Communicating with a non-statistical public about issues of variability is enormously difficult. I deal with this all the time with respect to weather. How much warmer (colder) is it today than “normal”?

The Energy Information Agency’s “This Week in Petroleum” had a great discussion of the issue Thursday with respect to the prospect of $4 a gallon gasoline. It’s a huge marker out there, but what do we mean when we talk about $4 a gallon gas? As a practical matter, we’re probably thinking about the first time we see that magic $4 at any gas station anywhere in our field of view. But TWIP nicely sorts out the problem of both spatial and temporal variability associated with the price of gas:

Many recent inquiries have asked about the prospects for $4 per gallon gasoline, but what they are really interested in is if they will be paying $4 per gallon at their gas station. In EIA’s March Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), the U.S. monthly average retail regular gasoline price is projected to peak near $3.50 per gallon in May and June. It is important to note, however, that even if the national average monthly gasoline price peaks near that level, it is possible that prices during part of a month, or in some region or at some stations, will cross the $4 per gallon threshold.

Michael Tobis does some nice number-crunching on the true costs of energy:

A hundred dollars a barrel. A barrel! Energy is unbelievably cheap.

That’s about six million BTUs. One point seven megawatt hours. With that $100 barrel you can power your laptop for two years. You can ship hundreds of pounds of bananas from Guatemala. You can microwave a hundred and two thousand cups of tea to steaming warmth. You can power the digital clock on your microwave for seven million years!

It’s not that energy is too expensive. It’s that it’s too cheap. It’s made us ridiculously lazy.

Especially worthy of note is Michael’s calculation of the cost of shipping a tomato across the country. Not as much as you might think, and (most importantly) not as much as the cost of getting it home from the market in your car.

A confession: I’m one of those people who delights as the gas price numbers at the Kwik-E-Mart around the corner from my house tick up higher and higher. I know, I know, I’m a bad person. There are folks for whom that price really hurts, who don’t have the disposable cash to buy 30-year old Frank Zappa albums when the mood strikes them.

My thinking is that price increase will surely in some sense rationalize our consumption. If we don’t have the gumption to actually tax for the externalities, maybe the price runup will have a similar effect. Sadly,  not so much, as Erica Myers pointed out last week:

Despite a recent spike in domestic gas and electricity prices, demand for energy has barely moved. In fact, the more that 100% increase in oil prices in recent years may actually be leading to an increase in carbon emissions.

In which Simon Donner expands on the way ethanol production kills the ocean:

The new US Energy Policy calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by the year 2022. Of that, 15 billion can be produced from corn starch. Our study found meeting those would cause a 10-34% increase in nitrogen loading to the Gulf of Mexico.