The annual car evaluations Consumer Reports publishes in its April issue have just arrived—and the news for Detroit is not good. This year the magazine has devised what it calls a “Report Card” on the world’s 15 largest car companies. We show some of the results in the table below. (The "overall score" here is calculated by combining the average test scores for a given company's models a...

With the current cost of gas at around $3 and falling, driving has become slightly more affordable than it was a few months ago, when gas was $4 a gallon. The price decrease also takes away some of the incentive consumers have to turn to more fuel-efficient cars. AIER’s new Comparative Fuel Efficiency Calculator shows the influence of the $1 fall in gas prices. Consider a high-priced gas-guzz...

Natural gas is likely to play an ever more important role in U.S. energy production. Between 1997 and 2007,  for example, the amount of natural gas used in the production of electricity increased by more than 50 percent, and today, natural gas generates 22 percent of all electricity in the United States. A 25 percent reduction in industrial use has offset this increase, keeping consumption flat...

The price of a gallon of regular-grade gasoline has more than tripled in the past eight years, increasing from $1.29 in 2000 to over $4.00 today.  The increase has been blamed on oil producers, consumers, speculators, refiners, global political events, and even gas station owners. It’s impossible to untangle all the supply and demand forces that determine the price of gas. But according to the ...

The recent and continuing surge in gasoline prices has raised concerns and fears about the future of oil-based energy in the coming years. Are we reaching the end of global petroleum supplies in the face of increasing demand that supply seems unable to keep up with? In fact, oil reserves around the world are plentiful, and can keep growing consumption and industrial uses humming for many decades t...

The United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the largest reserve of its kind, with 700 million barrels of unrefined crude oil housed in man-made, underground facilities in Texas and Louisiana. That is about as much oil as the entire world consumes in nine days. By 2015, total SPR capacity will have been increased from 730 million to one billion barrels. There have been numerous call...

At a time when the dramatic rise in global food prices has created a deep concern about the standards of living of the poorest around the world, a recent study on the traffic in wildlife products points out the crucial role it plays sustaining the livelihood of tens of millions among those poor. The report also emphasizes the importance of recognized and enforced property rights to create the inc...

The issue of climate change and religion is suddenly getting more attention. In the June 12 issue of the New York Review of Books, physicist Freeman Dyson reviews a couple of new books, including economist William Nordhaus’s A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. Dyson writes, All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming,...

America’s dependence on foreign oil is frequently mentioned in political and economic discussion, as well as in daily news and everyday talk, and record highs in prices have become a common occurrence in the past few months. However, the actual scope of the issue is rarely seen. The chart below yields two striking facts: U.S. petroleum production in 2006 was lower than that of 1950, and was a...