Someone totally redesigned the Department of Energy website making the information that you need for the Lab 2-2 (Transportation) is harder to find. Worst of all, the links on the main website (which has been renamed www.energy.gov) are little more than window dressing for impressing impressionable taxpayers. This page is useless to us because we cannot use it to navigate to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Even putting this name in the "search" box does not work! So here it the link:

http://www.eia.gov/

You can use this as a base to find all the information you need, but the route has changed. To find out about petroleum, you scroll to the bottom left under sources and uses, then click on petroleum. To get the basic information on crude oil, you go to the bottom right and click on petroleum explained. To get information on consumption and world oil price, go to the data tab on top of the page and click on consumption / sales. On the bottom of the new page, go to the weekly petroleum status report, then click on the highlights pdf. Here you will find the current world price and total refinery input (which I assume corresponds to total crude oil consumption). Here is the direct link where you can access the pdf file from the link on the top right corner:

 http://www.eia.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/weekly_petroleum_status_report/wpsr.html

To get the information for electricity, you go back to the main page of the U.S. Energy Information Administration then scroll down to sources and uses and click on electricity. From this new page, go to the data tab on top of the page and click on consumption of fossil fuels to generate electricity. From here click on coal. You will get an extremely busy and unreadable report. Go to the top of the page and click on the full report pdf. This will give you all the information you need on all the fossil fuels used to generate electricity. This report is more readable. In case you cannot find it, here is the direct link where you can access the pdf file from the link on the top left corner:

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_2_5_a

I did this lab two weeks ago without knowing any of this until the students could not find anything following my instructions. Fortunately, a few of them were able to figure it out and little class time was wasted after the information was shared. Such are the perils of relying on websites! A similar thing happened to the WHO website which I used for Lab 2-5 (Risk Factors and Health Outcomes in Africa). It was so bad that I had to downgrade Lab 2-5 to a workbook exercise whereby I had no choice but to directly provide my students the data I had downloaded a year earlier (before it became inaccessible). Hopefully this is a temporary state of affairs for Lab 2-5 and a better web designer will make the data accessible again.