's the rub: RAND found that over the long haul, these kinds of solutions simply don't have much effect on congestion. They can briefly get traffic moving faster, but just about every improvement in travel time results in ... more people taking to the …

Brilliant. That's the word that kept crossing my mind as I read this clearly written report [PDF] about the Puget Sound Regional Council's study on using road tolls to fight congestion. The study found that a well-designed, comprehensive system of congestion-busting tolls could make a major dent in traffic backups in the Puget Sound. It would also speed up transit, shorten commute times, and reduce gasoline consumption. But much to its credit, the report also identifies one critical question that may dominate any public debate over congestion pricing: Can tolling be fair? To collect the data for the study, the …

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, gas prices have fallen back from the phenomenal highs of last summer. The immediate cause has been the economic crisis. When credit markets seized up, some companies that wanted to buy oil simply couldn't get the cash. And perhaps more importantly, the economic slowdown has decreased projections for oil demand. Markets that seemed tight are now looser than they've been in a while. But those changes are just on the demand side. On the supply side, though, little has changed. If anything, the outlook for oil supplies is somewhat more pessimistic than it …

A request: If you a) have anything to do with city or county government, and b) have any interest in, or authority over, property taxes, finance, or energy efficiency, please drop whatever you're doing for two minutes, and skim this article. Oh, all right, I bet you didn't actually hit the link. So to make your job easier, I'll pull a quote or two. California [just] enacted a law that allows cities and counties to make low-interest loans to homeowners and businesses to install solar panels, high-efficiency air conditioners and other energy-saving improvements. Participants can pay back the loans over …

"Staycation ... a portmanteau that combines "stay" and "vacation" and refers to a holiday that takes place either at or near home." With gas well above $4 per gallon this summer, and with airlines raising prices and canceling flights because of high fuel costs, it's not too surprising to find a word like "staycation" gaining a toehold in the North American lexicon. Google now finds nearly 200,000 web pages that use the word -- most of them added within the last few months, if my casual browsing is any indicator. But even back when fuel wasn't so pricey, some of …