What’s the price of gasoline? In the U.S. it’s about $4 a gallon. But some experts say the true price of gas is much higher. What about the costs of pollution, and the global and local problems caused by it? Who pays for those? This animated feature from the Center for Investigative Reporting calculates the carbon footprint and other “external costs” of gasoline use in the U.S.

YouTube video

How much would you be willing to pay for gas? Share your thoughts with CIR.

Learn more on California Watch: U.S. gas is artificially cheap: What we don’t pay for at the pump

Read the video transcript with source annotations on DocumentCloud:

 


Reported by Sarah Terry-Cobo
Produced by Carrie Ching and Sarah Terry-Cobo
Animation and illustration by Arthur Jones

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Carrie Ching

Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.

Sarah Terry-Cobo is a reporter based in Oklahoma City, specializing in environmental science and policy and Latin American issues. She is a native Oklahoman, where she graduated from the University of Tulsa with a bachelor’s degree in environmental policy. After college she moved to California to attend UC Berkeley, where she graduated with a master’s in journalism and master’s in Latin American studies. She began as a print reporter, but has expanded her skills with audio production and data visualizations.

Arthur Jones

Arthur Jones is an illustrator, graphic designer, writer and animator. In addition to the Center for Investigative Reporting, he has done design work for NPR’s “This American Life,” animations for “Yo Gabba Gabba!” and graphic design at The New York Times. His book, “Post-it Note Diaries: 20 Stories of Youthful Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps, and Everyday Adventure,” was published in October 2011. Arthur is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and his work can be seen at byarthurjones.com.