Michael Giberson The New York Times observes that crude oil price volatility has been exceptionally high for the last eighteen months. (Hmmm. Eighteen months ago … January 2008 … the Iowa caucuses … the U.S. presidential primary season gets underway in earnest … nahhh, couldn’t be all due to presidential politics.) Actually, eyeballing the chart …
Lynne Kiesling I have to admit, I thought that this point was obvious. Clearly Walmart (accurately, I think) sees itself as well-positioned to leverage its size nationally to negotiate better health care arrangements than its competitors, so its newly-announced support of employer-based health care is a classic example of raising rivals’ costs. Apparently, it’s not …
Walmart Supports Employer Health Care to Raise Rivals’ Costs Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In his usual trenchant way, Jonathan Adler has hit upon the two things to which I object the most in the Waxman-Markey bill and vote. The first is the one about which I wrote in May: despite all of the tooth-gnashing and knicker-twisting about the cap-and-trade portions of the bill, the really egregious …
Transparency and Representation in the Waxman-Markey Vote Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The New York Times has a spiffy interactive map showing all of the House votes from Friday’s Waxman-Markey bill vote, as well as the entire roll call.
Michael Giberson The ethanol industry is suffering and The Wichita Eagle asks, “Will wind energy follow ethanol’s path?“ The answer is: Possibly. It depends on politics, the health of the credit markets and the price of coal, oil and natural gas. Oil prices are moving up, recently exceeding $70 bbl in NYMEX trading, but gas …
Michael Giberson Have you been keeping up with the news out of Albany, New York? On Monday, with the support of two Democratic state senators the minority Republicans voted themselves back into the leadership positions. Democrats tried to prevent the maneuver by, among other things, turning off the lights in the Senate chamber, and having …
Michael Giberson From the inbox comes word that Paul Devlin’s documentary, Power Trip, will be aired this weekend on BBC World and in the PBS World Voices program. The film tells the story of the efforts of AES Corporation to succeed as the owners of the newly privatized (in January 1999) electric utility in Tbilisi, …
Michael Giberson The answer to the title question is “nothing,” according to Marc Gunther (though he admits of the difficulty of being certain when the bill is 932 pages and still in process). The kind of kites he has in mind are high-altitude solar power collectors, under development by the Makani Power company. That Waxman-Markey …
What Does Waxman-markey Have to Say About Kites? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling While we’re on a carbon note … [sarcasm] yeah, I’m shocked, really, totally shocked that, as Virginia Postrel notes, the 946-page Waxman-Markey House energy bill proposal is really a piece of command-and-control legislation.[/sarcasm] The WaPost notes that the “cap-and-trade” bill sponsored by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey is, in fact, loaded with all …
Waxman-markey is Really a Command-and-control Energy Bill? No, Say It Ain’t So! Read More »
Michael Giberson Robert Rapier explains a few ins and outs of ethanol. For example, he observes that ethanol producers like to claim that it is the oil company which blends ethanol into gasoline that is subsidized, not the ethanol producer itself (since the blender gets a credit against federal taxes — in fact, I just …
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