This grant funds the Aspen Institute to host a three-year dialogue series, The Aspen Series on Energy Governance, which will synthesize the disparate strands of research that Sloan and other funders have supported in recent years on hydraulic fracturing and shale oil and gas development. The series will consist of three annual forums and two smaller-scale dialogue series that will bring together scholars and practitioners from different fields to develop a set of guidelines and recommendations related to how to oversee shale oil and gas production at the local, state, and federal levels. Discussion papers will be prepared to inform each of the meetings in the series, and a rapporteur will produce a report to summarize the collective results. The Aspen Institute will also develop a web resource that will include materials created for each session in the series and that will serve as a one-stop-shop for all of the publicly available research that the Sloan and Mitchell Foundations have supported on shale gas and oil development. Findings from the discussion series will be presented at public panels and workshops, both in Washington, D.C. and in regions where shale gas and oil development has taken place.

This grant supports energy economist Christopher Knittel in his plans to implement a randomized controlled trial to study how individuals respond to information about their driving habits and how the provision of such information affects energy use and automobile fuel economy. In partnership with a company named Automatic, which manufactures and installs driving activity monitoring devices and provides that information to drivers, Knittel will examine how individual driving behavior is influenced by different kinds of information, packaged in a variety of ways. Automatic’s devices can detect and alert drivers during hard accelerations, hard braking, and speeds over 70 miles per hour. Knittel will study how different ways of presenting these data differentially affect driving behavior. Treatment groups will receive weekly aggregated summaries and comparisons of their driving habits to other drivers. In addition, Knittel will study how sustained exposure to these alerts (at either three or six months) changes driving habits. Though Automatic’s sensors will be installed free of charge to participants, individuals will be given the opportunity to purchase the devices, at different prices, at the study’s conclusion, allowing Knittel to estimate participants’ willingness to pay for this information. The transportation sector is the second largest energy consumer in the United States and accounts for over a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This innovative RCT will help us understand better what interventions might lead consumers to change their driving habits in ways that reduce those emissions.