Lynne Kiesling Yesterday was Earth Day, and here’s a good way to observe it: Andrew Langer and Iain Murray argue for catch shares as a sustainable free-market fisheries policy. The idea is simple: give fishermen an ownership stake in a particular fishery through the assignment of quotas, which can be traded. The quotas give individual …
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 …
Michael Giberson In general, in public policy analysis, you’d like to judge ultimate success or failure of a program by its net results, by actual benefits less the costs involved in achieving those benefits. Admittedly sometimes benefits are hard to measure, but ultimately the point of a policy change is to bring about some improvement …
Measuring Success by How Much You Spent on the Program: A Renewable Energy Example Read More »
Michael Giberson From the Indianapolis Star, “More Hoosiers reap benefits of generating their own electricity“: [M]ore and more people around Indiana are starting to generate their own electricity, motivated by environmental concerns and feelings of energy independence. The arrangement is known as “net metering,” allowing customers to offset part of their energy costs and feed …
Net Metering in Indiana Sees Exciting 50 Percent Growth Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I loved seeing pictures a couple of weeks ago of an endangered Bengal tiger and her cubs from a hidden camera. Large predator wildlife that roam and are territorial often face reductions in their territory when humans move in; in the Bengal tiger territory in India, both traditional farming and the construction of …
Michael Giberson On December 7, 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency dropped a bomb on Range Resources Corporation. From the EPA news release: (DALLAS – December 7, 2010) Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ordered a natural gas company in Forth Worth, Texas, to take immediate action to protect homeowners living near one of its …
Michael Giberson In principle, there is nothing in the science of climate change that imposes a partisan political commitment. It isn’t as if, for example, you have to believe in steeply progressive tax rates in order to understand climate science. Yet there seems to be a partisan divide on the science. Three recent posts at …
Michael Giberson Like the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, I’d like to see the Production Tax Credit for wind and other renewable energy technologies expire at the end of this year as scheduled. So policy-wise, I’m with them. Still, their editorial against the wind power policy yesterday was awful and it deserves public …
The Wsj’s Awful Editorial Against the Wind Power Industry Read More »
Michael Giberson Gasoline prices are relatively high and we’re well into the 2012 political campaign, so that means we have presidential wannabees and a wannabee-reelected promising to pass out candy to voters faster than a newly split piñata. In North Carolina yesterday President Obama announced a $1 billion initiative for a “National Community Deployment Challenge …
Well, in That Case I Favor Higher Automobile Fuel Economy Standards Read More »
Michael Giberson The Spectator magazine in the U.K. announces the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy: Matt Ridley has long deplored the wind farm delusion, and was appalled when a family trust was paid by a wind farm company in compensation for mineral rights on land on which it wanted to build a turbine. The …
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