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January 23, 2019
The Brownsville U-turn Redux: Cartelization of the Alberta Oil Sector
The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade promises to continue the large economic benefits of the earlier North American Free Trade Agreement, but one threat to those benefits has emerged in the form of mandated production cuts in the Alberta oil sector. For U.S. firms operating in Alberta, this policy in effect can confiscate the value of…
December 17, 2018
Other People’s Money: ESG Investing and the Conflicts of the Consultant Class
Unintended consequences are a longstanding effect of public policies, an eternal truth seemingly invisible to one generation after another of policymakers eager to improve upon the economic arrangements emerging from market competition and individual choices. Witness, for example, a regulation implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2003, intended to reduce the scope of supposed…
November 29, 2018
Observations on Volume 2 of the Fourth National Climate Assessment
Over the Thanksgiving weekend the Trump administration released Volume 2 of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, eliciting the usual array of apocalyptic predictions from the media about the fate of mankind should we fail to impose sharp limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Herewith, a few observations on this report. The report assumes one particular scenario for…
November 9, 2018
Environmental Policy: Benjamin Zycher Responds to His Critics
I thank Jonathan H. Adler, Patrick Allitt, and William Dennis for their thoughtful and informative commentaries on my Liberty Forum essay on reforming U.S. environmental policy, in particular with respect to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to executive agency statutory interpretations in the face of legal ambiguities. I learned much from their observations, to each…
November 2, 2018
Nigerian Officials Learn the Hard Way About Where Money Goes
Hope springs eternal, a human inclination affecting romance, dieting, new year’s resolutions, and a good deal more. International investing is prominent among the activities often influenced by a hope that things somehow will work out, whatever the landmines known to obstruct the path toward healthy economic returns. Which brings us to the tale of Process…
October 29, 2018
Politicized Law Enforcement and the ExxonMobil White Whale
The latest lawsuit against ExxonMobil (EM), filed by Acting New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood, is straightforward: Got that? Underwood actually is arguing that EM should not concern itself — or its investors — with (1) the aggregate effect of GHG policies on prospective worldwide demand conditions for its energy products, and (2) the…
October 29, 2018
Washington State Initiative 1631: A Carbon Tax and Wealth Redistribution to Favored Interests
The Washington State electorate on November 6 will vote on Initiative 1631, a “pollution” tax on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the stated goal of which is an annual GHG emissions reduction reaching 25 million tons by 2035 and 50 million tons by 2050. Nowhere in the initiative is there any requirement actually to meet these goals —…
October 22, 2018
Hearken Sinners: The End Is Near
Dog bites man. Baby cries. Water flows downhill. And the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says climate catastrophe is imminent. The new “Summary for Policymakers” of Global Warming of 1.5°Celsius, a “special report” from the IPCC, makes the following central arguments: It is difficult to see how anyone attempting to maintain an objective…
October 15, 2018
Subsidies to Power Plants Are No Substitute for a National-security Plan
In an effort to deal with the market and non-market forces inflicting economic losses on coal- and nuclear-power plants, the Trump administration is seeking through regulation to force state and regional grid operators to purchase bulk power from coal- and nuclear-power producers to slow the (early) retirements of those facilities. The administration is justifying this policy on national-security grounds:…
October 4, 2018
Washington Post Climate Reporters Beclown Themselves
They have translated the climate policy equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They have uncovered the smoking gun of smoking guns. They have provided final and convincing proof that the Trump administration — the bête noire of the Paris climate agreement, the facilitators of planetary destruction, the knuckle-dragging deniers of “science,” the heroes of polluters, belching cattle, and…