“The oil and gas boom has revealed a shortage of skilled labor. Some educational institutions are responding. But should the industry itself enter into the educational field and form for-profit training programs? Such would further remove the need for government (taxpayer) education, a win-win for the economy.”
Julian Simon said it first and best: the scarcest resource is human capital. His proof? The rising cost of labor relative to other inputs, even so-called depletable resources. And such is a mighty tribute to capitalism, as David Boaz noted.
A recent article in the Houston Chronicle, “San Jacinto College’s fast-track pipefitting fabricator program responds to industry need“ (Cheryl P. Rose, June 28, 2013) made me think of Simon, the hydrocarbon-energy boom, and the purpose of education.
We will soon have the Internet capability of getting a world class education at virtually zero marginal cost.…
Continue Reading“We should not be using models to ‘validate’ policy and regulations. We should be using the models to better inform policy debates and avoid picking technological winners and (more frequently) losers.”
California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) put the state on a track rejected by the nation as a whole: a regulatory limit on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This policy, which I have criticized as elitist climate policy postmodernism [1], is an all pain, no gain policy with high implementation costs.
The result of AB 32, California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), has been debated for six-plus years, including the release of rival studies estimating regulatory impacts. Studies do not debate the climate-change impacts because the answer is … nil.
LCFS requires fuel producers to lower the average carbon content of their products 10 percent by 2020.…
Continue Reading“Absentee landowners may be gaining financially from [wind power] development, but the idea that ‘wind farming’ is a compatible agriculture use is more myth than reality in Illinois…. In fact, those Illinois farmers who have leveraged their operations conservatively tell us that they’re not interested in the ‘windfall’ of wind farming.”
The wind industry continues to claim that wind “farming” and agriculture are compatible land uses. Here it is again in a recent letter in the Wall Street Journal by the American Wind Energy Association defending the economics of wind power.
For years, politicians and urban/suburbanites have been treated to heaping doses of win-win business tales of family farmers leasing sections of their crop land for wind development, while working the soil right up to the towers and earning extra revenue to keep the land open.…
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