An economist has finally come forward with a cogent argument in favor of the gas tax holiday. In today’s New York Times, Bryan Caplan points out that voters are demanding that Congress do something. There is nothing Congress can actually do to help the situation. But since they’re likely to do something, the gas tax …
Global food prices have leveled off, according to the Economist food price index out today. It’s settled at 251.5, down 0.6 percent from a week ago and up 61.3 percent from a year ago. I don’t understand it well enough to know for sure, but I’ve got to assume that 0.6 percent over a week …
From Tuesday’s New York Times: “It clearly evokes a visceral response because we’re the only industry that has our prices in two-foot-high letters on the street corner,” said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute. “We’ve seen other things go up in prices, like milk, but if you ask 10 people on the …
Tim Haab’s graph of the day really needs no comment. (But this is the Internet, so I know that won’t stop you.)
My latest idea to save the world.
Al Zelicoff and Troy Simpson have their latest video up in a series the Albuquerque Journal is doing on stuff you can do to save energy and money. My favorite bit is the fact that Al fills up so rarely that he forgets which side of the car the gas tank is on. update: I …
Roger Pielke Jr., my favorite thrower of inconvenient hand grenades, wrote a provocative post this week about the linkage between malaria and global warming. Malaria, Jeffrey Sachs writes, causes poverty. (( The End of Poverty, p. 197)) It does this by reducing economic productivity, creating a vicious cycle in which people get sick, can’t work, …
I’ve been looking for a standard food price index comparable to the “barrel of oil” or the “gallon of gasoline” we’ve all come to know and love and, more importantly, intuitively grasp. The idea here is a number that’s standardized, readily available and easy to grasp. The Economist has its Food Price Index, but WTF …
Rich Sweeney goes beyond my casual “go read it” reference to the Economist article on renewables in Germany and actually explains its implications: Like a lot of things, economies of scale are more complex than the renewables lobby would have you believe (Joseph Romm makes the scale argument a lot, and recently Daniel Weiss made …
cycling: Been sick for a week, happy just to get on the bike for 40 minutes this morning. paper of the day: Barnes and Roy quantify the radiative forcing due to land use changes in the United States reading: Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty factoid of the day: The average resident of Chad uses …