Articles by Sean Casten
Sean Casten is president & CEO of Recycled Energy Development, LLC, a company devoted to profitably reducing greenhouse emissions.
All Articles
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Can perfect markets induce capital investment?
Question: are there any examples of a completely free market inducing investment in mature, capital-intensive industries? I’m not sure there are. More problematically, I’m not sure that economists and policy makers appreciate this reality. The result is that we continue to create markets — from electricity to CO2 — that by design are incapable of […]
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The perfect market fallacy
Suppose you want to compete in the 100 meter dash. Your odds of breaking Usain Bolt’s world record are pretty slim. So should you bother training? If you did train but ended up losing in the Olympic quarterfinals, would you take that as proof that training was a waste of time? Now consider that you […]
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The problem with unspoken assumptions
Steven Hayward’s OpEd in the Wall St. Journal this week (“No: Alternatives Simply Too Expensive“) annoyed me the first time I read it. But on re-reading it today, I’m struck by two things: 1. First, what he gets right: CO2 is fundamentally different, and can’t be treated in the same way we have dealt with […]
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How much energy does the U.S. waste?
We must save all the energy we can!At the broadest level, everything we can do to address climate change/national security/energy balance of trade and just about any other meaningful social question associated with our energy use falls into one of three categories: 1. Use less downstream energy. Turn down the thermostat, ride your bike to […]
