(Warning: this is a rant) OK … the antidote to my hopefulness. I just walked home from the el, which I took to work today because the rain threatened this morning and put me off of bicycling. Greenpeace has a bunch of their summer student employees out and about spreading the word about Mother Earth, …
This week is finals week at Northwestern, and that means that I get to read 11 research papers from my Environmental Economics class. Very good brain candy — I always learn something from their presentations, their evidence, and their arguments. If these students are representative of the future of environmental policymakers, I am hopeful.
I’m not going to get into the California market manipulation fray any further for now, beyond providing links to stories summarizing the issues and commenting on the continuing vituperative rhetoric of politicians in California, without any willingness to acknowledge that the rules of their dysfunctional “market” did not forbid any of these trades. At the …
Furthermore, the International Energy Agency announced today that it is revising its oil demand estimates downward for the second half of 2002. They cite the slow economic recovery as the primary reason for the revision. Slower oil demand growth increases the likelihood that prices will remain stable (all other things equal, of course). This pattern …
Lots of good oil market news today for consumers; a bit less good if energy stocks comprise a substantial share of your investments! A Platts survey of OPEC production shows a huge increase in May, according to a press release on Yahoo Financial News. Iraq coming back online and Venezuela increasing production after the oil …
This story from CBS Marketwatch does a nice job of summarizing the myriad developments in the energy industry in the past week. More thoughts later about how this house-cleaning is painful in the short run, but extremely beneficial in the long run as long as it doesn’t lead to knee-jerk, reactionary, thoughtless government regulation. Now …
I wonder if California’s politicians will ever stop externalizing all of the responsibility for their failed electricity restructuring. Now they are moving beyond placing all of blame on Enron and other “greedy, out-of-state, price gouging” power suppliers to Perot Systems, the company that wrote the software to implement California’s failed “market” design and made marketing …
In terms of energy markets, the news today seems to be no news. Prices are not fluctuating much, domestic gasoline inventories are higher than last year at this time, OPEC producers are pumping 1.4 million barrels per day over their stated quota (that’s 6 percent).
A Reuters article today posted on Yahoo Financial News illustrates a fascinating aspect of the energy future — the old fossil fuel industries can help create a “green energy” future more cost-effectively than totally green options. This article cites a presentation by a Shell official who discussed how oil refiners can use gasification to turn …
According to Bloomberg News, Germany’s largest energy trader is planning to expand its US operations. What a great example of entrepreneurial opportunism — RWE representatives state explicitly that they have not engaged in the types of questionable trading practices that are driving the financial uncertainty in US energy markets. This is how competition creates stability; …
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