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 […]
Read more...Environmentalists have been cheering that, to win approval of the proposed leveraged buyout of Texas utility TXU Corp., acquirers KKR, Texas Pacific Group, and Goldman Sachs have agreed to drop plans to build 8 of 11 coal-fired electricity plants that TXU had aggressively pursued. According to a story in CNN Money, “Green Groups Strut Their […]
Read more...As readers doubtless know, the efficient market hypothesis states that prices of publicly traded securities incorporate all available information. We’ve also commented on the wide spread evidence that (except for the subprime sector) investors have a pretty cheery outlook these days. The US stock market has had a nice run so far this year, with […]
Read more...Here we’ve had a few months of favorable oil prices, and as a result, oil has taken a back burner to other stories. It’s beginning to come to the fore, mainly in not-positive ways. We have two items today, one a very good post on Econbrowser, “Saudi Oil Production Cuts,” and what they might say […]
Read more...This informative commentary in today’s Financial Times, by Jerome Guillet, an investment banker specializing in the energy sector, makes the observation that the energy projects that get built are the ones that are cheapest to get financed, but in the end, are often not the cheapest to operate. Utilities, which can obtain government guaranteed financing, […]
Read more...Free market fundamentalists, most of which have never been within hailing distance of a real market (save perhaps a ceremonial visit to the New York Stock Exchange) view market prices as virtuous and seem woefully ignorant of the games speculators and market-makers play (see our post, “Are Speculators Driving Energy Prices?“) An article in the […]
Read more...BusinessWeek’s Moria Herbst thinks so, and I have heard similar things from brokers: The battle between bulls and bears in the energy market is beginning to look like something of a rout. On Jan. 16, oil prices tumbled yet again, dropping 3% to settle at $51.21 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil is down […]
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