Mexico’s recent elections made headlines around the world. In this guest post, my colleague Shannon O’Neil examines Mexico’s President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto’s promises to reform the oil industry, and the likelihood that Peña Nieto will be able to accomplish what his predecessor could not. Check out her blog, Latin America’s Moment, to read more about Mexico’s recent elections or its energy sector. Read more »

Commentary in the aftermath of Thursday’s Supreme Court decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act has focused on its immediate political and policy consequences and on the limits it articulates to the authority of Congress to regulate commerce. But there’s something else worth paying attention to: in upholding the ACA on the grounds that it is an exercise of congressional taxing authority, it appears to affirm the broader legal foundation for taxing private behavior that has damaging social consequences. That, of course, is a fundamental piece of environmental economics. Read more »

It depends on how you define it.

Take oil, for example. The recent, sustained downturn in U.S. oil imports is already the talk of the town, but to recap: The United States is importing far less foreign oil to satisfy its domestic needs than it was even a few years ago. This trend is very likely to continue in the coming years. Read more »

It is nearly impossible to read a pitch for expanding U.S. oil and gas production without being confronted with impressive estimates of how many jobs it will create. Wood Mackenzie has estimated that expanded oil and gas production could support 1.4 million new jobs by 2030. Citigroup has claimed an upside potential of as many as 3.6 million jobs from new oil and gas production by 2020. Read more »

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing last week titled “Tapping America’s Unconventional Oil Resources for Job Creation and Affordable Domestic Energy: Technology & Policy Pathways”. I had assumed that the hearing would highlight attacks on Obama administration policies toward shale gas, shale oil, and Keystone XL, all of which have been prominent in the news. Read more »

I was worried that my defense of speculation in the oil market, published this week on ForeignAffairs.com, was late to the game, but my timing turned out to be right on. Just yesterday, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by Joseph P. Kennedy arguing that “pure” speculators should be “banned from the world’s commodity exchanges.” Read more »

You’re not going to win any popularity contests being a speculator in the oil market these days. As if Occupy Wall Street weren’t bad enough, a significant percentage of the American public is convinced that speculation is the reason why it’s costing them so much to fill up the tank. Comments by President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Congressional leaders suggesting that speculators may be to blame for pushing oil prices higher over the last few months have added heft to these claims. Read more »

Anticipation is heating up around another release of oil and petroleum products from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), likely in coordination with the United Kingdom, France, and possibly others. Read more »

It’s difficult to open a newspaper or turn on the TV without hearing that Americans are apoplectic about skyrocketing gas prices. If ever there was a moment to channel public anger toward policy progress, this would seem to be it. So I was intrigued to see a new poll from Hart Research Associates, commissioned by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which tests a series of messages about gas prices and policy responses to see which ones would work best. Read more »

Pundits love to talk about how gasoline prices might influence the upcoming presidential election. So it might surprise people to know that political scientists have spent precious little time investigating the relationship between oil and electoral outcomes. The first step in getting our arms around how pain at the pump might play at the ballot box is to pull together some good data. Trevor Houser has done us the favor of delivering just that. Read more »