Rich Sweeney wonders why you hear so damn much about gasoline prices rather than the cost of food: [W]hy is that I can’t turn on the news without hearing, invariably in very tragic terms, about soaring gasoline prices, yet there is almost no coverage of soaring food prices? The short answer is that the media …
World potato photography contest launched
My colleague Michael Coleman had an excellent piece in this morning’s paper laying out the stakes and contending factions in the fight over solar tax credits: Senate Republicans and Democrats, almost all of whom say they support extending the solar tax credit, haven’t been able to agree on how to pay for it. Most Democrats, …
More evidence that getting this whole climate mitigation thing right is going to be hard: Early analysis of data out today from the European Commission shows that emissions rose about 1.1% last year to 1.9 billion metric tons. That’s after similar increases in 2005 and 2006.
That’s all well and good, Marty, but stop squirming and tell us how much you’d price carbon at? That’s all we really care about: Weitzman hemmed and hawed and noted that the whole point of his paper was that there are these big uncertainties, and that previous attempts to calculate the socially optimal price on …
I’m a big fan of what I call “how stuff works” journalism: take a topic of the day and step back and explain how the darn thing works. Too often, we write either incrementally, or for insiders who already know the underlying structure of what we’re talking about. (This explains, for example, my ultimately fruitless …
My initial reaction was that this was important confirmation of the whole global warming thing, but then I noticed how close the thermometer apparently is to all that blacktop, so maybe we need to throw this one out. (photo courtesy Dave Thomas)
Keith Johnson (who is rapidly becoming my favorite explainer of how the energy-environment-economy system works) today discusses the role of the banking industry in pushing us away from coal and toward natural gas.
Martin Weitzman’s paper on the economics of catastrophic climate change is rather like Moby Dick – something we all nod to knowing references while we’re secretly saying to ourselves, “WTF? Did you actually understand this?” I actually went so far as to enlist an environmental economist of my acquaintence (being a journalist has its advantages). …
As if the built in systemic problems associated with the current biofuel push were not enough, here’s a remarkable story from the Guardian in which biodiesel is shipped from Europe to the United States, then back, to qualify for the US biodiesel export subsidy: The “splash and dash” scam involves shipping biodiesel from Europe to …