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…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 15, 2016
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 9, 2016
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 6, 2016
“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…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 20, 2016
It is Earth Day, when pieties flow like wine, when the self-applause of the right-thinking is deafening, when the antihuman core of modern environmentalism shines bright, and when the destructiveness of groupthink…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 22, 2016
Policy research in the Beltway offers numerous attractions, among them the opportunity to exchange views and engage in back-and-forth challenges with other experts, in settings both formal and informal. Such…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 4, 2016
Residential consumers of electricity in California pay almost 17 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), a price higher than those of every other state in the lower 48, except New York and…
By Benjamin Zycher | January 19, 2016
The question before us is straightforward: Is the Paris climate agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions a good strategy? A strategy, of course, is a set of tools used to…
By Benjamin Zycher | December 18, 2015
Breaking news Saturday in Paris from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: National leaders described the agreement finally reached as “an historic…
By Benjamin Zycher | December 15, 2015
I. Introduction The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21), the latest installment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, begins today in Paris amid a feverish effort to achieve “binding” commitments by no…
By Benjamin Zycher | November 30, 2015
Good things come to those who wait, and the waiting is minimal when it comes to the endless stream of entertaining silliness offered by the U.N. climate-change bureaucracy. On November…
By Benjamin Zycher | November 6, 2015
I kid, of course: Silence is the last adjective one would use about climate policy, except with respect to such minor parameters as the actual benefits of various policy prescriptions…
By Benjamin Zycher | September 29, 2015
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