From the op-ed pages of the New York Times, Erle C. Ellis explains, “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem“: MANY scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us. Like bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite …
Take these two facts and consider them together: (1) China’s air quality has been notoriously poor for the past three decades or so; and (2) according to the BP statistical Review of World Energy, China’s energy use and coal use relative to other countries indicates that any greenhouse-gas-reducing policies by other countries are likely to …
Will Domestic Health and Tourism Concerns Lead China to Curb Pollution? Read More »
Bruce Yandle’s “bootleggers & Baptists” model of political coalition formation is one of the most useful models in the political economy of regulation (and one that both Mike and I employ frequently, as seen by our many posts using the model). Here’s a great new Learn Liberty video featuring Bruce himself describing how coalitions of …
Tesla Motors is doing more than shaking up the automobile industry by producing an exciting high-end electric vehicle and establishing a network of battery-swapping stations. Tesla wants to sell directly to consumers, bypassing established dealer franchising that dominates the industry. But such dealer franchising has not been a mere transaction-cost-driven Coasian outcome — it’s undergirded …
Lynne Kiesling As is his wont, Mike Munger speaks vast amounts of sense in this month’s Cato Unbound, focusing on the political economy of recycling. I’ve never seen a better articulation of the various energy and economic tradeoffs associated with recycling than Mike’s presented here. For example, Mike does a great job of pointing out …
Lynne Kiesling As a follow-up to my previous post about cutting down trees for biofuels, here’s some interesting news about the unintended consequences and perverse incentives embedded in regulations to promote the use of biomass as fuel: a BBC investigation reveals trees cut from swamp forests in the US being used to fuel electricity generation …
More on the Purported Environmental Benefit of Cutting Down Trees Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Cutting down trees to generate biofuels to substitute for fossil fuels can’t make sense in terms of carbon accounting, can it? I never thought so, but apparently some people have contended that it does. This Project Syndicate essay from Bjorn Lomborg addresses the question, and I think it’s worthy of consideration not just …
Michael Giberson While digging through the KP archives looking for another old story, I can across a 10-year old post titled “How cool is this?” (Let me warn you now that there isn’t much more to this 2013 post other than to observe that not every cool-sounding technology in 2002 turned out to work. You …
Lynne Kiesling Last week the EPA released a report on the extent of methane release during shale gas drilling; the results indicate that methane release is substantially smaller than previously thought. According to an article in Fuel Fix summarizing the report, The scope of the EPA’s revision was vast. In a mid-April report on greenhouse …
Michael Giberson From The Economist, “Wood, The fuel of the future“: WHICH source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union? Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world’s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.) Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither. By …
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