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 »
Michael Giberson News about the Chinese economy has become a bit worrisome, for instance from the New York Times earlier this week, “China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods“: After three decades of torrid growth, China is encountering an unfamiliar problem with its newly struggling economy: a huge buildup of unsold goods that is cluttering …
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 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 »
Michael Giberson At the Freakonomics blog, a Q&A with Peter Leeson about his book The Invisible Hook. Here is the first exchange: Q.The Invisible Hook is more than just a clever title. How is it different from Adam Smith‘s invisible hand? A. In Adam Smith, the idea is that each individual pursuing his own self-interest is led, …
An Invisible Hook Q&a, and Other Items of Interest Read More »
Michael Giberson A good, quick introduction to the Nest thermostat along with some discussion of utility and other efforts to bring home energy management into the internet age: CBS Sunday Morning, “Dialing the thermostat into the digital age”
Michael Giberson When I worked on public policy issues in Washington, DC, I used to read the National Journal. It tended a bit toward Washington-establishment thinking, but at least it gave evidence of thinking. Now much farther from the daily fray, I only occasionally come across the National Journal, and usually just the so-called Energy …
Losing the Race to Sound Conclusions on the Production Tax Credit Read More »
I want to believe that the level of discourse on matters of importance in our nation’s capital is higher than that exhibited in the National Journal’s energy blog collection of opinions on the case for the Production Tax Credit. I want to, but evidence pulls me toward oblivion.
Michael Giberson The significance of the “rebound effect” remains a matter of some debate. (The rebound effect is the frequently observed tendency for energy efficiency improvements to increase consumer use of the now more efficient good or service). Recently the Institute for Energy Research published Robert Michaels’s survey of rebound effects. In the study, Michaels concluded: Properly …
Michael Giberson One of the federal government’s first oil conservation ideas, initiated during the Ford presidency, was Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulation. Mostly the goal was to reduce U.S. consumption of oil as a way to reduce oil imports, though ancillary environmental benefits were also anticipated. Regulatory analysis of CAFE regulations over the near …
Federal Government is Trying to Fix Your Car-buying Mistakes Read More »
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