Recently, there has been renewed concerns about efforts by China to acquire mineral assets overseas, taking advantage of recent company devaluations and their own abundant capital reserves. This is not a new concern, having arisen when Chinese companies began to look overseas for investment opportunities, particularly in the oil market, about a decade ago.
And this dates from nineteenth-century nations seeking to monopolize the whaling industry, to the English government establishing British Petroleum in an effort to avoid reliance on those undependable Americans. (Even the US, fearful of ‘running out’ of oil in the 1920s, established the Naval Petroleum Reserve, which proved useless.)
But there is some fire for all the smoke.…
Continue ReadingIt’s understandable that this happens during a recession, but nonetheless a very bad trend in policy analysis is the narrowminded focus on jobs per se. Thus the ~$800 billion spending package is evaluated according to how many jobs it will create or save, rather than according to its promotion of efficient resource allocation.
This focus on employment for its own sake is most evident in the “green jobs” rhetoric. There are two major problems with the typical claims in this area.…
Continue ReadingIn 2007, U.S. electric power generators had roughly 1 million MW of installed capacity. Almost one third of that capacity was spread over 1,400 coal-fired plants, which in turn generated about half of our electricity.[1] More than 100,000 MW of these coal plants are greater than 30 years old.[2] These plants use about 20–25 percent more fuel and emit even more of the undesirable by-products of coal – sulphur, nitrogen, particulates – than do new plants with state of the art combustion technology and emission control.[3] Replacing these older plants as they are retired from service with newer coal-fired power plants represents the quickest and lowest-cost way to reduce the adverse environmental impacts of current coal-fired power generation. And it does so without government subsidies or any deterioration in the quality of electricity service.…
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