Lynne Kiesling Recently the New York Times ran a Sunday magazine article from Jeff Himmelman profiling some companies in the solar industry in the US. The main thrust of the article is that despite the industry’s technological and economic challenges, it’s starting to look like a better investment: Two factors have hurt the industry’s growth. …
Lynne Kiesling This summer, corn prices are high. Drought, extreme weather, and other factors combine to increase corn prices, and one of those factors is the federal ethanol mandate/renewable fuels requirement implemented over 20 years ago (as an oxygenate requirement) and extended in 2005. Roger Pielke Jr. points to a Purdue research paper that suggests …
Can We Finally Get the Ethanol Mandate Monkey off of Our Backs? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Some arguments and ideas catching my eye this morning: At their Why Nations Fail blog this morning, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson point out that central planning predates Marxist ideology historically, and is an instrument that political elites use to control and “extract resources from society”. At the Huffington Post, economist Ben Powell …
Lynne Kiesling Andy Morriss (Univ. of Alabama Law School) and Don Boudreaux (George Mason University) have an excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, A Coca-Cola Solution to High Gas Prices. The punch line: environmental fuel formulation regulations balkanize wholesale fuel markets and make prices more volatile as a consequence. This is not a new …
Obsolete Boutique Fuels and Failure to Arbitrage Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Steve Horwitz has a great post at the LSE blog that provides an introduction to and summary of the Austrian economic theory that’s relevant to macro policy questions, including the current Eurozone crisis. Most people know that Austrian economics provides a critique of the Keynesian policies emphasizing government stimulus spending, but what’s the …
Lynne Kiesling Back in July and also a couple of other times over the past two years, Mike has written here about the Jevons effect — when an increase in energy efficiency reduces the per-unit cost to the consumer of doing the energy-consuming action, moving her down along her energy demand curve and increasing her …
More on Rebound, Backlash, and the Jevons Effect Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Starbucks is having an internal energy efficiency competition among its stores. The goal for each store: reduce energy use by the most during a 30-day period, starting from last Wednesday. 10 stores are involved, and while the article is not specific, it looks like they are all in Washington state. The goal is …
Lynne Kiesling As a fellow cook, food lover, and economist who incorporates Austrian entrepreneurial theory into my work, I love Mike’s post commemorating Julia Child’s birthday today. Let’s push it even further. One way to create value in cooking is through new combinations of what Mike calls “raw elements”. We can think of three categories …
Lynne Kiesling Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution and Kip Viscusi of Vanderbilt University have a new Mercatus working paper that is a careful and thoughtful critique of the rationale, the methodology, and the outcomes of federal energy efficiency regulations. Using standard Pigouvian externality theory, most environmental regulations are based on the “market failure” rationale …
Lynne Kiesling Several people have pointed out the remarkable fact that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion have fallen almost to 1995 levels. As the Institute for Energy Research noted, The Energy information Administration reports that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are 2.4 percent less in 2011 than they were in …
Co2 Emission Reductions: Fracking, Recession, Renewables? Read More »
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive