Ken Glozer's New Book on Corn Ethanol (Hoover University Press)
By Ken Glozer -- May 9, 2011[Ken Glozer’s new book, Corn Ethanol: Who Pays, Who Benefits?, sponsored and published by Hoover University Press, will be released this month. Mr. Glozer is president of OMB Professionals, a Washington, D. C. based energy consulting firm. He was a senior executive service career professional with the White House Office of Management and Budget in the energy, environment, and agriculture area for 26 years.]
… Continue Reading“Clearly, reducing petroleum imports with the current ethanol policy is a costly ineffective policy. The nation and its taxpayers and consumers would be far better off if the federal government adopted a competitive market-reliance policy for ethanol and thereby avoided the very substantial costs that current ethanol policy has imposed on the nation’s consumers and taxpayers. The current corn ethanol policies should be phased out over a year or two.”
A Free Market Energy Vision (Part I: Worldview)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 6, 2011[Editor note: This is a revision of a previous post at MasterResource last year. Part II highlights a federal free-market energy bill created for discussion by the Institute for Energy Research. Part III examines the Cato Institute’s (Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren) federal energy priorities.]
Energy is the master resource. Without it, other resources could not be produced or consumed. Oil, gas, and coal could not be replenished without the energy to manufacture and power the requisite tools and machinery. Nor could there be wind turbines or solar panels, which are monuments to embedded (fossil-fuel) energy.
And just how important are fossil fuels relative to so-called renewable energies? Oil, gas, and coal generate the electricity needed to fill in for intermittent wind and solar power to ensure moment-to-moment reliability.…
Continue ReadingThe Failure of Nuclear Power (Remembering the bad start from government policy)
By William Beaver -- May 5, 2011… Continue Reading“In the long run, [government] subsidies can stifle technological progress and retard true commercialization. If state-of-the art technologies find a market, some of the private incentive for further improvement is dissipated. The acceptable becomes the enemy of the better, because individual firms come to have a stake in present technology. Minor improvements will be made to stay ahead of the competition, but there is little motivation toward major steps away from a successful line of business. Once a basic design is established, it also becomes more difficult for federal research and development managers to support radically different approaches to the same problem. There is fear of appearing foolish, hesitation in seeming to second-guess prior decisions, concern about upsetting investment in the operating technology, and pressure to satisfy competing demands for funds to support marginal improvements to current practice.”