How very 1992.

Yesterday the Commerce Department decided to put a 13 to 26 percent tariff on Chinese made wind towers -- as punishment for "dumping" the towers in the American market at a price that may be less than cost. This follows the recent preliminary recommendation of a 31-to 250 percent tariff on Chinese-made solar cells because the Chinese government subsidizes the industry. Last week, the Chinese government filed a complaint against the U.S. for imposing the tariffs with the WTO, and so we're off to the races on a greentech trade war that feels awfully retro.

The Commerce Department's recent decisions are an attempt to return to a simpler past, rather than building a fairer future. Tariffs are not going reverse time so that the U.S. has the 27 percent share of the global solar manufacturing market that it had in 2001 -- instead of 2010's 5 percent share. Nor will the tariffs create jobs here or hasten the installation of green technologies. In fact, it is likely to do the opposite: Higher prices will dampen the installation of solar and wind here, causing layoffs in the solar and wind installation industry and rolling back the progress these green industries have made. Imposing tariffs will certainly not increase American government subsidies so that they can compete with China's.

Tariffs are an old tool for an old problem when countries subsidized domestic industries to drive exports. Today big companies span multiple countries, as do capital, supply chains, and markets. Borders are no longer the relevant identifier: The lead complainant in the solar case is a German company with a U.S.-based plant, hardly the Andy Griffith character the laws were meant to protect. Read veteran China auto industry reporter Alysha Webb's excellent Electric Vehicles blog, and you'll see a that U.S. and Chinese green startups have complex interlocking financial, intellectual, and market relationships with each other. Michigan-based ALTe LLC is wooing markets in China and the U.S. at the same time. The future is a complicated mix of cross-Pacific competition and cooperation and what we need is a new way to describe them -- coopertition, maybe -- and a new way to make them fair. But the old frameworks don't apply.

The language of the tariff case depicts Americans as victims of Chinese "dumping." But that obscures the real victims of this dumping. If anything, a worldwide supply of cheap solar panels has reallocated money from the pockets of Chinese peasants to the newly solar rooftops of Orange County yuppies. It's those peasants who should be aggrieved. They have also had to bear the brunt of some of China's other pro-green business policies. Last year 500 people rioted outside the gates of Jinko Solar, a plant which appeared to be putting poisonous waste into a local river. It is peasants in Inner Mongolia who have to live next to the five-square-mile pond of ghastly radioactive tailings produced by the mines that provide most of the world's neodymium -- a rare earth element that is crucial for electric vehicles and some wind turbines. The old metaphor of "dumping" low-price goods doesn't account for the literal environmental dumping that enables many of the low-cost goods Americans think we deserve when we go to an auto showroom or Pottery Barn.

"One off stuff" is how Jigar Shah, a solar entrepreneur and president of CASE, a group of solar companies opposing the tariffs, describes the Department of Commerce's actions. Shah has aggressively fought the tariffs, but in conversation he advocates a more comprehensive approach for the future. We need a US industrial policy to make our industries more competitive with Canada and Germany. We also need a free trade pact with Asian economies. But free trade these days is not the same as the days when it meant managing currency valuations and subsidies. A new free trade pact could include prohibitions on child labor, standards for human rights, environmental standards, carbon valuations, and incentives for making products universally recyclable. "The world is different than in was fifteen years ago." says Shah.

How very 1992.

Yesterday the Commerce Department decided to put a 13 to 26 percent tariff on Chinese made wind towers -- as punishment for "dumping" the towers in the American market at a price that may be less than cost. This follows the recent preliminary recommendation of a 31-to 250 percent tariff on Chinese-made solar cells because the Chinese government subsidizes the industry. Last week, the Chinese government filed a complaint against the U.S. for imposing the tariffs with the WTO, and so we're off to the races on a greentech trade war that feels awfully retro.

The Commerce Department's recent decisions are an attempt to return to a simpler past, rather than building a fairer future. Tariffs are not going reverse time so that the U.S. has the 27 percent share of the global solar manufacturing market that it had in 2001 -- instead of 2010's 5 percent share. Nor will the tariffs create jobs here or hasten the installation of green technologies. In fact, it is likely to do the opposite: Higher prices will dampen the installation of solar and wind here, causing layoffs in the solar and wind installation industry and rolling back the progress these green industries have made. Imposing tariffs will certainly not increase American government subsidies so that they can compete with China's.

Tariffs are an old tool for an old problem when countries subsidized domestic industries to drive exports. Today big companies span multiple countries, as do capital, supply chains, and markets. Borders are no longer the relevant identifier: The lead complainant in the solar case is a German company with a U.S.-based plant, hardly the Andy Griffith character the laws were meant to protect. Read veteran China auto industry reporter Alysha Webb's excellent Electric Vehicles blog, and you'll see a that U.S. and Chinese green startups have complex interlocking financial, intellectual, and market relationships with each other. Michigan-based ALTe LLC is wooing markets in China and the U.S. at the same time. The future is a complicated mix of cross-Pacific competition and cooperation and what we need is a new way to describe them -- coopertition, maybe -- and a new way to make them fair. But the old frameworks don't apply.

The language of the tariff case depicts Americans as victims of Chinese "dumping." But that obscures the real victims of this dumping. If anything, a worldwide supply of cheap solar panels has reallocated money from the pockets of Chinese peasants to the newly solar rooftops of Orange County yuppies. It's those peasants who should be aggrieved. They have also had to bear the brunt of some of China's other pro-green business policies. Last year 500 people rioted outside the gates of Jinko Solar, a plant which appeared to be putting poisonous waste into a local river. It is peasants in Inner Mongolia who have to live next to the five-square-mile pond of ghastly radioactive tailings produced by the mines that provide most of the world's neodymium -- a rare earth element that is crucial for electric vehicles and some wind turbines. The old metaphor of "dumping" low-price goods doesn't account for the literal environmental dumping that enables many of the low-cost goods Americans think we deserve when we go to an auto showroom or Pottery Barn.

"One off stuff" is how Jigar Shah, a solar entrepreneur and president of CASE, a group of solar companies opposing the tariffs, describes the Department of Commerce's actions. Shah has aggressively fought the tariffs, but in conversation he advocates a more comprehensive approach for the future. We need a US industrial policy to make our industries more competitive with Canada and Germany. We also need a free trade pact with Asian economies. But free trade these days is not the same as the days when it meant managing currency valuations and subsidies. A new free trade pact could include prohibitions on child labor, standards for human rights, environmental standards, carbon valuations, and incentives for making products universally recyclable. "The world is different than in was fifteen years ago." says Shah.

Reuters

Yesterday, everyone involved in the support and opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline got what they wanted: Obama tossed a squib to environmentalist supporters whom he's previously disappointed, and Republican boosters of the pipeline got to turn the Obama's refusal (which they accelerated by attaching a February 21 deadline for approval to the payroll tax bill) into a talking point against Obama in the upcoming election. In a country without a greenhouse gas strategy or an energy policy, this is passing for political action, but it's really... nothing, a draw, a symbol of symbols.

The Keystone XL is merely on hold, and oil from all sorts of other "dirty" situations continues to flow into our gas tanks. The next time around, environmentalists should resist fighting the symbolic pipeline to concentrate on fighting the larger issue -- reducing emissions and making tar-sands oils prices reflect their environmental toll. We need to stop fighting oil development project by project -- and instead focus on passing a Low Carbon Fuel Standard (which could make the Keystone XL economically unviable), and on reducing oil consumption overall.

First, I have to say I'm a skeptic about the economic viability of the Keystone XL pipeline. Tar sands oils are expensive to extract, so they require a high global oil price -- well over $50 a barrel to be profitable. In the global crude market, these oils do not command the higher prices that light sweet crudes do. So tar-sands crude operates within a pretty narrow margin of profitability. In addition, 15 companies, recently including Chiquita, and the EU are refusing to buy gasoline made with these oils -- which means that the stuff risks becoming an "orphan" crude, where only a few buyers compete for it. (The consulting firm  Purvin & Gertz wrote a report suggesting that the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which sets the tax on different fuels according to their total life-cycle emissions, would seriously impact the profitability of tar sands.) 

When you put an oil with so many costs and qualifications into a $13 billion pipeline, you may magnify these price risks even further. Take the example of another TransCanada pipeline, the mainline gas pipeline running from Alberta to New England, which is now in a  "death spiral" of rising costs and falling shipping volume. When less product is shipped in a pipeline, the cost per unit of product increases, making the product even more expensive. This, in turn, drives other suppliers out of the pipeline, making the product even more expensive. It's not hard to imagine this happening with the Keystone XL. It would join the dust heap of "must have" energy projects including LNG terminals, pipelines, and extra refineries that were sideswiped by market forces. 

To stop tar sands development in Canada, we must work furiously to pass a low-carbon fuel standard. It is obviously a clunky bit of legislation, and it would need to be watched carefully and adjusted to account for how the market responds, but it's essentially fair. More importantly, it gets at the root of the problem with the oil sands -- their high, unpriced, environmental toll. Oil companies and Canadian Government have fought the Fuel Standard ferociously, but the legislation has the potential to create jobs, clean the air, and level the playing field for alternative fuels in the U.S. Environmentalists should put their resources into making a case to voters and pushing it hard.

More on Keystone XL
	Stopping Keystone XL Won't Stop Global Warming
	Proposed Tar Sands Pipeline Sparks Civil Disobedience
	Keystone XL Oil Pipeline: Today's Most Explosive Environmental Debate

More generally, I'm wary of big social movements taking on small-minded projects like opposing  Keystone. The world is covered with pipelines built at the convenience of American companies with assistance from the State Department for the relative convenience of American consumers.

For the past 30 years, American environmentalists have concentrated stopping oil drilling off the east and west coasts, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and now in the tar-sands region. Over that time, until very recently, U.S. oil consumption has grown, so this activism has essentially off-shored our oil production to places like Angola, Chad, Nigeria, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, and Russia, among others -- places with far fewer environmental laws, human rights, and economic opportunities for citizens. (For the past four days Chevron has been battling what appears to be a serious offshore gas well blow-out in Nigeria. And yet coverage of the issue has been confined to the satellite fans, the  drillers, and the sea captains .) Our desire to use oil that is not in our backyards, and preferably invisible, makes Saudi Arabia our perfect supplier: Its oil production is enormous and completely hidden from our view.

Even opposition to the high-carbon emissions of oil sands production bears a whiff of hypocrisy: Driving a mile in a conventional vehicle releases 377 grams of CO2, more than twice the amount of CO2 produced by refining that gasoline from tar sands (166 grams). The U.S. environmental community needs to become more broad-minded, more deeply moral, by changing strategies to really address the problem, which is that our use of oil is is despoiling lands, and producing greenhouse gasses that affect the whole world. 

The Republicans made it easy for Obama to reject the Keystone XL this time around. Environmentalists of both parties should seize this moment by committing themselves to the much harder project of reducing worldwide oil consumption. 

Reuters

Yesterday, everyone involved in the support and opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline got what they wanted: Obama tossed a squib to environmentalist supporters whom he's previously disappointed, and Republican boosters of the pipeline got to turn the Obama's refusal (which they accelerated by attaching a February 21 deadline for approval to the payroll tax bill) into a talking point against Obama in the upcoming election. In a country without a greenhouse gas strategy or an energy policy, this is passing for political action, but it's really... nothing, a draw, a symbol of symbols.

The Keystone XL is merely on hold, and oil from all sorts of other "dirty" situations continues to flow into our gas tanks. The next time around, environmentalists should resist fighting the symbolic pipeline to concentrate on fighting the larger issue -- reducing emissions and making tar-sands oils prices reflect their environmental toll. We need to stop fighting oil development project by project -- and instead focus on passing a Low Carbon Fuel Standard (which could make the Keystone XL economically unviable), and on reducing oil consumption overall.

First, I have to say I'm a skeptic about the economic viability of the Keystone XL pipeline. Tar sands oils are expensive to extract, so they require a high global oil price -- well over $50 a barrel to be profitable. In the global crude market, these oils do not command the higher prices that light sweet crudes do. So tar-sands crude operates within a pretty narrow margin of profitability. In addition, 15 companies, recently including Chiquita, and the EU are refusing to buy gasoline made with these oils -- which means that the stuff risks becoming an "orphan" crude, where only a few buyers compete for it. (The consulting firm  Purvin & Gertz wrote a report suggesting that the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which sets the tax on different fuels according to their total life-cycle emissions, would seriously impact the profitability of tar sands.) 

When you put an oil with so many costs and qualifications into a $13 billion pipeline, you may magnify these price risks even further. Take the example of another TransCanada pipeline, the mainline gas pipeline running from Alberta to New England, which is now in a  "death spiral" of rising costs and falling shipping volume. When less product is shipped in a pipeline, the cost per unit of product increases, making the product even more expensive. This, in turn, drives other suppliers out of the pipeline, making the product even more expensive. It's not hard to imagine this happening with the Keystone XL. It would join the dust heap of "must have" energy projects including LNG terminals, pipelines, and extra refineries that were sideswiped by market forces. 

To stop tar sands development in Canada, we must work furiously to pass a low-carbon fuel standard. It is obviously a clunky bit of legislation, and it would need to be watched carefully and adjusted to account for how the market responds, but it's essentially fair. More importantly, it gets at the root of the problem with the oil sands -- their high, unpriced, environmental toll. Oil companies and Canadian Government have fought the Fuel Standard ferociously, but the legislation has the potential to create jobs, clean the air, and level the playing field for alternative fuels in the U.S. Environmentalists should put their resources into making a case to voters and pushing it hard.

More on Keystone XL
	Stopping Keystone XL Won't Stop Global Warming
	Proposed Tar Sands Pipeline Sparks Civil Disobedience
	Keystone XL Oil Pipeline: Today's Most Explosive Environmental Debate

More generally, I'm wary of big social movements taking on small-minded projects like opposing  Keystone. The world is covered with pipelines built at the convenience of American companies with assistance from the State Department for the relative convenience of American consumers.

For the past 30 years, American environmentalists have concentrated stopping oil drilling off the east and west coasts, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and now in the tar-sands region. Over that time, until very recently, U.S. oil consumption has grown, so this activism has essentially off-shored our oil production to places like Angola, Chad, Nigeria, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, and Russia, among others -- places with far fewer environmental laws, human rights, and economic opportunities for citizens. (For the past four days Chevron has been battling what appears to be a serious offshore gas well blow-out in Nigeria. And yet coverage of the issue has been confined to the satellite fans, the  drillers, and the sea captains .) Our desire to use oil that is not in our backyards, and preferably invisible, makes Saudi Arabia our perfect supplier: Its oil production is enormous and completely hidden from our view.

Even opposition to the high-carbon emissions of oil sands production bears a whiff of hypocrisy: Driving a mile in a conventional vehicle releases 377 grams of CO2, more than twice the amount of CO2 produced by refining that gasoline from tar sands (166 grams). The U.S. environmental community needs to become more broad-minded, more deeply moral, by changing strategies to really address the problem, which is that our use of oil is is despoiling lands, and producing greenhouse gasses that affect the whole world. 

The Republicans made it easy for Obama to reject the Keystone XL this time around. Environmentalists of both parties should seize this moment by committing themselves to the much harder project of reducing worldwide oil consumption. 

Gasoline-wise, 2011 has been a very expensive year. Who knows what gas prices 2012 will bring? Rather than giving lovely gadgets that will only consume more energy, like everyone else, here are three ways to stuff the gift of *less gas* this holiday season.

1. Turn Your Honda Civic Hatchback into a Homemade Hybrid for just $1600.

Green gearhead Nick Rothman is an electric car renaissance guy: Fluent in Japanese, he's a certified Prius mechanic, and has built scads of plug-in hybrids at Pat's Garage in San Francisco while developing a second career in custom electric bikes. A few years ago, he started tinkering on a salvage title Honda Civic hatchback, adding an electric motor in the spot where the air conditioner goes to boost starts. He wired it all together with a bunch of off-the-shelf batteries and controllers for around $1600. Driving around San Francisco, Nick toggled his electric motor throttle and engine kill button to boost the Civic's fuel efficiency by 42 percent, which works out to an extra 10 mpg. Now he's produced a how-to book about the process which you can buy from Electric Motor Sport and soon from Amazon, where he already sells a book on electrifying your bike.

Homemade Plug In Hybrid ($40, perhaps less as a Kindle edition) is a fine gift for eco-dreamers and tinkerers. It's full of illustrations and explanations and offers interesting strategies like building a mock version of the motor from cardboard to be sure it will fit inside the hood. Practically, however, you do need to know how to fabricate a drive sprocket and a lot more to make the car. But even if you have no intention of building your own hybrid, it's an education in the state of the U.S. electrical vehicle movement. First, you learn it's possible to build your hybrid with American-made parts. Nick prints detailed comparisons of components, listing those that are made in the U.S. and those that are not. For many in the electric vehicle business, DIY also means DI-USA, and tinkerers are often willing to take on heavier components because they're part of a "Little Magneto on the Prairie" vision.

"A lot of the best electric conversion components are made in the USA," Nick says. "The concept of converting cars to electric in your garage is still a very American phenomenon. It's an American tradition to take your car and lavish time and money on it to create something that didn't exist before. The Civic has become the modern Mustang -- there are endless catalogs of after-market parts.

Out of this grand-old tradition of building hot rods comes a new tradition, and new industry, of building cool rods.
 
(Next year, you may want to just give your loved ones all of your old coffee grounds. Here's a British car powered by gasified coffee grounds that averaged 66 mph in September.)

Option 2: Have a Hypermiling Holiday

While I was talking to Nick he mentioned that he'd been experimenting with ecodriving -- a way of driving to increase gas mileage -- and found he could sometimes get an extra 8 to 10 mpg out of his Honda Fit. The key, he says, is to invest in a feedback gadget, like this Scangauge, ($95 and up) which plugs into your car's computer system to tell you how much mileage you're getting out of every gallon and every tank. Then read up on the tricks of the hypermilers. Hypermiler Wayne Gerdes says he got 67 mpg from a 2009 Toyota Corolla XRS that the EPA has rated at 25 mpg. Some hypermiling moves are easy -- turning off the car when you're idling. Others -- like dramatically changing the rhythm of your driving patterns in traffic -- may require a personality transplant. Nick says he's found that almost everyone changes they way they drive when they adjust the Scanguage's feedback to show how much they're spending on gas every day. (If you add that daily cost of gasoline to the daily cost of insurance and the daily cost of auto financing, you may just want to try option three, below.)

Option 3: Where possible, get a bicycle, a pair of shoes, or a bus pass, and wrap it up in a very large box labeled "new car."

Image: Reuters.

Gasoline-wise, 2011 has been a very expensive year. Who knows what gas prices 2012 will bring? Rather than giving lovely gadgets that will only consume more energy, like everyone else, here are three ways to stuff the gift of *less gas* this holiday season.

1. Turn Your Honda Civic Hatchback into a Homemade Hybrid for just $1600.

Green gearhead Nick Rothman is an electric car renaissance guy: Fluent in Japanese, he's a certified Prius mechanic, and has built scads of plug-in hybrids at Pat's Garage in San Francisco while developing a second career in custom electric bikes. A few years ago, he started tinkering on a salvage title Honda Civic hatchback, adding an electric motor in the spot where the air conditioner goes to boost starts. He wired it all together with a bunch of off-the-shelf batteries and controllers for around $1600. Driving around San Francisco, Nick toggled his electric motor throttle and engine kill button to boost the Civic's fuel efficiency by 42 percent, which works out to an extra 10 mpg. Now he's produced a how-to book about the process which you can buy from Electric Motor Sport and soon from Amazon, where he already sells a book on electrifying your bike.

Homemade Plug In Hybrid ($40, perhaps less as a Kindle edition) is a fine gift for eco-dreamers and tinkerers. It's full of illustrations and explanations and offers interesting strategies like building a mock version of the motor from cardboard to be sure it will fit inside the hood. Practically, however, you do need to know how to fabricate a drive sprocket and a lot more to make the car. But even if you have no intention of building your own hybrid, it's an education in the state of the U.S. electrical vehicle movement. First, you learn it's possible to build your hybrid with American-made parts. Nick prints detailed comparisons of components, listing those that are made in the U.S. and those that are not. For many in the electric vehicle business, DIY also means DI-USA, and tinkerers are often willing to take on heavier components because they're part of a "Little Magneto on the Prairie" vision.

"A lot of the best electric conversion components are made in the USA," Nick says. "The concept of converting cars to electric in your garage is still a very American phenomenon. It's an American tradition to take your car and lavish time and money on it to create something that didn't exist before. The Civic has become the modern Mustang -- there are endless catalogs of after-market parts.

Out of this grand-old tradition of building hot rods comes a new tradition, and new industry, of building cool rods.
 
(Next year, you may want to just give your loved ones all of your old coffee grounds. Here's a British car powered by gasified coffee grounds that averaged 66 mph in September.)

Option 2: Have a Hypermiling Holiday

While I was talking to Nick he mentioned that he'd been experimenting with ecodriving -- a way of driving to increase gas mileage -- and found he could sometimes get an extra 8 to 10 mpg out of his Honda Fit. The key, he says, is to invest in a feedback gadget, like this Scangauge, ($95 and up) which plugs into your car's computer system to tell you how much mileage you're getting out of every gallon and every tank. Then read up on the tricks of the hypermilers. Hypermiler Wayne Gerdes says he got 67 mpg from a 2009 Toyota Corolla XRS that the EPA has rated at 25 mpg. Some hypermiling moves are easy -- turning off the car when you're idling. Others -- like dramatically changing the rhythm of your driving patterns in traffic -- may require a personality transplant. Nick says he's found that almost everyone changes they way they drive when they adjust the Scanguage's feedback to show how much they're spending on gas every day. (If you add that daily cost of gasoline to the daily cost of insurance and the daily cost of auto financing, you may just want to try option three, below.)

Option 3: Where possible, get a bicycle, a pair of shoes, or a bus pass, and wrap it up in a very large box labeled "new car."

Image: Reuters.

For 30 years, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been more lethargic than strategic. Its roughly 700 million barrels of oil have sat in their salt caverns on the Gulf Coast, not doing anything more ambitious than providing a feeling of security. That may have changed last month, when the Obama administration arranged for a release of 30 million barrels from the SPR, and an equivalent amount from IEA worldwide reserves.  This move, rife with what we'll call "strategic ambiguity" may be one of those smallish moves that turns out to be decisive in the long run of history. Will the US now take a more Strategic (with a capital S) approach to world oil markets? Will we come to guard moderated world oil prices as we now use our navy to guard the world's oil choke points? Is this even a worthy goal?

The SPR was initially designed to be our answer to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo's "oil weapon." Yet by the time it was built in the early '80s, the evolution of the world oil market had made embargoes obsolete. So, until recently, there had been just two "emergency" releases: once after the beginning of the first Gulf War, and again after Katrina. The SPR was probably more notable for what it didn't do: The Bush Administration didn't release oil from the reserve at the start of the Second Gulf War. Instead they asked Saudi Arabia to increase its production, which was exactly the sort of political sausage making the SPR was created to avoid. And in the aftermath of Katrina, the SPR release did not relieve US prices, because the SPR, the pipelines, and the refineries were all in the path of the hurricane. Instead it was tankers of refined gasoline from Europe that sailed to our rescue.

SPR aside, there is a strong case to be made for the US taking a more strategic approach to oil prices

For 30 years, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been more lethargic than strategic. Its roughly 700 million barrels of oil have sat in their salt caverns on the Gulf Coast, not doing anything more ambitious than providing a feeling of security. That may have changed last month, when the Obama administration arranged for a release of 30 million barrels from the SPR, and an equivalent amount from IEA worldwide reserves.  This move, rife with what we'll call "strategic ambiguity" may be one of those smallish moves that turns out to be decisive in the long run of history. Will the US now take a more Strategic (with a capital S) approach to world oil markets? Will we come to guard moderated world oil prices as we now use our navy to guard the world's oil choke points? Is this even a worthy goal?

The SPR was initially designed to be our answer to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo's "oil weapon." Yet by the time it was built in the early '80s, the evolution of the world oil market had made embargoes obsolete. So, until recently, there had been just two "emergency" releases: once after the beginning of the first Gulf War, and again after Katrina. The SPR was probably more notable for what it didn't do: The Bush Administration didn't release oil from the reserve at the start of the Second Gulf War. Instead they asked Saudi Arabia to increase its production, which was exactly the sort of political sausage making the SPR was created to avoid. And in the aftermath of Katrina, the SPR release did not relieve US prices, because the SPR, the pipelines, and the refineries were all in the path of the hurricane. Instead it was tankers of refined gasoline from Europe that sailed to our rescue.

SPR aside, there is a strong case to be made for the US taking a more strategic approach to oil prices

The American driver buys about a quarter of the world's oil production and has been willing to put up with higher and higher prices, despite the extraordinary drain on our household and national economies. (In March, we spent more than $42 billion on gasoline. Our gas tanks have become a stimulus program in reverse.) If we significantly reduced our commutes, we'd not only reduce the amount of money we're spending on oil, we might also send a message to the oil market that there are limits to what we'll pay, thus dampening prices.

But conventional wisdom says that Americans will not get out of our cars. Only 4.5 percent of us take public transit because it's too [fill in the blank] inconvenient, expensive, slow, unpredictable, dangerous, or un-American. Another 10 percent or so use carpools, but nearly nine out of 10 of us commute to work in cars, mostly alone. (Outside transit-rich cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, this number is higher.) The hurdle to change the way Americans commute seems impossibly high, and made of expensive investments in high-speed rail, light rail, and long-term changes in development patterns.

Marci and her team see leaving the car at home as a lifestyle choice rather than a sacrifice—something you'd read about in Real Simple or Oprah.

I spent a couple of hours with Marci to find out how she nurtures this cult that gets 10,000 people out of their cars daily. It seemed to me that there were three aspects of the program that operate counter to the current thinking. First, logistically, there are a lot of buses that terminate and originate within a few blocks of all the 30,000 jobs in the park. Secondly, the focus of the transit program is not exclusively environmental, but encompasses health, stress, and financial benefits. Thirdly, though there are 500 businesses at the park, a single office takes pride in its ability to get people on transit, and thus there's an evangelical zeal to the whole operation. It's not "just a program"--it's Marci and her team's program.

First, the logistics: The park was developed from farmland by Masud Mehran's Sunset Development Corporation in 1978 on the belief that San Francisco real estate would soon become expensive and companies would need cheaper space for their administrative services. His grandson, Alexander Mehran, describes the transit program as "a necessity that developed into a whole different animal." When the park started, it was simply too far from anywhere. "We were getting crushed by people going to work in Walnut Creek and Dublin," where the BART stations are. As a result, the ranch bought a fleet of buses and worked with the city and county transit agencies to subsidize both bus routes and bus passes for workers. There are now 13 different bus routes running to the park, and the connections to BART and various local train and express bus services are coordinated. On its website, the Ranch now pitches its transit program as a competitive advantage.

The need for employment-centered transit often falls out of debates about Transit Oriented Development, but recent analysis by economist Jed Kolko of the Public Policy Institute of California shows that making sure that transit ends at job sites reduces car commutes more than putting the transit near homes. Policy-wise, transit oriented employment could be easier to encourage through tax breaks and enterprise zones.

Secondly, Marci and her team see leaving the car at home as a lifestyle choice rather than a sacrifice--something you'd read about in Real Simple or Oprah. While Marci tells everyone that one Ranch rider got rid of his car and saved $10,512 a year on his auto lease, maintenance, fuel, and tolls through the transit program, she sees that as the start of a long discussion. "If they're just looking to save money, it won't work," she explains, "If you're riding because it helps you make several changes in your life, you'll ride longer. It really matters that people feel they have a choice."

Marci says she often tries to figure out what's causing stress in people's lives and uses transit to solve it. One of the biggest problems is that people feel pressed for time, and she suggests they get off transit a stop or two early and walk so that they can avoid spending time on the treadmill later. The ranch is also along a bike path which is used by hundreds of workers for occasional rides. Marci herself lost 40 pounds taking transit and sprinting to make a difficult connection. The one hurdle Marci says she can't overcome is childcare problems, but for easier problems the Ranch also provides free taxi rides home--though only 2-3 percent of the coupons are ever used.

Marci says that once riders begin leaving their cars at home they go through a stressful period of two weeks or so where they feel that they've lost the control they had in the car. But within three weeks they notice their overall stress levels are lower. "Transit requires that you go at a different pace. You have to wait. If there were roses, we'd smell them," she says, "There's not much of that in our lives." She says HR people have called her saying some of their meaner workers have become pleasant people after switching to transit.

Do you believe her? Would you believe that taking transit solves problems other than getting to work and avoiding oil use--if that? You probably would if Marci were standing in front of you. She's a small, passionately chatty evangelist. Because she and her small staff have been tasked with transit for the whole park of 550 businesses, they take pride in every rider in the program. While urban planners tend to see bus ridership as a design issue, Marci sees it as a cultural endeavor. A conversation with her ricochets from practicalities like transfers to aspirations (that stress!) to an academic understanding of traffic. Typical of her approach is a packet of microwave popcorn --the currency of office afternoons--adorned with a sticker reading: "What do popcorn and traffic have in common?" (Answer: They both expand rapidly to fill empty space.) Will that abstract concept alone get a person out of her car? No, but Marci sees the impact as cumulative. While policy pundits like myself gabble on about the need for policy leadership and pricing externalities and the like, Marci works the gig more like an Avon Lady -- hand delivering bus passes to offices in the park so she can get to know the receptionists who then refer frustrated auto commuters to her.

Sitting in Marci's office, the path towards reducing our oil use in a hurry seems clearer than elsewhere--and possible. Maybe we don't need to wait for years of expensive infrastructure buildouts, new development patterns, technology, and punishing taxes or high oil prices. We need some of that, to be sure. But in the short term we could do a lot with policies to encourage employer-centered transit, a lot of connector buses, and a whole army of Marcis.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The American driver buys about a quarter of the world's oil production and has been willing to put up with higher and higher prices, despite the extraordinary drain on our household and national economies. (In March, we spent more than $42 billion on gasoline. Our gas tanks have become a stimulus program in reverse.) If we significantly reduced our commutes, we'd not only reduce the amount of money we're spending on oil, we might also send a message to the oil market that there are limits to what we'll pay, thus dampening prices.

But conventional wisdom says that Americans will not get out of our cars. Only 4.5 percent of us take public transit because it's too [fill in the blank] inconvenient, expensive, slow, unpredictable, dangerous, or un-American. Another 10 percent or so use carpools, but nearly nine out of 10 of us commute to work in cars, mostly alone. (Outside transit-rich cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, this number is higher.) The hurdle to change the way Americans commute seems impossibly high, and made of expensive investments in high-speed rail, light rail, and long-term changes in development patterns.

Marci and her team see leaving the car at home as a lifestyle choice rather than a sacrifice—something you'd read about in Real Simple or Oprah.

I spent a couple of hours with Marci to find out how she nurtures this cult that gets 10,000 people out of their cars daily. It seemed to me that there were three aspects of the program that operate counter to the current thinking. First, logistically, there are a lot of buses that terminate and originate within a few blocks of all the 30,000 jobs in the park. Secondly, the focus of the transit program is not exclusively environmental, but encompasses health, stress, and financial benefits. Thirdly, though there are 500 businesses at the park, a single office takes pride in its ability to get people on transit, and thus there's an evangelical zeal to the whole operation. It's not "just a program"--it's Marci and her team's program.

First, the logistics: The park was developed from farmland by Masud Mehran's Sunset Development Corporation in 1978 on the belief that San Francisco real estate would soon become expensive and companies would need cheaper space for their administrative services. His grandson, Alexander Mehran, describes the transit program as "a necessity that developed into a whole different animal." When the park started, it was simply too far from anywhere. "We were getting crushed by people going to work in Walnut Creek and Dublin," where the BART stations are. As a result, the ranch bought a fleet of buses and worked with the city and county transit agencies to subsidize both bus routes and bus passes for workers. There are now 13 different bus routes running to the park, and the connections to BART and various local train and express bus services are coordinated. On its website, the Ranch now pitches its transit program as a competitive advantage.

The need for employment-centered transit often falls out of debates about Transit Oriented Development, but recent analysis by economist Jed Kolko of the Public Policy Institute of California shows that making sure that transit ends at job sites reduces car commutes more than putting the transit near homes. Policy-wise, transit oriented employment could be easier to encourage through tax breaks and enterprise zones.

Secondly, Marci and her team see leaving the car at home as a lifestyle choice rather than a sacrifice--something you'd read about in Real Simple or Oprah. While Marci tells everyone that one Ranch rider got rid of his car and saved $10,512 a year on his auto lease, maintenance, fuel, and tolls through the transit program, she sees that as the start of a long discussion. "If they're just looking to save money, it won't work," she explains, "If you're riding because it helps you make several changes in your life, you'll ride longer. It really matters that people feel they have a choice."

Marci says she often tries to figure out what's causing stress in people's lives and uses transit to solve it. One of the biggest problems is that people feel pressed for time, and she suggests they get off transit a stop or two early and walk so that they can avoid spending time on the treadmill later. The ranch is also along a bike path which is used by hundreds of workers for occasional rides. Marci herself lost 40 pounds taking transit and sprinting to make a difficult connection. The one hurdle Marci says she can't overcome is childcare problems, but for easier problems the Ranch also provides free taxi rides home--though only 2-3 percent of the coupons are ever used.

Marci says that once riders begin leaving their cars at home they go through a stressful period of two weeks or so where they feel that they've lost the control they had in the car. But within three weeks they notice their overall stress levels are lower. "Transit requires that you go at a different pace. You have to wait. If there were roses, we'd smell them," she says, "There's not much of that in our lives." She says HR people have called her saying some of their meaner workers have become pleasant people after switching to transit.

Do you believe her? Would you believe that taking transit solves problems other than getting to work and avoiding oil use--if that? You probably would if Marci were standing in front of you. She's a small, passionately chatty evangelist. Because she and her small staff have been tasked with transit for the whole park of 550 businesses, they take pride in every rider in the program. While urban planners tend to see bus ridership as a design issue, Marci sees it as a cultural endeavor. A conversation with her ricochets from practicalities like transfers to aspirations (that stress!) to an academic understanding of traffic. Typical of her approach is a packet of microwave popcorn --the currency of office afternoons--adorned with a sticker reading: "What do popcorn and traffic have in common?" (Answer: They both expand rapidly to fill empty space.) Will that abstract concept alone get a person out of her car? No, but Marci sees the impact as cumulative. While policy pundits like myself gabble on about the need for policy leadership and pricing externalities and the like, Marci works the gig more like an Avon Lady -- hand delivering bus passes to offices in the park so she can get to know the receptionists who then refer frustrated auto commuters to her.

Sitting in Marci's office, the path towards reducing our oil use in a hurry seems clearer than elsewhere--and possible. Maybe we don't need to wait for years of expensive infrastructure buildouts, new development patterns, technology, and punishing taxes or high oil prices. We need some of that, to be sure. But in the short term we could do a lot with policies to encourage employer-centered transit, a lot of connector buses, and a whole army of Marcis.

Image: Wikimedia Commons