Michael Giberson The New York Times describes one of the hazards of doing new things: your new thing may not fit neatly into existing regulatory category. A case in point: Two new cars that can be recharged electrically are creating a puzzle for the Environmental Protection Agency, which must rate the “fuel economy” of passenger …
How Do Plug-in Vehicles Connect with Cafe Regulation? Read More »
Michael Giberson Recently I went looking for a source for the idea that special interest lobbying succeeds due to the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Frequently in economics and especially among public choice analysts the concept is attributed to Mancur Olson and sometimes specifically to The Logic of Collective Action. For example, in …
Michael Giberson Appearing in the September 2010 issue of BioScience: “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why is Human Well-Being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?” ABSTRACT: Environmentalists have argued that ecological degradation will lead to declines in the well-being of people dependent on ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment paradoxically found that human well-being has increased despite …
Why is Human Well-being Increasing As Ecosystem Services Degrade? Read More »
Michael Giberson A handful of stories of interest: The boom in shale gas has been a boon to homeowners who use gas, local economies with the resource, and manufacturers who make stuff with it, but it has “upended the ambitious growth plans of companies that produce power from wind, nuclear energy and coal. Those plans …
Natural Gas, Helium, Offshore Wind Power, and Cap-And-Trade Design Issues Read More »
Michael Giberson Some food for thought. For months and months, it seems, these three items – “Roast potatoes,” “Elinor Ostrom,” “Whole Foods competitors” – have dominated the “Top Searches” list in the Knowledge Problem site stats. We blog a lot about energy, economics, and public policy. Once in a while a bit of food or drink …
Roast Potatoes, Elinor Ostrom, Whole Foods Competitors Read More »
Michael Giberson Holman Jenkins’s Wall Street Journal column on the shale gas fracking debate seems to be right on the money. Jenkin’s writes: As a report from the Houston investment firm of Tudor Pickering shrewdly predicted in June, there will be no fracking ban. Too much money, too many jobs, too much revenue for state …
The Sound and Fury of the Shale Gas Fracking Debate Read More »
Michael Giberson Under North Carolina’s Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard, poultry waste burned to boil water to generate steam to turn a turbine generating electricity will earn RECs which can be sold to electric utilities needing to meet the state’s new renewable energy standard. Also under the law, poultry waste burned to boil …
The Differences Between Renewable Energy and Renewable Power in North Carolina Read More »
Michael Giberson Arizona is re-thinking its open range law. Dan Cole, blogging at Law, Economics & Cycling, is reminded of Ronald Coase (and specifically Robert Ellickson’s law review article “Of Coase and Catttle“). Cole summarizes the situation: Arizona is an “open range” state, which means that cattle can roam at will. Ranchers do not have …
Michael Giberson Streetwise Professor dubs F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom “An Intellectual Gateway Drug.” Craig Pirrong writes: “Amazingly, Hayek’s 60+ year old Road to Serfdom is the subject of contemporary political discussion even though in many ways it is about a world that disappeared long ago–and in, fact, never really existed, though Hayek feared that such a …
Michael Giberson In the current issue of Regulation, Tim Brennan reviews Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story, edited by Andrew Kleit and our own Lynne Kiesling. After a lengthy introduction discussing how deregulation came to the electric power business (mostly it hasn’t, but parts of the industry have been reorganized), Brennan gets down to the book …
Review of Kiesling and Kleit (eds.) Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story Read More »
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