Gas Prices

An oil-rich region of West Texas is about to get more than half a billion dollars in highway funds so it can continue to pump more crude and frack natural gas — perpetuating a cycle that is causing the destruction of human civilization.

Meet the party fighting for cheap gas and against global warming at the same time.

Long-term climate prospects brightened somewhat in 2015. Pope Francis put climate care on the moral and political agenda. President Obama rejected the Keystone XL dirty-oil pipeline. Denialist heads of state were routed in Canada and Australia, and their brethren in the U.S. faced growing ridicule. To cap it off, nearly 200 nations signed the UN Paris accord, committing to cutting emissions. Meanwhile, U.S. coal use took another double-digit plunge. And U.S. electricity generation from zero-carbon photovoltaic solar cells continued to soar and has now grown 20-fold in just five years.

At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap gas has serious hidden costs—more pollution, more energy consumption, more crashes and greater traffic congestion. There’s an important lesson here, if we pay attention.

Cross-posted from City Observatory. 

With gas prices plummeting and employment figures rising, America's per capita driving rate increased in 2014 for the first time in nearly a decade. But experts warn driving is far from back to its previous historical pattern.

Uber is celebrating. DC passed an Uber-legalization law that Uber thinks cities the world over should follow. The problem is, most cities have much more tightly regulated taxi industries than DC, with a far higher cost of entry. In those cases, letting Uber get away with providing taxi services while complying with none of the rules is unfair. The taxi companies have been screaming about this for a while now. Uber's response is something like, "Catch me if you can, old geezer." DC's contribution to that conversation strengthens Uber's position.

So transit ridership is up. Everybody knows that. It’s at its highest point since 1956. Right?

How embarrassing. The Republican National Committee’s outreach to young potential voters misses the mark so badly they're just proving the point they were hoping to disprove: The party is absolutely clueless about young people.