November 2007

Happy Travels? Will Federal Policy Bring Economics to Airports?

Lynne Kiesling Today’s a big national travel day, and many of us are flying about. Painful. As we’ve discussed here before, airport takeoff-landing slot congestion pricing would be the most sensible and efficiency-promoting policy, but the FAA, Congress, and the airlines are not inclined to implement anything sensible or efficiency-promoting. One of the outgrowths of …

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Generation Shares by Fuel Type: Regulated and Deregulated States

Michael Giberson Courtesy of industry thinker Jeffrey D. Roark comes this contribution to understanding some of the differences between power produced in “regulated” and “deregulated” states. Click on the image to see a larger version. Charts were developed using the EIA data cited in the image. Roark draws attention to two points: first, that the …

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Making Use of Captured Carbon

Lynne Kiesling I’ve been waiting for something like this for years! A company called Blue Source has a potentially commercially viable carbon capture business model that involves the captured CO2 actually being useful: Blue Source is piping industrial carbon dioxide from a natural-gas processing plant in southeastern Colorado to an undisclosed oil producer that will, …

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Cap-And-Trade Characters: Hoarders, Speculators and Do-gooders

Michael Giberson Rich Sweeney, at Common Tragedies, writes about three common characters that populate some of the industrial/bureaucratic commentary over cap-and-trade carbon permit systems: hoarders, speculators and do-gooders. A hoarder may be a low-carbon intensity electric generator seeking to bid up the cost of carbon permits to drive up costs for rivals and drive up …

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Prices Are Information Goods, and Information Wants to Be Expensive, Because It’s So Valuable

Michael Giberson I know the internet mantra “information wants to be free,” the bane of many copyright holders. Macy’s, among many others, is one retail Goliath fighting against the free flow of information online. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse posted online a copy of Macy’s letter to bfads.net, the “David” in this David and Goliath story, …

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Pjm, Its Market Monitoring Unit, and the Hotline Tipster’s Allegation of Market Power

Michael Giberson From the Baltimore Sun, columnist Jay Hancock highlights part of one story buried in the most recent report on the dispute between PJM and its Market Monitoring Unit (MMU). Hancock writes: On Sept. 14, 2004, a tipster urged electricity administrators to investigate a power generation plant that seemed to be charging extra-high prices …

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Gridlock! Drew Carey and Reason.tv on Road Pricing

Lynne Kiesling In the five-plus years of Knowledge Problem’s existence, one of the topics on which I have opined extensively is the efficiency and conservation benefits of congestion pricing. Recently, Mike had two great posts on congestion pricing, one on how economists don’t understand the opposition to congestion pricing, and one on the unwillingness of …

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