As we have said before, the Wall Street Journal’s news reporting isn’t all its cracked up to be. One pattern we’ve noticed is a tendency to put a positive spin on economic news. Now we’ve detected a second: failing to report when powerful foreign interests jerk America’s chain. When the US said that it would […]
Read more...Earlier this month, the national science academies of the G8 plus those of China, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and India, issued a strongly worded joint statement about global warming and energy usage. Let us stress that it is pretty much unheard of for this many independent science bodies to agree on such an unequivocal […]
Read more...Larry Summers keeps getting better and better as an op-ed writer. His current article in the Financial Times lays out a series of practical recommendations on what to do about climate change. He focuses on the problem of the developing world, since they will account for 75% of the increase in greenhouse gases, and as […]
Read more...We comment only intermittently on the oil scene (there are only so many hours in the day), but the health and remaining productive capacity of the world’s major oil fields is a vital economic and strategic issue. Yet the big producers provide little information, so experts try to extrapolate from the data points they possess. […]
Read more...In an underreported story (no mention in the Financial Times or the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal reference was in its energy blog, far from prime time), the United Nations said in essence that biofuels could create as many problems, via environmental damage and higher food prices, as they solve. It also […]
Read more...Lately, Wal-Mart looks schizophrenic. On the one hand, it has established a powerful position as the employer of last resort in many communities, and, despite its vigorous protests otherwise, has little regard for workers. It subjects them to surveillance, engages in union-blocking that many claim is on the wrong side of the law (the law […]
Read more...The Financial Times, in a series of articles published today, probes the workings of the carbon trading business, and uncovers widespread fraud: buyers paying for reductions that don’t occur, organizations extracting large carbon reduction payments for programs they were going to implement regardless, clueless or complicit brokers, offset programs that are shams. We have been […]
Read more...Count on the Financial Times to make a clear, compelling argument. From its editorial “CO2 needs a price but taxes are the best way to set it:“ The Kyoto protocol to fight climate change expires in 2012. The shape of a successor treaty is still in doubt, but one aspect seems certain: carbon trading will […]
Read more...The Financial Times has managed to be too polite. A more accurate title for this story would be “United States Again Refuses to Commit to Anything Regarding Global Warming.” Now this continuation of the US head-in-the-sand posture might be fine if the Administration hadn’t raised expectations by agreeing to a climate change summit. So its […]
Read more...It seems China is becoming the pivotal player on many fronts. Apologies for being a day late on this story, but we could not access it on the Financial Times website and had to have the text e-mailed. As we have noted before, the proliferation of fuel technologies is slowing widespread adoption of cleaner cars. […]
Read more...Usually I worry about appearing unduly Financial Times-centric; today, it’s the BBC that gets prominent billing. It looks like American’s preference for the easy way out won’t serve it very well. We reported earlier that Detroit’s enthusiasm for ethanol (so-called E85, which is 85% ethanol, 15% gas) as a way to reduce carbon emissions was […]
Read more...An interesting article in Econbrowser, “More speculation about Saudi Arabia,” highlights the issue of falling Saudi oil output and what its causes might be. The debate centers around whether this fall is intentional, that is, whether the Saudis are taking wells out of production, or whether it reflects a decline in the productivity of Saudi […]
Read more...In a very interesting turn of events, Environmental Defense, the group that negotiated for some environmental concessions to win its support for the leveraged buyout of TXU, the Texas utility, by Texas Pacific Group and KKR, has engaged boutique investment banking firm Perella Weinberg. The New York Times, in the story, “Environmental Group Behind the […]
Read more...A great post, “CAFE Standards,” from James Hamilton at Econbrowser on how fuel efficiency standards (technically, corporate average fuel efficiency, or CAFE) work and their effects in practice. He in turn cites research by Marc Jacobsen, an economics PhD at Stanford. I found it useful to understand a bit more about how these standards are […]
Read more...Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, in his post “Super-green minivans possible today,” picks up on a Mercury News story that discusses what amounts to a low-emissions minivan, one that meets the stringent California requirements for 2016. Except this car hasn’t been built yet: According to the Mercury News, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has designed […]
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