Deflation

I’ve never lived through deflation, and don’t much understand its implications, so I’m reading Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression. That got me wondering about the current numbers, which the St. Louis FRED site (“Better than Boing Boing!”) helpfully graphs for us: Blue includes energy, red is without. Click through to see it bigger.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Solar Power Edition

New Mexico State regulators approve expansion of rooftop solar incentives: New Mexico regulators Tuesday approved a major expansion of the state’s solar energy program, including provisions for solar installations on Albuquerque businesses. “We’re going to see a flowering of solar in this state,” said Jason Marks, a member of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission. …

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Green Video

Troy Simpson, the Journal video guy, has been doing a series with our energy conservation guru, Al Zelicoff. He just put together a nice “channel” collecting them all:

Liberal? Socialistic?

A couple of months ago in this space, a commenter responded to a post about economists favoring a carbon tax as a response to climate change by asking whether said economists were “liberal and socialistic”. The question is perhaps best answered by reference to former advisors to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan who favor …

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Elasticities in the Short and Long Term

Via Dessler and Revkin, an interesting interview with economist Gary Yohe that gets to the heart of the puzzle about gasoline consumption this year. Gas prices soared over the summer, but consumption dropped only a bit (on the order of 3-5 percent year-over-year). The question posed by critics of a carbon tax as a greenhouse …

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Net Green Jobs Watch

John Whitehead’s jihad against the green jobs argument continues: The implication of this type of study is that environmental policy creates net positive green jobs. The jobs lost as a result of environmental policy are never mentioned. You’ve really got to follow the comment threads on these. And to be clear – John is not …

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