Dong Energy
Does anyone study economics anymore?
Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades
Sixty-three out of fifteen hundred climate policies (call it 4%) had any impact on emissions.
That is a complete sentence.
‘Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate targets necessitates better knowledge about which climate policies work in reducing emissions at the necessary scale. We provide a global, systematic ex post evaluation to identify policy combinations that have led to large emission reductions out of 1500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents. Our approach integrates a comprehensive climate policy database with a machine learning–based extension of the common difference-in-differences approach. We identified 63 successful policy interventions with total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2. Our insights on effective but rarely studied policy combinations highlight the important role of price-based instruments in well-designed policy mixes and the policy efforts necessary for closing the emissions gap.’
Follow the Science: Biden Climate Policy Is a Fraud
Apparently, if you subsidize something you get more of it.
If you subsidize energy consumption … you get more energy consumption. If it happens that the subsidies accrue to green energy consumption … you still get higher overall energy consumption, including higher consumption of now cheaper fossil fuels
People have known this for a while. This is one reason why climate change policies fail to reduce emissions.
But the bureaucracy continues unimpeded. It’s almost as if reducing emissions wasn’t the true objective. If the true objective was to line certain pockets, then, “Mission Accomplished.”
‘Mr. York and a colleague returned with a 2019 empirical paper showing that while “renewable energy sources compose a larger share of overall energy production, they are not replacing fossil fuels but are rather expanding the overall amount of energy that is produced.”
‘This result can’t really surprise the Obama-Biden Democrats, who sponsored a 2013 National Research Council study of their own, led by a future Nobel Prize winner no less. For similar reasons, the author didn’t mince words, concluding that green subsidies were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”
‘Yet this poor strategy Mr. Biden would later quadruple down on with upward of $1 trillion in taxpayer and energy consumer money.’
Why Is New York Paying So Much for Wind Power?
Did New York State sign a contract that locks in massive profits for Big Wind?
How did the bureaucrats come up with its pricing?
‘Using actual European capital and operating costs, Empire Wind will be exceptionally profitable, with an after-tax return on equity of 24% thanks to a federal investment tax credit of 30% of the construction cost. If Empire Wind qualifies for a 40% investment tax credit, which it is likely to do after the Biden administration reinterpreted the requirements under the Inflation Reduction Act, the company’s pretax return would be even higher. If these return estimates are true, New York made a drastic mistake in agreeing to the offtake price of $155 per megawatt hour. Meanwhile, the average wholesale value of power in New York from July 2023 to June 2024 was $36 per megawatt hour.
‘In addition, Equinor and Orsted will each receive a total subsidy of more than $3 billion courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Who is the patsy here? Are American taxpayers funding an extraordinarily expensive form of electricity generation? Did New York sign an agreement that allows large wind-farm operators to earn unreasonably high after-tax profits at the expense of its residents? Or both? Either way, New Yorkers are the big losers.’
Bureaucracy lacks common sense.
‘TSA: Peanut Butter is a liquid. We said what we said.
‘Community Notes:
Peanut butter is technically a Bingham Plastic (a subset of non-Newtonian fluids), but under ASTM D4359-90 it is classified as a liquid, not a solid. The TSA considers the nut spread a liquid, but is unrestricted if it is a sandwich ingredient. chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Or… kelid1.ir/FilesUp/ASTM_S… twitter.com/AskTSA/status/…’
SAVE Plan Is Another Student Loan Forgiveness Boondoggle
Cui bono? Who benefits from student loan forgiveness?
We’re told it’s the students. But let’s not forget the educational institutions. Subsidized or free borrowing is a direct link to tuition inflation.
Tuition inflation seems to be the only kind of inflation nobody cares to complain about. According to Forbes, the cost of attending a four-year college has increased 180% from 1980 through 2019.
‘The plan would also set up unhealthy incentive structures for colleges and universities, which set the borrowing allowances for housing, food, child care and the like. Nowhere would these perverse incentives be more disruptive than at community and technical colleges. In these fairly affordable two-year institutions, about half of students don’t take out loans. Many schools don’t allow their students to take them out because if too many default, the college can lose access to federal aid like loans and Pell grants.
‘But under the SAVE plan many students would owe nothing for their educations, making it nearly impossible to default. If the risk of default is minimized, so too is the risk that colleges might lose their aid. Community colleges would no longer be motivated to keep prices low and limit borrowing. With the SAVE plan, they’d have incentives to increase tuition and allow more borrowing knowing they can capture more no-strings-attached funds. Community-college leaders would also have less incentive to align their programs with workforce needs or to ensure student success after graduation.’
Don’t Believe the Drug Cost Spin
When God closes one door, He opens another door.
When the bureaucracy closes a door, it seals the room shut.
The U.S. government imposed pricing on branded drugs. This lowered prices.
The assumption seems to be that generic competition from generics and biosimilars would persist, even when the economics is less attractive. That is, the generic competitors would continue to make competitor drugs even with a diminished incentive to do so.
They won’t.
The net effect here is what we need to understand. The government’s intervention lowers prices, but this is offset by the reduced price-lowering impact of generic competition.
Could it be that prices go up?
‘Because the IRA guarantees formulary coverage for medicines that CMS selects for price control, manufacturers may be less likely to offer price concessions to insurers. The formulary guarantee will also make it harder for generics to compete. The result? Higher prices than if market competition prevailed.
‘The generics group says the formulary guarantee will compromise the forthcoming launches of several biosimilars that would compete with medicines on CMS’s list. Manufacturers will also have less incentive to develop generic versions of branded medicines since they don’t know which will be selected for Medicare price controls down the road. Why invest in a product that could be undercut by government price-fixing?
‘The generics group predicts that uncertainty surrounding the IRA’s “inherently political price setting scheme” will result in fewer biosimilars being developed and on a slower timeline. This means higher prices.’
How The Space Force Must Lead: Forget ‘The Valley Of Death’
If it wants to compete in the global battlespace, the U.S. cannot afford to take a command-and-control approach, directing private ventures in the space economy. The government needs speed and innovation. These are qualities that are foreign, if not anathema, to the bureaucracy.
‘With the urgency of a country at war, the Pentagon and Congress must cease playing armchair design engineer and instead focus on what the warfighting commands actually need today. In so doing, the field acquisition agencies and offices will be empowered to focus on what they are designed for: procuring the products, systems, and services today to fill these unmet needs. Developing only what does not exist commercially instead of so-called “investing” that is little more than Cold War cronyism will yield enormous cost savings on a parallel to the billions saved through the now highly competitive launch business.’
Bureaucracy in Literature: A timeless critique of power and process
You never see any positive depiction of bureaucracy in literatures.
This article highlights some of literature’s depictions of bureaucracy including Dickens, Gogol, Auden, Trollope, and Milton.
‘The critique of bureaucracy is quite a recurring plot in English and Russian literature despite their stark differences in the realm of governance and political philosophies. Moreover, bureaucracy in literature is most often described as synonymous with state high-handedness and power abuse by individuals. Shakespeare’s play “King John” is one such depiction where the character named Bastard is shown criticizing the government institutions through his speeches.’
The SAG-AFTRA bureaucracy and the video game performers’ strike
AI continues to be the bogeyman in entertainment labor relations. It’s an interesting argument that speculative concerns about AI crowd out quotidian concerns about things like residuals.
It’s difficult to say who the World Socialists hold in greater contempt, the companies or what they label the ‘union bureaucracy.’
‘The strike by some 2,500 video game performers and voice actors, members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), has entered its fifth week. According to media reports, there has not been any progress on the issues separating the parties. There have been no formal negotiations at all, aside from those conducted between the union and individual companies and games behind the backs of video game performers.
‘SAG-AFTRA announced last week there would be no negotiations scheduled before September, leaving bureaucrats free to attend the Democratic National Convention and participate in the lavish activities of that big business party, while video game performers were left blowing in the wind with the future existence of their professions in doubt.’