Various studies try to quantitatively relate real U.S. GDP growth, employment growth, and changes in consumer price levels to oil prices. For those of you who work on modeling these relationships, here’s an updated survey of studies in the public domain conducted over the last decade or so about how an oil price increase affects real U.S. GDP and the GDP price deflator. I’m putting these data together for some related work I’m doing here at CFR. Read more »

Ideas matter. Or at least Council on Foreign Relations fellows like to believe that: otherwise, we’d be wasting a lot of our time. With that in mind, I canvassed some of the smartest observers of the energy and climate worlds – scholars, advocates, journalists, businesspeople, and policymakers – for their picks for the most influential studies, reports, in-depth articles, or books of the year in the field. Then I threw my own judgement into the mix. Read more »

Policymakers, analysts, and pundits regularly argue over whether countries should care about who they buy their oil from. Economist usually insist that, because markets are flexible, the precise patterns of oil trade don’t matter. Security strategists often insist that they must. Read more »

A story on NPR yesterday morning, “The Downsides of Living in an Oil Boomtown,” had an interesting portrait of the economic effects of high oil prices and booming oil production on Williston, North Dakota. The frenzied pace of job creation has led to high wages but also high turnover. A leap in demand for local goods like housing has caused massive inflation in housing prices and day care services. A similar story could be told of many other rural communities in states like Pennsylvania and Texas where the ramp up in oil and gas drilling activity has been a sudden shock on an otherwise rather static business scene. Read more »

OPEC ministers met in Vienna on Wednesday to discuss the current oil market outlook and make a decision about future production levels, as well as to select a new secretary general. After deliberating, the group opted not to alter the current production ceiling of 30 million barrels per day (though they are currently pumping more than that). Nor could they agree on a replacement for the current secretary general, Abdalla Salem el-Badr, a Libyan national, choosing instead to extend his tenure an additional year starting next month. Read more »

A new term has been getting a lot of play in recent weeks. The International Energy Agency (IEA) kicked things off when it projected that the United States will be “almost self-sufficient in energy, in net terms” by 2035. The idea of “net energy self sufficiency” has shown up everywhere from The Economist to Scientific American. Even a State department blog has trumpeted projected developments using similar words. Read more »

Some of you who saw my piece last month for the Globalist, “The Middle East’s Voracious  Hunger for Energy,” wondered if I could post some charts showing the data underlying the argument.  Here are three. Read more »

Earlier today, the Department of Energy released a long-awaited (and long-delayed) study on the macroeconomic impacts of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The study, prepared by the consultants NERA, is the most in depth look at the economics of LNG exports published to date. That means it’s long, and will take a while to digest. Here are a few quick observations and context. I’ll write another post later on differences between the NERA results and what I reported in my own LNG exports study earlier this year. Read more »