Category Archives: Economics

Geoengineering

A brief survey of potential global warming solutions. What is more interesting to me than the engineering is the politics and ethics of all this. Asteroid diversion falls in the same category. But at least some of these things could drive a need for low-cost space access in an unprecedented manner.

But this is one that doesn’t really seem to be in this category, unless it were mandated. It’s more of a “think globally, act locally” approach:

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the ultra-low-tech approach of painting rooftops white to reflect sunlight.

We’ve been thinking about doing that anyway, just to reduce our air conditioning bill. With a gray cement tile roof, that soaks up a lot of sun, it’s hotter than Hades’s kitchen in the attic this time of year, and that could really cool things down.

Short Oil Futures

An interesting point:

…once most of the former big fuel subsidizers have removed much or all of their subsidies, world demand for oil is likely to level off, or possibly even plunge. And if the latter scenario prevails, then the petroleum futures speculators will be running for the hills, in the midst of a bursting oil bubble, much like real estate speculators fled upon the bursting of our recent housing bubble in the States. All bubbles are self-correcting, one way or another.

Yes. Few people appreciate how much demand has been artificially spurred by subsidized fuel in many large countries. When their governments can no longer afford to continue to do so (as they can’t for long at current prices), watch crude plunge.

Obama The Conservative

At least in Virginia Postrel’s parlance:

Obama’s memoir is not a policy tome or a campaign biography but an emotional journey. It does not offer alternatives, only bleak observations and predictions. It is pessimistic, conservative, nostalgic. The theme running through Dreams from My Father is the search for order, for stability, for roots in an undisturbed pre-modern culture. How that yearning for stasis translates into presidential policy is not clear, but I worry.

Me, too. It’s questionable whether most of his nostrums are really “change,” but if they are, they’re not change I can believe in.

Energy Wedgists Versus Breakthroughists

Put me in the latter camp.

Although the Climate Security Act does direct some spending towards low-carbon energy research, it is basically a wedgist scheme. If something like it is adopted by the next presidential administration, we will find out which side is right. If the wedgists are correct, cutting carbon dioxide emissions will produce a modest increase in energy prices resulting in the deployment of a wide variety of readily available low-carbon energy sources over the coming decades. If the breakthroughists are right, energy prices will soar provoking a political backlash. In which case, perhaps one need only peer across the Atlantic to the spreading protests against higher fuel prices in Europe to see the future.

Yup.

One of the most disturbing things about McCain is that he has bought completely into the hysterical climate-change claptrap, and is unamenable (so far at least) to reason.

Revenge Of The Jedi

The browser wars return.

This particularly caught my eye:

Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

“Sitting at somebody else’s computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience,” said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Sounds like a market opportunity to me. I have a few ideas about how to solve it.

The Zero-Sum Candidate

Both Barack and Michelle Obama have a collectivist mentality:

Jeff Dobbs, a little while back, saw Michelle Obama’s statement that “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

…Barack Obama today: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

Would an Obama Administration really mean an end to “eating as much as we want?”

There is an implicit assumption here that, in order for one person (or country) to have more, another must thereby have less. This is the view of a person who views wealth not as something that is created, but something that simply exists, and the only important issue is how to divvy it up. But no one in Zimbabwe is starving because I took food away from them and ate it myself. They are starving in former Rhodesia, and in North Korea, and other places, because the governments there, in thrall to greed and the poisonous ideology of collectivism, have destroyed the agricultural sector.

What are the Obamas going to take away from us to give to someone else? And how will they decide from whom to take it, and to whom to give it? And what means will they choose to do so?

And which countries’ approval are we seeking? Egypt, to whom we give billions a year in aid? France? Germany? The Europeans seemed to be well fed, last time I checked.

My mother, who used to tell me to clean my plate in the sixties because there were children starving in China, had her mother tell her to clean her plate during the depression because there were children starving in Europe. Who is it that Obama is asking (telling?) us to clean our plates (or better yet, put less on them) for? Will he set up rationing? Will Michelle be in charge of the rationing board and pie distribution?

Hungry stomachs want to know, before November.

The sad thing, of course, is that our agricultural policies, which actually increase the cost of our food (though we’re wealthy enough to afford it, at least until the Obamas take over), are also complicit in destroying the agricultural sector of many third-world countries, by providing foreign aid in the form of subsidized grain and depressing the price of food there, making farming a non-viable economic activity. What will Barack do about that?

[Update a few minutes later]

This doesn’t speak so much to their collectivism, but Charlotte Hays asks:

I loved Obama telling us how how “unacceptable” and “low class” it would be for us to to mention his wife’s anti-American remarks. How’s he gonna stop us? (I certainly hope he will have a tougher approach when negotiating with dictators!) And, come to think of it, this isn’t the first time Obama has said that anti-American “snippets” by a close associate were taken out of context. We get to decide if we think this is relevant, not the candidate.

Do we really want to be bossed around by these arrogant people and their double standards for four years?

[Update in the afternoon]

Rachel Lucas and her commenters aren’t very impressed by Obama’s Calvin-ball campaign rules.

So I just want to know what happens if Republican’s aren’t “careful.” Is he gonna give them karate? Write a strongly worded letter of disapproval?

Doomsday Has Been Postponed, Part Whatever

More thoughts on “peak oil,” and what I’ll call the “peak oil constant,” which seems to be twenty or thirty years (i.e., it’s always predicted to be that far in the future).

[Update mid afternoon]

Manzi has a follow up, in response to a Georgetown professor. Bottom line:

What if we had reacted to the predictions throughout the 1970s and 80s that we would reach peak oil in about 2000? Do you think that some of these proposed changes would have slowed economic growth and prevented the world from being in the current position of paying an ever-dwindling share of total output for oil? What other difficult-to-anticipate changes might some these interventions have had? Could the idea of purposely restructuring the transportation, housing, and agricultural sectors of the U.S. economy based on a prediction for an event that we have proven to be very bad at predicting – and for which the world’s leading experts refuse to provide anything other than very broad guidance – induce a sense of humility? It does in me.