Oil Prices, Oil Prices, Oil Prices Increasing

Oil prices are on the rise and this is great for alternative energy. If owners of companies can rely on a stable and permanent increase in real oil prices then they can justify investing in alternative energy. The Economist comments on the price increase and the effect on macroeconomics, it gives good context to our economy and oil prices and shows how integrated all of our modern issues are.

Governments can fund alternative energy projects and can subsidize alternative energy companies but it will be the market that makes the large scale changes that environmentalism seeks. The government does not fix the economy, rather it creates context and the market responds- Increase the real price of oil and people will use substitutes.

Technology leads the way

Later this year a very important UN Kyoto Meeting of the Parties will occur and many feel that this is our last chance to negotiate a global Climate Change agreement before it is too late and positive feed back mechanisms take over the global ecosystem, changing the earth's climate more than humans would like. Sweden is taking the lead as president of the European Union and will be the lead in the Climate Change negotiations.

The CATO institute is a libertarian organization and is void of a lot of Democrat Republican rhetoric so I enjoy their analyses, their commentary is sometimes disagreeable but their numbers are often spot-on. This article is about the economics of Obama's spending on increasing rail in the US. One note about this article, it states that electrical trains are a poor idea because we have coal fired power plants in America, but we are currently working on phasing out coal fired power plants and equipping them with carbon capture technologies, so i find their argument shallow.

This link is to a pdf so if you do not have the right software the link may not work. This report is made by the Oil Solutions Initiative and is titled "A Framework for Breaking US Oil Dependence."

Increasing energy efficiency for our appliances is being pushed right now and many do not like increased efficiency because it means more overall resource use. I would say that this is no condemnation of increasing energy efficiency because plenty of humans are still poor and want to use more energy, but already rich people using increases in energy efficiencies to use more is a problem.

The Economist provides a good commentary on energy grids in American and how they are changing.

12/26/08: Oil prices, Oil prices, Oil prices

I have been writing a lot about the price of oil, but only because not enough is being done to protect the health and wealth of humans and the environment. Since not enough is being proactively done we have to wait for the markets to signal investment in alternative energies. What economists are really trying to say in this scenario is that as long as oil is cheaper than wind or solar power there will always be large numbers of humans that will accept the cost to themselves and their environment for prices to be lower in the current moment.

This is an article from the "christian science monitor" commenting on how great it is that oil prices are low and expected to be low in the next year.

These two articles from "business week" are about decreased investment in a sustainable economy because of low oil prices, and this one is about Obama trying to do something governmentally about a market that is not signaling the long term costs and supplies of energy sources.

12/24/08: Environmental Economic stuff

The economist gives a good article on alternative engines and focuses on steam. It is a bit satirical but the solution to environmental degradation (in the popular media it is a.k.a. "Climate Change") needs to be as broad as possible.

The price of oil needs to be high to create large investments in alternative energies and a "sustainable" economy. But, the price of oil is low. This article shows what happens to investment in a sustainable economy when the USA goes into a depression and the price of oil is low.

The economist supplies another great article on computers and how green this whole technology thing is . The article gives some good information on how sustainable the carbon emissions of the computer world are. Currently, Computing and Telecommunications produce 2% of global emissions which is comparable to the amount that aviation emits (plane travel). The article did not specify what was being emitted by technology use, but apparently it is 2% of global emissions of all things. Pollution is not a single thing, some pollution is preferable to other pollution. So, 2% of global emissions does not mean much. But, the article is worth reading, and so is most of the economist.