Lisa Margonelli discusses Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline.
Americans consume 10,000 gallons of gasoline a second: three gallons per person per day. New America Irvine Fellow Lisa Margonelli spent three years tracing the path that petroleum takes from oil fields far away to the gas tanks of California drivers. In her book "Oil On the Brain" she examines the history, chemistry, economics, politics and culture of oil to look at where our relationship to petroleum is taking us.
At this Sacramento event, Margonelli described her travels and discussed opportunities to change the status quo, particularly in California. High gas prices may be a chance for policy makers to offer radical new energy policies. She talked about one opportunity to make efficiency gains tradable, so that companies can work towards energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction while stimulating technology and creating jobs- New America Foundation
Bio
Lisa Margonelli
Lisa Margonelli writes about the global culture and economy of energy. The results of her research on the effects of industry and policy on the lives of individuals have been published in Wired, Discover, Salon, Business 2.0, Health, Jane, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine and California Monthly, among other publications.
Her column, Money Tales, which combined economics and oral history in the San Francisco Chronicle online, won an Excellence in Journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists in 2003. In 1999-2000, she was awarded a Sundance Fellowship to write about the effect of globalization on the stories told by Eastern European filmmakers. She has written for Slate, CNN, NPR, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal. She is a graduate of Yale University.
As a California-based Fellow at the New America Foundation, Ms. Margonelli’s work will include an examination of the promise and possibility of the post-oil world and California’s unique opportunity to benefit from new technologies and policies. She is the author of a book about the oil supply chain, Oil on the Brain: Travels in the World of Petroleum, published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.