Earth Track Blog

In years past, when my project work would divert me from posting about energy subsidies on the Earth Track blog, I'd get an incoming email from Michael Mariotte at NIRS. This wasn't an intrusive inquiry. Rather, he'd merely be checking in to be sure everything was okay, saying he'd noticed I hadn't...

Two important, though not particularly cheerful, goings-on to mention. The first is a new paper that suggests climate change is likely to occur much more quickly, and to be more severe, than previously predicted. This finding underscores a central limitation of so many efforts to analyze highly...

It was pure coincidence that the release event for my detailed review of US subsidies to nuclear power -- a document a couple of years in the making -- was on March 11, 2011, the day of the Fukushima accident. I was in DC for the launch, traveling in a cab to the event with David Lochbaum of the...

My many years of criticizing fossil fuel subsidies aside, I still get asked fairly regularly whether there might just be some good times and good places where fossil fuel subsidies would make sense. It is not useful to dismiss the question, as it often comes from serious and well-intentioned people...

1) Solar parity and my cousin Jeff. Congrats to Jeff Koplow, an energy researcher at Sandia National Labs, for being named the inaugural recipient of the Innovator in Residence Fellowship awarded by DOE's SunShot Initiative. He'll lead a multi-disciplinary team in attacking key limits in current PV...

Here's hoping that 21 will be the magic number, and there will be real progress on a global agreement to constrain greenhouse gas emissions at COP21 meetings now underway in Paris. Removing subsidies to fossil fuels are now well recognized as a central element to getting energy prices right, and the...

The promised progress from the Iranian nuclear deal appears still to be far from materializing. The deal, or more formally, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was signed on July 14, 2015. On September 10th, the last attempt to block the deal in the US Congress failed. Almost immediately, a...

I'll say right up front that I am not an unbiased observer of this particular effort by OECD to tabulate support measures to fossil fuels. I've collaborated with Ron Steenblik, one of the project supervisors, for decades at this point; and with project manager Jehan Sauvage since his early days of...

Lot's happening with nuclear around the world -- mostly associated with continued problems with market-competitive delivery, seeking alms from taxpayers, and attempts by taxpayer groups and trading partners to block the largest of the subsidies. 1) Prefab reactors not so cheap. The Wall Street...

For many decades, natural resource industries would work their land, sell their minerals, and abandon their sites for somebody else to deal with. There are tens of thousands of such sites around the US, associated with both energy and non-energy minerals; here's a sampling, compiled by the...

Another roundup of interesting tidbits from the world of government subsidies. 1) Nuclear: A new age of nuclear energy is about to dawn? Optimism is a good thing, and Michael Brush of the Fiscal Times certainly exudes it. But optimism probably shouldn't lead you to invest your 401(k) in a bunch of...

It's been almost two years since Earth Track and Oil Change International released a detailed review of oil and gas subsidies to Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs). The paper documented the favored exemptions that MLPs receive from standard corporate tax rules and how they primarily benefitted oil...

Two straightforward concepts drive the inevitable marketplace defeat of nuclear power in most power markets: incremental innovation and lot size. People are quite clever in making many things, but we also frequently screw up. We learn by educated trial and error, and we get better bit-by-bit over...

1) Reuters attributes sunk costs of German nuclear capacity to renewables. Michael Marriotte of NIRS flagged this one. In a recent post, he pointed out that $75 billion Reuters implied was associated with Germany's transition away from nuclear was actually "for decommissioning Germany's reactors and...

1) Official fact sheet on agreement suggests many business-as-usual policies will remain. Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center translated a Farsi fact sheet on the agreement that was released by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. There appears to be a fair bit of wiggle room here. Some...

The word out of Switzerland yesterday was that "Iran and and six world powers had agreed on the outlines of an understanding that would open the path to a final phase of nuclear negotiations but are in a dispute over how much to make public." What exactly is the dispute over? The AP noted that...

1) Corporate happy talk 1: Hamming it up with frack water and earthquakes Tracking and quantifying the side-effects of particular energy fuel cycles is always challenging. If you do it wrong, or ignore the external costs entirely, particular fuels get a free ride. Other forms of energy, most often...

I'm happy to announce the release of Fossil Fuel Subsidies: Approaches and Valuation, a paper I wrote with Masami Kojima at the Bank. Masami has written about fossil fuels for many years, often focusing on the functioning of the price mechanism in oil markets. The working paper takes a deep dive...

Conventional industries have it easy. Make a good product; invest in technology and engineering to make it better and keep costs in line; then crank up the output and sell it wherever you can. Unit costs drop. Word of mouth bolsters your smart advertising campaign to millenials, creating feedback...

Hillary Clinton's use of her personal email account for official government business has been all over the news lately. The concern is that the approach escapes the normal channels of accountability regarding official government business, and makes it much more difficult to protect government...