According to statistics from the Energy Information Administration (EIA),  there were few new coal-fired plants constructed in the past several decades.  This is owed mainly to environmental opposition and the resulting legal and regulatory challenges, and the construction of natural gas units and, recently, wind turbines. But that trend may be changing somewhat. In 2009, [...]

China became the world’s largest energy consumer in 2009, surpassing the United States, which held the title for more than 100 years, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).[i] The recession took a toll on U.S. industrial output, adding to a decline in total energy consumption that was almost 5 percent below 2008 levels.[ii] The [...]

The White House has launched a coordinated PR campaign to argue that it is not anti-business. That is a difficult argument to make when we look at the Administration’s record on energy. Time after time the Administration has acted to make it more difficult to produce energy domestically and they are actively seeking to make [...]

New national survey finds that 70% of Americans oppose new energy taxes to combat global warming IER President: “The American people are smarter than the political class in Washington think – they see this tragic accident playing out in the Gulf, and are overwhelmingly opposed to the Obama Administration’s plan to capitalize on it politically [...]

Criticism of Employment Effects Estimates Another criticism made by Levi is that the estimated employment impacts in our study are invalid because more capital-intensive industries will be more heavily affected than labor-intensive industries by climate policy. As we make clear in our study, our figures for potential job losses are only order-of-magnitude estimates designed to [...]

by Andrew Chamberlain Chamberlain Economics, L.L.C Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations argues for a naive view of state and local utility regulation. He argues for a world in which municipal regulators have the ability to force utility managers to act against their own economic interests, passing forward the full benefit of free [...]

Every year BP releases a Statistical Review of World Energy.[i] This report is greeted by energy experts as one of the best snapshots of the world energy situation. This year, however, the release of the report was overshadowed by BP’s struggle to stop the flow of oil from the Macondo well and to deal with [...]

Many claim that wind generation is beneficial because it reduces pollution emissions and does not emit carbon dioxide.  This isn’t necessarily the case. The following article explains a phenomena called cycling where the introduction of wind power into a generation system that uses carbon technologies to back-up the wind  actually reduces the energy efficiency of [...]

Abstract Various legislative and other proposals have promoted policies that would tax or place a price floor on petroleum-based transportation fuels such as gasoline because as President Obama stated in his recent address, “we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”[1] Their object is to spur conservation and promote the [...]

Washington, DC – This afternoon Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), along with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), released an economic analysis of the American Power Act (APA) – a piece of legislation designed to change consumer behavior by taxing 85 percent of the energy consumed in the United States in an attempt [...]