Why Cap-and-Trade Won’t Backfire

There was a great study done some years back involving daycares in Israel that introduced a modest financial penalty for kids over-staying their welcome. Once parents were being fined for it, tardy pick-ups increased.
This editorial from Justin Danhof published by the Christian Science Monitor falsely compares this policy to a cap-and-trade system of regulating carbon [...]

Public Transit Update

CNN has some good news about the habits of Americans. They have actually begun to change in a meaningful way. As the article cites, there were an additional 85 billion public transportation trips taken in the first 3 months of this year compared to last, not world saving numbers but an impressive increase, nearly 3.5%. [...]

HHO Gas Magic — What a hydrogen car isn’t

In researching another post, I stumbled upon a site advertising so-called HHO gas engine modification technique (HHO gas is the term they use for a 2:1 mixture of elemental hydrogen and oxygen). Usually, such snake oil would not even be worth addressing. The idea itself is that water can be used to supplement gas in [...]

E.P.A. official: White House staffers censored global warming report

The Bush administration’s environmental policy reputation has suffered yet another blow, after a former E.P.A. advisor accused the office of the Vice President of altering prepared testimony by the head of the CDC. The advisor, Jason K. Burnett, alleged that Cheney’s office removed parts of the testimony related to the health risks associated with global [...]

Gas Tourism and the Failure of Subsidies

The New York Times published this piece on the so-called “gas tourism” happening at the Mexican border. Gas tourism is the practice of actually driving somewhere to buy gas. Gasoline and diesel are much cheaper in Mexico then in America, and some living in border communities feel that provides enough incentive to brave traffic and [...]

Journalists Shouldn’t Do Science

Time Magazine last month provided a textbook example of why one should take the journalistic hype about any scientific study with a grain of salt. For years we’ve seen stories extolling the benefits of sleeping eight to ten hours, including this one from Time itself that is dripping with doom-and-gloom about the epidemic of sleeplessness [...]

It’s All Speculation?

From BusinessWeek comes the delightfully simplistic and delightfully wrong story entitled “High Oil Prices: It’s All Speculation”.
The article begins with a straw man argument invoking the California Energy Crisis of 2001. Ed Wallace juxtaposes a quote by Vice President Cheney suggesting that the California Energy Crisis had resulted from poorly planned deregulation (which, in large [...]

More on “Speculation”

Note: There’s been a bit of a layoff in posts of late due to the authors’ schedules. I want to apologize to all of our readers. Post volume should mostly bounce back in the near future, rest assured though, the site is alive and well.
Apparently, the case (see examples already posted on this blog) against [...]