Michael Giberson Fracking for natural gas continues to make headlines. For example, USA Today: “‘Fracking’ for natural gas also splits towns and families” and from Bloomberg, “Oil, gas companies injected toxic chemicals into ground, U.S. report shows.” These stories extend the understanding of shale gas development a little, but mostly cover familiar ground. Another angle, …
Michael Giberson A story reported by Kim Barker, ProPublica (a version of the story ran in the Washington Post). I’m excerpting several parts of the story, but the whole story is worth a look: The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely …
Gusher of BP Oil-spill Fund Creates “Spillionaires” Read More »
Michael Giberson The Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a citizen policy non-profit that has been around since 1963, has commissioned a study of recommended regulations to cover oil and gas resource development in the state. The resulting study, “Model Oil and Gas Laws, Regulations and Ordinances,” concludes that many states and localities offer stronger regulation than …
Model Oil and Gas Resource Development Regulations for Arkansas Read More »
Lynne Kiesling When I think about climate, greenhouse gases, carbon policy etc., I always worry about the certainty that people (typically politicians) want to attach to models (actually, that statement holds for macroeconomic models too, for the same reasons). The global climate is an incredibly complex system, comprising many individual agents and local systems that …
Michael Giberson Texans who have drawn there water supplies from the vast but shrinking Ogallala Aquifer are engaged in a complex process of clarifying and/or renegotiating a more exact notion of just what rights they have to access the resource. A story in the Sunday Lubbock Avalanche-Journal provides an update. Some clever “enviropreneurs”, to invoke …
How Can Property Rights in Subsurface Water Work in West Texas? Read More »
Michael Giberson Last November we noted that industry and environmental groups in Texas were working together on fracking disclosure rules. Earlier this month a bill was introduced in the Texas House that would establish disclosure rules for fracking fluids. Kate Galbraith reports in The Texas Tribune, “Texas Could Require Disclosure of Drilling Chemicals“: Hydraulic fracturing, an …
Update: Industry, Environmental Group Working on Shale Gas Drilling Rules Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Two good articles on misguided government intervention and energy policy at Reason recommend themselves. Ron Bailey’s written a really excellent, clear, analysis of improved, safer reactor technology, and argues that the best response to the Fukushima accident is not a ban, but rather is innovation: One hopeful possibility is that the Japanese crisis …
Michael Giberson From the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, “Critics say BPA drops ball while juggling its power“: So much electricity flooded Pacific Northwest powerlines last spring — thanks to rainy, stormy weather powering hydroelectric and wind turbines — that this spring, a federal agency wants the option of turning off wind turbines to keep the system from …
BPA Still Won’t Pay Negative Prices to Get Wind Power Producers to Curtail Read More »
Michael Giberson Rob Harmon gave a TEDx talk last fall in Seattle on a market mechanism that links willing buyers and willing sellers in a way that protects in-stream water flows and helps restore stream ecosystems. Harmon was formerly with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) in Portland, Oregon, where he was a developer of the …
Rob Harmon at Tedxranier: How the Market Can Keep Streams Flowing Read More »
Michael Giberson John Tierney’s column, “When Energy Efficiency Sullies the Environment,” in the New York Times examines the rebound effect and some of the broader consequences of trying to promote conservation through policies inducing energy efficiency. Some of the biggest rebound effects occur when new economic activity results from energy-efficient technologies that reduce the cost …
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive