Category Archives: energy
Governor calls with last minute reprieve for California drivers
Just as many California drivers thought they were being sent to their doom with prices nearing $6 a gallon at some stations, California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has called on California’s air quality regulators to allow an early switch to the less strict winter blend of gasoline, a blend that produces smog more easily than the [...]
Gasoline prices in L.A. approaching $6 a gallon
Gasoline prices in L.A. are now approaching $6 a gallon as is reported here by CBS in LA. Obviously, prices in the rest of the country are considerably lower than that. Even in California, prices in northern California, as in San Francisco are a bit lower, but there are also supply problems in the San Francisco [...]
Baptists and Bootleggers, Damon and the UAE
Matt Damon has proven over and over to be a talented actor and screenwriter. In December, he will be coming out with a pro-environmental movie about fracking to extract natural gas and petroleum from certain rock structures, a movie titled Promised Land. No doubt, Matt Damon is an environmentalist–he believes in this new project. A [...]
UN considers global taxation
Yesterday I posted a comment on the World Health Organization’s attempts to place a global tax on cigarettes here. Today, I read here that the UN is attempting to tax billionaires, carbon, airline flights, minerals, currency trading in dominant currencies (the dollar, the pound, the euro, the yen), and in financial transactions. In yesterday’s posted [...]
Breaking windows, destroying cars and creating jobs
Bastiat, in one of his best-known essays points to the lack of logic of those who suggest that we can become better off through destruction, a fallacy that has come to be called the “broken window fallacy.”. In 2006, in this inaugural post on Bastiat’s Bastions, Norbert Michel and I suggested that the notion that [...]
Speculators aren’t the bad guys in the oil market
Today, President Obama offered up a legislative approach to dealing with high oil prices that he blames on speculators. Here is a story from NECN.com (New England Cable News) on Obama’s suggested approach. Ed Rogers at the Washington Post has this comment on Obama’s “let’s do something, anything” about high oil prices by handcuffing speculators, calling [...]
Tornados and green cars
In the aftermath of some horrific tornados that ripped through Dallas and other parts of North Texas, Sen. Dick Durbin calls for people to switch to hybrid cars to reduce the incidence of tornados, which seems nonsensical. Think about it. As some people switch to greener vehicles, raising the demand for green vehicles relative to [...]
Gasoline Shortages in Egypt
Last January, I wrote in this post about how Mubarak’s hold on Egypt was lost, in part, due to food riots, riots over the rising prices of food. The problem was that the government in Egypt, to placate its citizens, had created programs to keep food prices down, at least to some, creating “program addiction,” a [...]
Waste and corruption in competing for special favors in renewable energy
This New York Times article describes the federal government’s huge subsidy program in renewable energy as a gold rush. Perhaps, a better analogy is a land rush, like the competition to get land when the Oklahoma territory was opened up. There, something was being given away, and there really wasn’t anything new being created, as that land in Oklahoma [...]
Gasoline shortages from Northeasts’ October Snowstorm
No electricity becomes no gasoline? In this news story from NBC Connecticut’s Leanne Gendreau and Brynn Gingras, we see that the snowstorm in the Northeast this weekend has left many gas station pumps without power to pump, and so, has left those residents a way to get gasoline in their towns. Now, these stores could [...]