“Ocean acidification and warming concerns, however, are vastly overstated and generally far out of touch with reality. In almost every instance, the predicted degree of harm is exaggerated due to improper scenario inputs that utilize the most extreme scenarios of future temperature and seawater pH. Furthermore, their projections fail to take into account the ability of species to acclimate and adapt, both within and across generations.”
Shark Week has become a staple of American television. Debuting in the summer of 1988 the event has morphed into a week-long block of programming at the Discovery Channel featuring all kinds of entertaining and educational shows focusing on sharks.
Hot off the heels of this year’s event, I could not help but be drawn to the title of an article pertaining to these menacing but often misunderstood fish species: “Shark teeth can resist ocean acidification.”…
Continue Reading“By facilitating decentralized coordination instead of imposing specific outcomes, the institutions designed in Texas became the most market-oriented in the country, and the most likely to be resilient and adaptive in the face of unknown and charging economic, technological, and environmental conditions.”
– Lynne Kiesling and Andrew Kleit, eds. Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story (AEI: 2009), p. 3.
The Texas electricity debacle of February 2021 stands as the greatest failure in the history of the power industry–if not any other industry in America. Hundreds dead and many tens of billions of dollars in unnecessary expense led one system architect, Robert Borlick, to lament:
… Continue ReadingI have to admit, the ERCOT blackouts have shaken me. The amount of physical damage and human suffering they caused is astounding. Obviously, the ‘market’ failed to provide the service reliability that customers expected and deserved.
“Totally forgotten in this transformation [to mandatory open access] was a simple removal of the regulatory covenant to allow a real free market and genuine entrepreneurial discovery process…. Instead, we were told the ISO/RTO model worked: the planners knew how to price for volume and for reliability with Texas as the national model.”
Classical liberal theory explains market coordination and governmental discoordination, even “planned chaos.” The same intellectual tradition notes the propensity of government intervention to expand from its own shortcomings. Electricity is no exception. The rise and fall of the Texas grid is a case study–just the opposite of what some claiming to be classical liberal thought (see yesterday’s post).
The history of electricity in the U.S. is supportive of an undesigned order, beginning with inventor Thomas Edison and his business protégé Samuel Insull in the 1880s.…
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