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Category Archive: Energy and environment
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Arguments against Exporting Natural Gas Don’t Add Up
The energy policy topic of the week is whether to export more of America’s newly abundant natural gas. Like any good card-carrying economist, my instincts favor free trade. Other things being equal, that makes me pro-export. Still, shouldn’t we listen to what the other side has to say? Maybe gas is different. Maybe exporting it [...]
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Fareed Zakaria is Wrong (Mostly) about the Keystone Pipeline
Watching the Sunday talk shows this week, I learned that the influential journalist Fareed Zakaria has now joined the chorus urging construction of Keystone pipeline. If built, that pipeline would carry bitumen, a form of asphalt that can be used as a substitute for conventional crude oil, from Canadian oil sands to refineries on the [...]
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Too Much Flaring of Natural Gas? How a Carbon Tax could Help
After a few years when the practice was declining, flaring of natural gas is back in the news. (See, for example, Flares take shine off fracking boom in the Financial Times for Jan. 27.) Estimates indicate that natural gas flaring accounts for more than 1 percent of all the CO2 that human activity releases into the [...]
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What is Holding Back Natural Gas as the Transportation Fuel of the Future?
The natural gas revolution has brought big changes to the U.S. energy scene. Natural gas prices, which used to move closely together with oil prices, have plunged in the last five years, as the following chart shows. One result has been the rapid displacement of coal by natural gas in electric power generation. According to [...]
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Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Harbor Green Illusions about Solar Power?
Ozzie Zehner’s book Green Illusions calls our attention to the sometimes exaggerated claims that are made for alternative energy. Zehner sees these unrealistic ideas as widely shared in the mainstream environmental community. He maintains that they lead to the illusion that if we only muster the will to invest more in solar panels, windmills, and [...]
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Is Wall Street’s Thirst for Water Really a Dire Threat? Nonsense, Says David Zetland
Journalist Frederick Kaufman made a few waves last week with an article on water markets in Nature and a related interview in Wired. His cautionary story envisions a global water derivatives market that would allow speculators to rake in billions while poor farmers, priced out of the market, would be unable to irrigate their crops. [...]
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Why Do We Need Government to Tell Business to Be Energy Efficient?
In response to my interview “The Myth of Affordable Energy,” my friend and fellow blogger Gary Alexander asks an excellent question. Many readers of the interview on various sites where it has been reposted have asked similar questions, and the following is addressed to them, as well. Gary asks: Ed, I need your clarification on [...]
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Looming Demise of Wind Power Subsidy Shows the Need to Rethink Both Energy and Tax Policy
Wind power has been a success story of green energy. After several years of rapid growth, it now accounts for about 3 percent of all electricity produced in the United States. It has benefitted from federal support, but that support is scheduled to end on December 31, throwing the industry into a crisis of layoffs [...]
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Court Rejects EPA Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. Where to Next?
Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected an EPA rule known as the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR). The rule was supposed to have gone into effect at the beginning of 2012, but the same court had previously stayed its implementation on procedural grounds. Last week’s ruling is [...]
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Repeal and Replace the Ethanol Mandate
During the debate over the Obama administration’s health care policy, Republicans came up with the catchy phrase “repeal and replace.” I’ll get back to health care in another post, but for now, I’d like to filch the phrase for the increasingly lively debate over the federal ethanol mandate, or Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), as it [...]
