Dan Yurman calculates the jobs he thinks would be created by expanding the federal loan guarantees for nuclear power: The Federal loan guarantee program for construction of nuclear power plants, set by Congress at $18.5 billion, could if expanded to cover the entire fleet of 21 proposed new reactors, create nearly 80,000 construction jobs, and …
Continue reading ‘On Federal Energy Investment and Job Creation’ »
Alex Steffen: Since we know the single best way of bringing down high birth rates is to empower women by giving them access to reproductive health choices (including contraception and abortion), education, economic opportunities, and legal protection of their rights, empowering women ought to be one of our highest priorities. (As Kim Stanley Robinson puts …
Continue reading ‘Women’s Rights as a Climate Change Strategy’ »
I guess all of us eat, right? So the continued slide in the global price of food is a good thing, right? Economists have a model they call the “cobweb model“. It basicaly says that when the price drops, farmers plant less, there’s less food, and the price goes back up. So maybe not such …
In preparing for a talk I’m giving Monday to a couple of classes at the University of New Mexico, I went looking for examples from the BlogoWorld of people citing the old “’70’s global cooling consensus” canard. It’s a version of my usual talk on the science->media->public brain interface, but I wanted to add the …
I feel a bit like an enthusiastic tourist of late, visiting the Land of the Economists, learning their customs (Their curries, while an acquired taste, are delicious!) and language. Their language uses many words that we foreign visitors also use, but in different ways that can be at first puzzling, but eventually instructive. “Rent” was …
Bruce Thomson, head of the water resources program at the University of New Mexico and a very smart guy, has a guest post on WaterWired about New Mexico’s brackish water gold rush: [W]e must insist that water dependent development in NM be sustainable. We may allow communities to tap into non-sustainable supplies such as deep …
Continue reading ‘On the Sustainability of Brackish Water’ »
Does “energy independence” make sense as an energy policy rationale? One of the oft-repeated themes of the presidential campaign was the idea that every U.S. president since Nixon has called for energy independence. Here’s Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf: A second broad rationale for government intervention in energy markets is national security concerns. In 2006, the …
Dieter Helm, writing in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, offers the counter-argument to the point made recently by Andy Dessler that the peak and inevitable decline of fossil fuels may put some sort of upper limit on our ability to to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: Some argue that, however intense the dash-for-resources, …
Our BAMS paper made the front page of Daily Kos. Kinda reminds me of the olden days, when I used to write about climate. (h/t Matt)
“SASOL’s plans to build a new coal-to-liquids plant in Limpopo, with a production capacity of 80000 barrels per day, are continuing.” Business Day “Louisiana Energy Services is proposing to double the size of a southeastern New Mexico plant being built to make fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.” AP New Mexico rig count down. Me. …