I’ve been crashing on an exciting piece of analysis that will be out tomorrow. (Well, at least I think it’s exciting.) In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple things.

CFR.org asked four experts, including me, to assess the potential for reduced U.S. oil consumption in light of the Gulf of Mexico spill. Here’s the link. My bottom line is that there’s a lot of potential there, and that we should seize it, but that exploiting it is unlikely to obviate deepwater drilling. Read more »

I’m in LA for an all-day climate forum sponsored by Marketplace. The agenda looks great. The event will be streamed online.

I’m up at 11:30 AM PDT. Here’s their description: Read more »

Bill McKibben has an op-ed on the oil spill and climate politics in the LA Times. It’s got a mix of good stuff and crazy stuff in it. But one line in particular irritated me: Read more »

President Obama caught some flak last week for appointing former EPA Administration William Reilly to cochair his oil spill commission. Rachel Maddow’s blog has highlighted the fact that Reilly sits on the boards of ConocoPhillips, DuPont, and Energy Future Holdings. (He will be taking leave from the ConocoPhillips board.) Tom Philpott at Grist has run with that report, noting that Obama also employs former BP chief scientist Steven Koonin as DOE Undersecretary for Science, and has called on Obama to “purge his administration of petro hacks”. Read more »

A guest poster over at Econbrowser claims that the new EIA oil supply projections are a “Hard Core Peak Oil Forecast”. His argument is that the EIA has been steadily reducing its oil supply projections for 2020 over its last four annual projections, and that this is a sign that EIA has “placed its fortunes firmly with the peak oil crowd”. I think he’s wrong. In any case, if this is what counts as peak oil, then I’m not sure why anyone is so excited about it. Read more »

The Chamber of Commerce has released a new “Energy Security Index”. They’ve taken 37 indicators related to energy and security and combined them to create a master index of energy security risk. I encourage people to wade through the data and analysis – there’s a lot of interesting and provocative stuff there. (I’ve barely scratched the surface myself.) Read more »