Michael Giberson Yesterday the California Public Utilities Commission approved a program to subsidize installation of solar hot water heaters. Green Inc. at nytimes.com provides a description of the solar hot water program. The description emphasizes the goals of the program (reduce use of natural gas and electricity to heat water, primarily in order to reduce …
Lynne Kiesling Some drive-by blogging today: -Although it is currently not commercial and does not look like it will necessarily put a big dent in greenhouse gas emissions, this copper material that binds to carbon dioxide to generate useful chemicals is very cool and promising. This is the kind of ingenuity and innovation that makes …
Michael Giberson Maybe there is more to this story than “no company with the least respect for stockholders money would invest in Venezuela these days”, but that might be a sufficient explanation. From Bloomberg: Venezuela’s Mariscal Sucre project, which has estimated reserves of 14.7 trillion cubic feet of gas, has failed to attract private interest …
The Costs of Policy Uncertainty: Venezuela Edition Read More »
Michael Giberson A Financial Times article discusses advances in the application of LED technology, both for television and other display technologies and for general lighting applications. Pete Moran of the DCM venture capital firm says LEDs have advantages such as longer life and greater efficiency compared with both incandescents and the energy-saving compact fluorescents with …
Taking out a Mortgage to Buy Led Lights for Your Home Read More »
Michael Giberson What does “price gouging” mean? Commonly it is taken to refer to merchants raising prices substantially on necessities during emergencies. Each of the three elements – substantial price increase, necessary items, emergency periods – is part of a proto-typical case of price gouging. However, the term is frequently also used in cases lacking …
Stretching the Meaning of “Price Gouging” in Venezuela and Alaska Read More »
Michael Giberson I noticed when posting the previous item that one of the subject tags in the Knowledge Problem system was “smart gird.” Not “grid”, but “gird.” A simple enough substitution of the “i” and “r”, and, apparently, pretty common online. Google yields a plethora of “smart gird” results (although it first redirected me to …
Michael Giberson Much of the smart grid promise (and hype) implicitly suggests that the benefits will be scooped up by high-income consumers. Who else is going to be buying “grid aware” washer-dryer sets with built in wi-fi connectivity integrated into internet-linked home energy managements system? Still, the benefits won’t be limited to big spenders hoping …
Lynne Kiesling Glen Whitman has been posting excerpts from his Arizona Law Review paper with Mario Rizzo on the “new paternalism” for a while, and his most recent discussion has to do with the paternalist policy recommendations around the human tendency toward hyperbolic discounting. Hyperbolic discounting means that individuals tend to place more weight on …
Whitman and Worstall: Apply “New Paternalism” Logic to Policymakers Too Read More »
Michael Giberson In the photo accompanying Arnold Kling’s EconLog post, he is smiling, but in his recent post “Market Failure” he does not sound like he is smiling: I want to propose a new definition of market failure. … This post ties together a couple of recent bitter themes. It is not intended in any …
Ignore the Smiling Photo – Arnold Kling is Bitter Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I am, and always have been, a fan of Nikola Tesla, having most recently celebrated his birthday with a post here that included a link to the video of the O.M.D. song “Tesla Girls”. Now I find out that my appreciation of Tesla makes me a hip trendsetter! Who knew? Today’s Wall Street …
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