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Tag Archives: economics

Double-counting

While reading a recent post on RealClimate, something that I noticed several years ago was reinforced: climate scientists are more careful at math than their detractors are. Even in a simple blog post, Ray Pierrehumbert is careful to avoid double-counting emissions. This is a nice contrast to the ‘skeptics’ who typically double-count the cost of [...]

The Bakken Formation Oil email

There is a new email circulating claiming that if we’d just drill for oil in the Bakken Formation, we could have inexpensive gas and could free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. I was asked for my take on the email, so here is my evaluation. As always with this type email, the conclusion turns [...]

The myth of American gasoline

Since the price of gasoline in the US is increasing again, the talk making ridiculous claims about gas prices are too. For example, I recently received a chain email titled “Buy AMERICAN Gasoline”. This particular email (which I won’t help spread by posting a link) claims that we should buy “AMERICAN” gasoline or we will [...]

Building a Green Economy

You should read Paul Krugman’s new article, ‘Building a Green Economy: How we can afford to tackle climate change’, in the upcoming issue of The New York Times Magazine. The article is a good overview of the economics of carbon pricing. It includes good discussions of the cost of action versus inaction, of planing for [...]

The Most Important Graph in Economics

Most politicians in ‘both’ political parties—and practically everyone in the area where I live—base their economics and voting on this graph: Unfortunately, they neglect a critical fact: I’ll leave the conclusions to the reader, but it should be noted that at some point these two lines cross (and may already have done so). To avoid [...]

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How it can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman

I finally got around to reading Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Friedman is one of the few columnists that I read on a regular basis and the book is on an interesting subject, so I was expecting to enjoy reading it. I didn’t. While I don’t agree with all his ideas, the main [...]

“Drill, Baby, Drill!”

“Drill, Baby, Drill!” We have heard this phrase constantly since the Republican convention. The thought behind this chant is that increased American oil production will lead to lower gas prices. This idea is based on supply and demand. With a constant demand, increasing supply should lower the price of a resource. Drilling in the US [...]