Michael Giberson I stumbled across another blog post on the New York Times article discussed here earlier in the week. Rich Sweeny, at Common Tragedies, wants to inject a little more research-based thinking into the discussion: What I really wanted to add to this debate, though, is a discussion of how elecricity costs have been …
Lynne Kiesling An article by Jeffrey Ball in today’s Wall Street Journal (subs. required) does the best job I’ve seen to date of capturing the nuances and tensions in the economic and policy dynamics of rising energy costs and concerns about the environmental effects of energy consumption. The article focuses on Dow Chemical and its …
Lynne Kiesling This morning finds oil prices hitting $98 per barrel, amid inventory data showing that U.S. inventories have fallen for another week (that’s three in a row). So is this the most expensive oil has ever been in real terms? “The $100 jackpot is imminent now, despite the fact there aren’t really oil fundamentals …
Lynne Kiesling Every year the U.S. Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency publish forecasts of world energy production and consumption, and the economic and environmental consequences thereof. Typically these forecasts use elaborate computer models to extrapolate various scenarios to generate a sense of where we might be headed, based on different use patterns, …
Michael Giberson Today, the 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike. Among the issues in dispute is a share of income from new media. No doubt you can find much commentary on the web on the substance of the negotiations, I’m concerned with a more practical matter: How long will the …
Lynne Kiesling In the comments to my earlier post about sugar industry rent seeking, Dan asks who are the top recipients of these sugar subsidies. I did a search on Hoover’s for U.S. companies listing SIC 2061 (cane sugar growing) and 2062 (cane sugar refining and processing) as their primary SIC codes. I excluded beet …
Lynne Kiesling Today’s New York Times has an editorial on the sugar lobby, and the apparent unwillingness of the members of Congress to do anything constructive to constrain their special interest self-aggrandizement. A couple of weeks ago the Times ran a story on the sugar industry’s attempts to construct a political hedge for their profits …
Lynne Kiesling A bit of shameless self-promotion … this Smart Money article on Enernoc and Comverge includes a (fairly anodyne) quote from me about how demand response can enhance electric power network reliability. This concept of a “virtual power plant” is just a fancy way of saying that both electricity retailers (utilities is the old-fashioned …
Michael Giberson Larry Ribstein suggests that at least some of Boeing’s troubles with the 787 might have been avoided if either insider trading was permitted in Boeing’s stock or the company was operating internal prediction markets focused on project completion. The quotes that Ribstein draws from the Wall Street Journal article on Boeing highlight two …
Michael Giberson A few recent news articles on congestion has Peter Klein at Organization and Markets asking, “Why the Resistance to Pricing?” When the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity supplied — causing shortages, delays, congestion, misallocation — the solution is to raise the price. Every freshman economics student knows this. Why, then, are regulators, industry …
Economists Do Not Understand the Opposition to Congestion Pricing Read More »
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