Regulation
Who Is Ernest Moniz?
And why should you care? Moniz is a nuclear physics professor at MIT, the director of the MIT energy project, and at least according to a lot of reports, President Obama’s first choice to head the Energy Department. Anything not to like about that? Well, lots of environmentalists don’t seem to. The Daily Beast reports …
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CONTINUE READINGNewsflashes from the B-School
You might think that business schools would take the same views of policy as the Chamber of Commerce, but that’s not necessarily true. The Haas School here at Berkeley has a very interesting energy blog. I don’t always find their conclusions congenial but they’re always interesting. Here are some recent posts: Information and energy use. …
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CONTINUE READINGSecond California cap-and-trade auction sells almost $225 million worth of allowances
Results are in from California’s second cap-and-trade auction. California Air Resources Board (CARB) offered 12.9 million 2013-vintage allowances along with 9.56 million 2016-vintage allowances. CARB sold all of the 2013 vintage at $13.62 per allowance and almost half (4.44 million) of the 2016 vintage at $10.71 per allowance. In total, that amounts to a bit …
CONTINUE READINGIgnorance as Political Bliss: The Republican War on Social Science
Several recent posts on this blog have been about the political process, discussing issues like political polarization, congressional deadlock, and special interest groups. The discipline of political science is in large part the study of how collective decisions get made. It would seem to be in everyone’s interest to have a better understanding of collective …
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CONTINUE READINGRubio Resigns: Was CEQA “Reform” Just About Fracking?
With the news that CEQA “reform” champion and State Senator Michael Rubio resigned today to lobby for Chevron, I have to wonder if his push for CEQA reform was really just to benefit oil and gas fracking. Sure, CEQA reform proponents liked to trumpet how a weakening of the law will help businesses and infill …
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CONTINUE READINGThink Tanks on the Auction Block
I’ve previously expressed some skeptical views about the so-called think tanks that play such a significant role in Beltrway policy debates. (See this post) The New Republic has an interesting story about the increasing dependence of think tanks on big money Here is the crux: Nowadays if donors don’t like the results they get, they …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists Sue Over New Lake Tahoe Plan: Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good?
The Sierra Club and a local neighborhood group recently sued the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, challenging TRPA’s just-adopted Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin. That development strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive. Let me briefly explain why. The Lake Tahoe Basin, which straddles the California-Nevada border, has since 1968 been governed under a bistate Compact negotiated …
CONTINUE READINGConfessions of a Regulatory Czar
The official title of the White House’s regulatory czar is deceptively abstruse, the Director of the the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). But OIRA plays a crucial role in government policy by reviewing all major proposed regulations. Environmentalists have long decried OIRA as a place …
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CONTINUE READINGOMB’s Dubious Claim to Regulatory Expertise
The head of OIRA – the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB– is often called the White House’s regulation czar. OIRA is charged with reviewing the cost-benefit analysis of all major government regulations. This task is all about economics. Yet OIRA has never established the kind of reputation for economics expertise held by …
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CONTINUE READINGSanders/Boxer carbon tax
Sens. Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer released today a pair of bills meant to increase the price of carbon in the United States. (Bill summary; carbon tax bill; fuel subsidies bill) The “Climate Protection Act of 2013” would impose a fee of $20 per ton (carbon or methane equivalent) on coal, petroleum, natural gas and …
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