energy economics

The pros and cons of cheap oil

Cheaper gas means more gas guzzled and more carbon emitted, right? Reality is more nuanced.

Gas prices are way low, but U.S. oil production to grow in 2015. What gives?

A worldwide glut of the crude stuff should mean less oil drilling in North Dakota, right? Wrong.

Meet clean energy's smart guy

MacArthur "genius award"-winner Shwetak Patel talks about a future where your house tracks your energy consumption -- and your every move.

Rebounds and Jevons: Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded

My last post on David Owen's piece in the New Yorker and on the Jevons effect stirred up some interesting questions and discussion that I want to follow up on here.

The State of Electricity Prices

I was messing around with some spreadsheets, and out popped this little guy: The chart plots the 50 states — minus Hawaii but plus DC — with the price of electricity on the vertical axis and consumption on the horizontal axis. (I left off Hawaii because it’s a serious outlier, with average electricity prices nearly twice as high […]

Price cannot steer emission reductions properly

In my last two posts I argued two points: emissions pricing is less popular with the public than funding of trains, renewable requirements and other types of public investment and rule based regulation . And the public is right. Clean energy, clean industry and clean agriculture are fundamentally infrastructure.  Infrastructure depends much more on rules […]