Lynne Kiesling Economist Ed Dolan makes a thorough argument for using the upcoming expiration of the wind production tax credit as an opportunity to rethink energy policy seriously. In particular, his combined focus on energy policy and tax policy, and whether such tax credits are good examples of either (guess what? No), makes for an …
Lynne Kiesling Rob Bradley has an Econlib essay on Enron, and it’s a good one. He focuses on Enron’s particular form of crony corporatism, its ability to take advantage of regulatory complexity, and the lessons that we should carry forward from the experience: Enron was essentially a political company, not a free-market one. Ken Lay’s creation …
Lynne Kiesling After a long and contentious series of battles over the past three decades, two of the original coal-fired steam turbine power plants in Chicago powered down at the end of August. The Fisk plant and the Crawford plant were the last two coal-fired power plants in operation within a major U.S. city, and …
A Proposal for Fisk Power Plant: Museum of History and Industry Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The title of this month’s Cato Unbound, “The Empirics of Austrian Economics”, makes it sound more like inside baseball than it really is. The valuable discussion does have some elements of insider talk, but most of the exchange is externally focused, and as such is well worth reading if you are interested in …
Lynne Kiesling This year’s Economic Freedom of the World report is released today, and the US has dropped to #18, its lowest ranking ever. From the press release: The United States, long considered a champion of economic freedom among large industrial nations, dropped to its lowest position ever in to the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic …
Lynne Kiesling The LIFX lightbulb is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while, even in a period of substantial innovation affecting many areas of our lives. It’s a Kickstarter project, not coming from an established company like GE or Philips, not coming from within the electricity industry. Go watch the intro …
The Lifx Lightbulb: Bringing the Internet of Things to Electricity Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Tyler Cowen and I have several things in common — wry senses of humor, economist sensibilities, and a strong love of interesting and well-prepared food. Those last two traits at least show up in Tyler’s post yesterday about proposals in California to label foods to indicate whether or not they contain GMOs. Tyler …
Lynne Kiesling As a coda to my previous post on wireless induction charging, there’s a Kickstarter out right now for Everpurse, a wireless charging purse for iPhone 4. The battery pack in the purse has to be charged from an AC adapter, but it will charge a phone as long as it has charge.
Lynne Kiesling Since the pioneering research of Nikola Tesla (have you contributed to his museum yet?) we’ve dreamed of wireless transmission of electricity, including wireless charging of devices. Tesla’s magnetic induction experiments gave us proof of concept almost 140 years ago, so where are the wireless chargers? We were promised wireless charging! Jessical Leber at …
Lynne Kiesling Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution and Kip Viscusi of Vanderbilt University have a new Mercatus working paper that is a careful and thoughtful critique of the rationale, the methodology, and the outcomes of federal energy efficiency regulations. Using standard Pigouvian externality theory, most environmental regulations are based on the “market failure” rationale …
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