Puerto Rico and its various government entities owe creditors $72 billion, an enormous debt that Gov. Alejandro García Padilla has described as “unpayable.” Over 11 percent of that total is…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 14, 2015
On Monday President Obama announced the final “clean power plan” regulation for greenhouse gas emissions from electric generating plants, the centerpiece of the broader Climate Action Plan being implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency.…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 5, 2015
Government policies virtually without exception create economic distortions, so that policy reform can yield results highly counterintuitive. That is the case with the emerging effort to end the current U.S.…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 4, 2015
The current ban on exports of U.S. crude oil was enacted as part of the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, and was justified on the basis of two fallacies.…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 17, 2015
Sometimes debt burdens become deeply burdensome. And if you’re the debtor, wouldn’t it be nice to find a way to avoid hard decisions by reneging on past agreements on repayment,…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 10, 2015
‘Flexibility” is the advertised hallmark of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which by 2030 would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants by 30% from 2005 levels.…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 7, 2015
In honor of this 45th anniversary of the first Earth Day, let us recall the wisdom of Dogbert, that noted political philosopher and sage observer of the human condition: “You can’t save…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 21, 2015
The State Department Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (FSEIS) on the Keystone XL pipeline, published a year ago, concluded, reasonably, that the pipeline would have virtually no impact on global greenhouse gas (GHG)…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 5, 2015