Michael Giberson If you follow price gouging headlines, you become accustomed to seeing price gouging stories around big sports events: the Rugby World Cup, NASCAR races, NCAA basketball finals, and always the Olympics (a selection: Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Salt Lake City 2002, Athens 2004, Vancouver 2010, London 2012, and finally this extreme example). All of …
Michael Giberson In the State of the Union address, President Obama invoked a little federal government research history and then jumped to the kind of logical non sequitur so common to those who see the world through politically-colored glasses: The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner …
Was Federal Government Support Critical to the Shale Gas Breakthrough? Read More »
Michael Giberson For your convenience, the energy policy parts from last night’s State of the Union address. Be aware that I’ve dropped some non-energy words, phrases or even short sentences without indicating where such edits happened in order to make this extract relatively clean. In some cases I kept non-energy bits that seemed useful as …
Michael Giberson Worthy of note, but still mostly puzzling: continuing, low-level, organized opposition to smart electric meters. I can understand concerns over data privacy, but that is about it. Sure, in some states the roll-out came with a sense that the regulated utility was gaining more control over consumer electrical consumption and making customers pay …
Michael Giberson Yesterday the Energy Information Administration released the results of its analysis of possible price effects from increased natural gas exports, and the Wall Street Journal finds the drama (“Gas Prices Could Rise With Exports”): Increased exports of U.S. natural gas could drive up domestic gas prices as much as 54% in 2018, federal officials …
Wsj Says Eia Says Natural Gas Prices Could Jump 54 Percent with Exports Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I found some things striking in yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA protests. One was Jim Harper’s clear and cogent statement that the Internet is not a thing, it’s a set of protocols stipulating how computers communicate with each other. That set of protocols is a platform, and those protocols are not the government’s to regulate. Jim’s …
Sopa/Pipa Protests and the Economics of Content Market Power Read More »
Michael Giberson Peter Behr, at ClimateWire, describes the U.S. Department of Energy’s efforts to rework its electric transmission study processes, created in the 2005 Energy Policy Act but stalled by adverse court decisions and political missteps. I’m not so sure that the new approaches will be any better received than the old, but I noticed …
Regional Transmission Efforts Good for Re-routing Information Flows to Regulators Read More »
Michael Giberson Michael Graetz’s The End of Energy is a fascinating run through 40 years of U.S. energy policy making. Engaging and at times even entertaining if you are at all interested in energy issues. In Graetz’s telling it is mostly a story of 40 years of failure, though he notes a few successes along …
Michael Giberson If you read Jonathan Adler’s post at the Volokh Conspiracy (and reposted at PERC’s Percolator blog), it makes the EPA seem a little silly for insisting on fining companies when it would be impossible for companies to comply with the law. But don’t blame the EPA, which is just implementing a law that Congress passed and …
Epa Fines Companies for Not Doing the Impossible Read More »
Michael Giberson I read recently that as many as 99,000 deaths per year in the United States are linked to nosocomial infection (also known as hospital-acquired infection). I’m outraged, obviously, and relying on the precautionary principle I am calling for a minimum one-year moratorium on hospital admissions so the healthcare industry can bring an end to nosocomial-linked …
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