As gasoline prices passed $3.50 a gallon nationally, the politicking predictably kicked into overdrive. “There’s no reason we can’t get gasoline down to $2 and $2.50 a gallon,” said Newt Gingrich, who in February promised he would accomplish this via an agenda he called “Drill here, drill now, pay less.” Two days later three prominent Democrats, including Representative Ed Markey, called for President Obama to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices.

Lisa Margonelli, a fellow at the New America Foundation, said she's baffled by the pronouncement that Iran would cut off oil shipments in advance of the new sanctions going into effect. Though she pointed out that just one Iranian news agency said the ...

Since 2007, California has experienced a solar boom. Photovoltaic panels rest on 107,159 rooftops, as of this writing (the numbers are updated here every Wednesday). Driven by incentives that are bankrolled by every Californian who pays a utility bill, Californians now have more than one Gigawatt of solar capacity installed over our heads That’s a lot: one Gigawatt is roughly the size of one of the state’s four nuclear power plants, although solar PV panels do not produce power at the steady, even rate that nukes do.

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.