Michael Giberson At first it seemed like just another newspaper article on the potential environmental dangers of fracking to produce natural gas from shale, but on second look there is something new in the New York Times article, “Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers.” Most such stories, and much of the public’s …
Lynne Kiesling Economist and teacher extraordinaire Steve Horwitz has done a great video for Learn Liberty on the question “are we running out of resources?” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcWkN4ngR2Y&feature=player_embedded] We’ve done our share of “peak oil” debunking here over the years, so it won’t surprise you that I find The Onion’s take on the question of running out …
Lynne Kiesling Over the past few weeks I’ve been paying some attention to the increasing, and spreading, bedbug infestations in the U.S. I’m not particularly squeamish, but bedbugs are rapacious colony-dwelling critters that can survive for a year without food, feast on the blood of sleeping animals (humans YUM YUM), and colonize easily in mattresses …
Bedbugs, Public Policy, and Relative Risk Assessment Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Why is it so difficult, in terms of politics and transaction costs, to define and enforce property rights in fish? If we fail to do so, some important fish species are likely to go extinct due to overfishing, such as the bluefin tuna. Migratory fish like the bluefin pose the biggest policy challenges, …
Overfishing and the Impending Collapse of Fisheries Read More »
Lynne Kiesling On Friday at Environmental Economics, Tim Haab wrote about the implications of New Source Review for innovation in a regulated industry, and how to represent it in the standard Pigouvian model (do go read the whole post, it’s very useful). The basic question is this: does the stifling of innovation that results from …
Electricity Generation, New Source Review, and Waste Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I was intrigued last week to read Bruce Yandle’s short piece in Regulation discussing Pigou and his ideas about taxation in the context of modern “Pigouvian” policy proposals. I recommend his essay highly; it communicates eloquently how Pigou’s ideas are currently being used as a justification for a variety of forms of taxation. …
Pigou As Public Choice Economist, Not a Pigouvian Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Yes, you saw that correctly, a turbine. According to Wired: Jaguar Land Rover is working on the car with British gas turbine manufacturer Bladon Jets and electric motor manufacturer SR Drives. The Technology Strategy Board, which funds business development in the U.K., is underwriting the first serious attempt at a turbine car since …
Lynne Kiesling Here’s a good piece of news from the fishery and common pool resource front: salmon and steelhead populations are dramatically larger in the Pacific Northwest than anticipated, and than they were last year. … More than 680,000 Coho salmon returned to Oregon last year, double the number in 2007. The Coho run was …
Lynne Kiesling I am blissfully on vacation this week in Maui (biking, diving, snorkeling, swimming, and not spending time on the Internet), but did check in briefly this afternoon. For those of you interested in keeping up with the “politicization of science” and bastardization of the scientific method aspect of it that angers me the …
Sarewitz/thernstrom La Times Op-ed on Leaked Climate Research Documents Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The East Anglia CRU leaked climate research emails and the Copenhagen climate meeting are reviving old discussions about the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle has much in common with Pascal’s Wager. Two new analyses this week have caught my eye, the first from George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. Somin argues for consistency …
Somin and Lambert on the Responsible Use of the Precautionary Principle Read More »
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