Energy

2013-12-12 Trade-offs are an inherent part of life. We all recognize this from our private budgets. To fix the roof, we may have to accept a less extravagant summer vacation. When we pick a cheaper wine, we can splurge on dessert.  Trade-offs also pervade environmental policy: Cutting more of one pollutant, for example, leaves fewer resources to address other issues. For example, coal is phenomenally polluting, but it also provides for cheap and reliable power, which drives development.

2013-12-04 THERE’S a lot of hand-wringing about our warming planet, but billions of people face a more immediate problem: They are desperately poor, and many cook and heat their homes using open fires or leaky stoves that burn dirty fuels like wood, dung, crop waste and coal. About 3.5 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes — about 200,000 more than the number who die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air outside, according to a study by the World Health Organization. (...) 

2013-11-11 Subsidizing first-generation, inefficient green energy might make well-off people feel good about themselves, but it won't transform the energy market. Yet when inefficient green subsidies are criticized, their defenders can be relied on to point out that the world subsidizes fossil fuels even more heavily. But the misinformation surrounding energy subsidies is considerable, and it helps keep the world from enacting sensible policy.

2013-11-06 One of the longest-running big picture debates is between optimists and pessimists  arguing the state of the world. Pessimists  have constantly painted a dystopian future from Malthus and Jevons to the 1972 book Limits to Growth. Optimists have cheerfully pointed to how everything is getting better. 

2013-08-31 Aktivister har ødelagt et markforsøg med genmodificeret Golden Rice i Filippinerne. Med hjælp fra velmenende, men vildledte organisationer som Greenpeace, ødelægger de potentielt muligheden for at forebygge 680.000 dødsfald hvert år. Det er moralsk uforsvarligt. 

2013-08-14 PRAGUE – Many today believe that renewable energy will let us get off fossil fuels soon. Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise. According to International Energy Agency data, 13.12% of the world’s energy came from renewables in 1971, the first year that the IEA reported global statistics. In 2011, renewables’ share was actually lower, at 12.99%. Yet a new survey shows that Americans believe that the share of renewables in 2035 will be 30.2%. In reality, it will likely be 14.5%. 

  2013-08-05 Die gegenwärtige Klimapolitik führt nicht zum Ziel, denn die Maßnahmen für den Umstieg auf erneuerbare Energien greifen zu kurz. 

Last week an extraordinary, scary story made climate headlines around the world: a melting Arctic could release an immense amount of methane that would dramatically increase global warming and cost the world a phenomenal $60tn. Fortunately, it is just a scare story. Of course, if you take an implausibly catastrophic event and run it through an implausibly pessimistic economic model, you can get headlines, but you don’t get good policy. The depressing reality is that current climate policies have failed.

2013-07-12 The United Kingdom has been reluctant to join the hydraulic-fracturing (or fracking) revolution. Yet tapping the Bowland Shale could reignite the UK economy and deliver huge cuts in CO2 emissions. 

  2013-07-15 The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently published a report that estimates global shale gas resources. These findings may have a significant impact on energy policy in the future: Shale gas increases global resources of natural gas by a whopping 47 per cent. The shale gas revolution promises to be great news for the Canadian economy, but it is also good news for our climate.