The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using real science.
Instead of a science-based approach, our energy and environmental policies are typically written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.
A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every 3 weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.
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More reports about greed energy economics:
It’s Time To Sequester Green Energy Subsidies, Not Mythical Oil And Gas Tax Breaks
End Subsidies for Wind Energy?…
Continue Reading“Where ecological services need to be monetized, they likely will be. Where monetization is unlikely or virtually impossible, they probably don’t need to be brought into the cost benefit calculations of decision makers in the normal course of events. And attempting to do so might be viewed with suspicion and undermine support for the very environmental benefit one is attempting to foster.”
Defining ecosystems in general or a specific ecosystem in particular is a difficult endeavor.
As daunting a task as this is, it is no less difficult to establish a sound economic baseline for the entirety of the benefits that nature provides to mankind. Where ecological services need to be monetized, they likely will be. Where monetization is unlikely or virtually impossible, they probably don’t need to be brought into the cost benefit calculations of decision makers in the normal course of events.…
Continue Reading“Due to a lack of knowledge and/or limited possibility of commodification due the impossibility of accurate pricing and the inability to enclose the commons for some environmental goods, it is an open question as to whether it is even possible to value ecosystem services as a whole – as opposed to a select few benefits that flow from particular sets of relations within an area.”
Many economists find valuing global (and most times even local) “ecosystem services” difficult. Nonmarket pricing, indeed, is inherently impossible to solve or thus requires very questionable methodologies.
Critics of environmental commodification argue that the ongoing public funds for such efforts are neither now, nor are they likely to be in the future, justified. Alleged market failure, in other words, is swamped by other failures in the “solution.”…
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