“Rather than adopt costly regulatory measures that serve to suppress energy use and economic growth, policy makers should seek to eliminate government interventions in the marketplace that obstruct emission reductions and discourage the adoption of lower emission technologies. Such an approach is a ‘no regrets’ strategy….”
“A true ‘no regrets’ approach to climate change is not greater government controls on economic activity, but fewer. Economic growth, market institutions, and technological advance are often the most effective forms of insurance that a civilization can have.”
– Jonathan Adler, “Greenhouse Policy Without Regrets: A Free Market Approach to the Uncertain Risks of Climate Change,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, July 14, 2000.
MasterResource from time to time reprints free-market-oriented energy/climate analysis that was bold for its time and still resonates today. Unlike the neo-Malthusians, our side’s work has held up well.…
The much touted benefits of wind come with a fatal caveat: industrial wind turbines–suffering from intermittency, low average-usage factors, remote siting, relatively high (and all-up-front) costs–are uneconomic. So the fact that the Wind industry creates jobs and can piggyback on consumer-chosen, taxpayer-neutral, baseload power is no consolation.
The starting point of economics is that wants exceed resources. Market prices are therefore needed to allocate resources. Out of a wide range of technical possibilities (including wind-produced electricity), only a small subset is economic desirable as well. Think of a bullet train from Los Angeles to New York City–technically possible but uneconomic when compared to air travel. Only freely acting consumers in a government-neutral marketplace can decide the difference.
The new study cosponsored by the American Wind Energy Association, Electricity Markets, Reliability, and the Evolving U.S.…
“[William] Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the ‘unproductive’ ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior.”
– Robert Litan and Ian Hathaway. “Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?” Harvard Business Review, June 13, 2017.
MasterResource covers business entrepreneurship, not only the in’s and out’s of energy history and energy policy.
Good entrepreneurship is about serving consumers in a private property, voluntary exchange, rule-of-law setting. Bad entrepreneurship is about a business receiving special government favor to advantage itself at the expense of consumers and (free market) competitors.…