Pressed for space in today’s Morning Bell, we left out some of the more fascinating findings from that Pew poll showing how dramatically American opinion is shifting in favor of increased energy production. Pew reports: Much of the increase in support for energy exploration has come among groups that previously viewed this as a less important priority than energy conservation – young people, liberals, independents, Democrats, women and people who have attended college. Fully half of people ages 18 to 29 (51%) now say expanding energy exploration is a more …
The fight over the mortgage bailout bill still being debated by Congress has helped expose one of the best-kept secrets in Washington. Despite the fact that the median price of a home is $218,000, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is threatening to kill the bill unless the cap on the size of mortgages the federal government can guarantee is raised to $730,000. So why would Pelosi stand in the way of legislation she believes could help poorer homeowners unless wealthy homeowners are bailed out too? Because the wealthy are her core constituency. The …
Current Harvard economics professor and former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan Martin Feldstein explains in the Wall Street Journal how announcing that the U.S. will allow oil development on currently banned lands, could lower oil prices right now: The relationship between future and current oil prices implies that an expected change in the future price of oil will have an immediate impact on the current price of oil. Thus, when oil producers concluded that the demand for oil in China and some other countries will grow more rapidly …
A major plank of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) efforts to convince the American people that liberals actually want to reduce gas prices is a bill that adds “new restrictions for commodity traders whose speculation has driven up the price of oil.” But as liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman shows today, blaming speculators for the price of gas is long on politics and short on reality. Krugman writes: Why are politicians so eager to pin the blame for oil prices on speculators? Because it lets them believe that we …
Pay close attention to the debate over the price of gas. Because in the coming years, you’re going to see the exact same debate play out over electricity prices. Just as in the debate over gas prices, conservatives will argue we need to increase supply by harvesting domestic resources and by building more power plants –whether coal, nuclear, or natural gas. The left, on the other hand, will demand that no new resources be harvested to provide electricity, that U.S. lands remain “pristine,” that no new coal or nuclear power …
Virginia Postrel voices the same frustration any honest economist feels witnessing the current state of accepted opinion on energy policy: It’s infuriating how all three presidential candidates prattle on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline. The candidates treat CO2 emissions as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications. In the real world, barring a massive buildup of nuclear plants, reducing carbon dioxide emissions means consuming less energy and that means raising prices a lot, either directly with …
