April 2012

Nhl Suspends Torres for Hossa Hit; Have We Achieved Incentive Compatibility?

Lynne Kiesling This year’s NHL Stanley Cup playoffs are in the first round, and so far the violence has been horrific: “The most vicious and, perhaps, disgraceful first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs” was the verdict of Stu Hackel, the former director of broadcasting for the N.H.L., and this is now close to a …

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Reasons to End the War on Drugs. Now.

Lynne Kiesling Today in Forbes Art Carden has an essay arguing that we should end the War on Drugs and make marijuana legal, now. He’s right. Here’s why. As Art argues, the War on Drugs is a policy poster child for unintended consequences, because the inelastic demand for the regulated good means that stronger enforcement …

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Micro-hydropower Potential in Man-made Waterways

Michael Giberson Earth Techling reports on the release of the latest report in the U.S. Department of Interior’s efforts to identify opportunities to develop small-scale hydropower projects within the DOI’s current water delivery systems in the Western United States. The goal of DOI’s project was to inventory potentially valuable locations and then invite developers to …

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Zwolinski: “Is Price Gouging Immoral? Should It Be Illegal?”

Michael Giberson Five minutes of Matt Zwolinski on price gouging (from Learn Liberty). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9QEkw6_O6w] If you think price gouging should be against the law, watch this video. Are you persuaded by Zwolinski? Let me know in the comments. MORE: Zwolinski has written serious philosophical works on price gouging,which makes the clarity of his position in …

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Smart Meter Cybersecurity and Moral Panics

Lynne Kiesling In March I wrote about Adam Thierer’s paper on technopanics — “a moral panic centered on societal fears about a particular contemporary technology” — and I argued that we should bear the moral panic phenomenon in mind when evaluating objections to smart grid technologies. In the past two weeks we’ve seen news articles …

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Oil Speculator Witch Hunt, 2012 Edition

Michael Giberson Steve Mufson at the Washington Post reports: President Obama proposed measures Tuesday to step up oversight of energy markets and boost by tenfold the penalties for market manipulation, in an effort to blunt political pressure over the 20 percent increase in gasoline prices since the beginning of the year. [Links in source.] Not that the administration has …

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How Green is Your Ev?

Lynne Kiesling On Monday the Union of Concerned Scientists released an analysis estimating the MPG equivalence of electric vehicles. The point of the analysis is this: taking as given an objective of greenhouse gas emission reduction, how do electric vehicles compare to internal combustion vehicles in that dimension? To do such an analysis requires comparing …

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NYT Energy For Tomorrow Closing Plenary Video

Lynne Kiesling Last week the New York Times hosted a conference called “Energy For Tomorrow”, and they have made video from all of the sessions available; there are several sessions discussing energy efficiency, natural gas, renewables, etc. I watched the closing plenary on Friday, for which the topic was subsidies in any or all energy …

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Reducing the Size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Michael Giberson Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried an essay by Austan Goolsbee in which he advocates reducing the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Even better, he suggests a rule by which the SPR could be managed in a transparent fashion: aim to be able to replace 90 days worth of imports from non-North American …

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