A Free-Market Energy Blog

Ethanol: Unintended Consequences

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 7, 2009

“[Government] intervention that impinges on complex market forces can produce both unpredicted and unpredictable results.”

– Robert Bradley, Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience (vol. 2), p. 1791.

Of all the environmental boondoggles of recent years, the biggest must be corn ethanol. As MasterResource’s Ken Green wrote in an article summarizing ethanol’s impact on the environment:

Contrary to popular belief, ethanol fuel will do little or nothing to increase our energy security or stabilize fuel prices. Instead, it will increase greenhouse gas emissions, local air pollutant emissions, fresh water scarcity, water pollution (both riparian and oceanic), land and ecosystem consumption, and food prices.

In a recent speech, Green elaborated, pointing out

the absolute fiasco of corn ethanol, which has caused increases in air pollution, water pollution, freshwater consumption, coastal pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and food prices.

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Power Politics: Enron Lives! (From Ken Lay’s “natural gas standard” to cap & trade today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 5, 2009

Editor Note: This commentary is reproduced, with slight revision, from the December 2009 issue of POWER magazine.

As director of public policy analysis in my last seven years at Enron, I participated in many legislative and regulatory debates involving electricity, although the public policy thrust of the company was the opposite of what I personally believed was good social policy.

While I favored free markets, the business model of Ken Lay (a PhD economist with years of Washington regulatory experience) centered on special government favor. Enron, for example, had seven profit centers geared to government pricing/rationing of carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions. And in the 1990s, the company was squarely behind a Btu tax. Today, Enron would be pushing cap and trade and a federal renewables mandate–and a lot of mandated energy efficiency with its profit centers in mind.…

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Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling (Part III – Response to Comments)

By Kent Hawkins -- December 4, 2009

Posts at Knowledge Problem acknowledge the range of results from Part I and Part II in my series; Katzenstein and Apt; and an article by Michael Milligan et al, Wind Power Myths Debunked, but attribute much of the differences to characteristics of the power system to which wind power is added.

However, although results will vary by jurisdiction, the differences I reported are not derived from this consideration but from general issues with respect to wind power integration. Milligan claims low reductions from the theoretical maximum (negligible to 7 per cent), apparently from Gross et al’s literature review, but this does not survive critical assessment.

The work of Katzenstein and Apt is cited in the bibliography to Part I, even though they show that as much as 75–80 per cent of the CO2 emissions reductions presently assumed by policy makers is realized.…

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The Undulating Oil Plateau: Peak without Decline

By -- December 3, 2009
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Apologist Responses to Climategate Misconstrue the Real Debate (Quantitative, not Qualitative)

By Robert Murphy -- December 2, 2009
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Climategate: Is Peer-Review in Need of Change?

By Chip Knappenberger -- December 1, 2009
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James Hansen on Cap-and-Trade & Copenhagen

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 30, 2009
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A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?

By Kenneth P. Green -- November 27, 2009
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The True Meaning of Thanksgiving: Private Enterprise in America

By Richard Ebeling -- November 26, 2009
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Climate Politics: Running Scared in the EU (even before Climategate)

By Carlo Stagnaro -- November 25, 2009
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