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August 15, 2016
Mark J. Perry on Nuclear Power
It is hot. It is humid. Even sound intellects have trouble maintaining focus in the dog days of Beltway August, a phenomenon illustrated recently by my esteemed colleague and good friend, Mark J. Perry. An absolutely solid economist. AEI scholar. University of Michigan professor. General Secretary of Carpe Diem, hands down the most useful and interesting policy…
August 8, 2016
More Regulatory Magic from the EPA
I wrote recently about the manipulation of benefit/cost analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and more generally about the adverse implications of the evolution of the federal bureaucracy into an interest group driven by both budget and ideological imperatives. This reality now emerges frequently, with little effort to hide it, the most recent example of which is an…
August 1, 2016
Missing the Forest for the Trees on Solar Net Metering
In a recent essay on the solar photovoltaic (PV or “rooftop”) power market, Mark Muro and Devashree Saha of the Brookings Institute applaud the net metering system of subsidizing such rooftop installations, concluding that the system is a “net benefit” for both the recipients and the non-recipients of the subsidy; that is, for all power consumers. The…
June 30, 2016
Springtime for the Rockefellers
The weather warms. The flowers bloom. The garden parties begin anew, and nothing is worse than waiting day after agonizing day for invitations that never come. So why not make an early bid for the most prestigious gatherings, by making a gesture simultaneously empty, loud, in tune with right-minded thinking, and utterly hypocritical? Dianne Ingram…
June 27, 2016
Is the Nuclear Liability Limit a Subsidy, or Not?
The heat is on. I refer not to the beginning of summer, nor the looming global warming apocalypse for which there is little evidence, nor an election season sure to be characterized by personal attacks aplenty. But instead, the increasing difficulty of defending the absurd argument that the massive explicit and implicit subsidies given wind and solar power and ethanol production yield environmental improvement and…
June 20, 2016
Nothing New Under the Sun as FTC Seeks to Expand Power over Solar
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced recently a workshop to be held on June 21, with the title “Something New Under the Sun: Competition and Consumer Protection Issues in Solar Power.” Accompanying the announcement is a discussion paper presenting a number of issues for public comment. The analytic quality of that paper is highly uneven, but for now it…
June 15, 2016
Four Decades of Subsidy Rationales for Uncompetitive Energy
The modern rationales for energy subsidies have varied in prominence over the decades, but none has been broadly discredited in the public discussion despite the reality that each suffers from fundamental analytic weaknesses. The rationales can be summarized as follows: Given the weak history of analytic rigor and policy success in the context of energy…
June 9, 2016
Comment for the Federal Trade Commission: Competition and Consumer Protection Issues in Solar Power
This note responds to the FTC request for public comment attendant upon the workshop scheduled for June 21, 2016 on the topic “Competition and Consumer Protection Issues in Solar Power,” as described on the FTC website, and detailed in a pdf document with that title. That document here is referenced as “the FTC discussion paper.” Read the PDF.
June 6, 2016
The Magic of the EPA’s Benefit/cost Analysis
Benefit/cost analysis: It sounds so scientific, so rational, so impartial. So sound as a tool with which to resolve conflicting assertions about the wisdom of regulatory proposals. So divorced from partisanship or ideological influence. A truck engine is tested for pollution exiting its exhaust pipe in California. REUTERS/Mike Blake Oh, please. Democracy is the art…
May 20, 2016
The Incoherence of Sustainability
“Sustainability” is a popular buzzword in the public discussion of energy and environment policies generally and in the defense of subsidies for “renewable” energy in particular. But the definition of that term is highly elusive, as illustrated by the Environmental Protection Agency’s discussion: Human ingenuity is the “ultimate resource.” Credit: Twenty20 Apart from being incorrect substantively…