Tag Archives: market failure

Iowa scientists: Drought a sign of climate change

  By Cyrus | November 20, 2012 - 12:48 pm | Energy Policy & Economics
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Note: As I’ve outlined in an essay you can find here, the huge and mounting costs of climate change and global warming are external costs that would be included in the market for oil & gas if those markets were actually functioning correctly.  This is a great example of unpriced consequences of fossil fuels and why it’s factually wrong to say things like “coal is cheaper than wind” because the market price for coal power electricity isn’t reflecting the true cost, an example of market failure. Posted on November 20, 2012 at 6:41 am by Associated Press in Climate Change, global warming DES MOINES, Iowa … Continue reading this post →

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Fossil Fuels & Nuclear Lion’s Share of DOE R&D Subsidies

  By Cyrus | October 11, 2012 - 1:14 pm | Energy Policy & Economics
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Opponents of renewable energy (it’s hard to believe they exist) claim that renewables cannot compete economically with oil, gas, and nuclear power.  I have discussed the fallacy in this argument from an economic theory point of view here, but it is also important to point out that the subsidies for renewables are a tiny fraction of those for coal, oil, and gas.  Many reports on this topic focus on the comparison of overall subsidies to fossils and nuclear vs. oil & gas, but in the context of all the criticism that the Department of Energy (DOE) has gotten after one … Continue reading this post →

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Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use

  By Cyrus | September 26, 2012 - 6:02 am | Energy Policy & Economics
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This report by the National Academies examining the externalized/societal costs of energy production was originally requested by Congress  in the 2005 Energy Bill.  It offers the most thorough attempt I have seen to try to quantify the costs we incur in addition to the price we pay for energy (I have written extensively on the topic of externalized/socialized  costs in my Framework Series article on the topic of Market Failure. One key takeaway: looking only at the non-global warming costs of electricity production from coal, society pays 3.2 cents per kWh in hidden costs in addition to the price we pay on our … Continue reading this post →

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