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Where Your Brews Come From: A Deeper Dive into Barley for Beer
A colorful sampling of craft beers from Alluvial Brewing in my former home of Ames, Iowa. Even with the rapidly growing demand for craft beers, localizing the full supply chain to support this budding...
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Four Economic Errors that Cause Environmental Problems (and How to Correct Them)
Our dependence on nature runs deep. There is no denying that a pristine environment improves our health, lengthens our lives, and makes us more productive. Yet in our lifetimes catastrophic...
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How Would a Flawed 2020 Census Affect You? I Talked with Someone Who Knows
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.Not to be outdone by other Secretaries who are gaining a lot more public attention, on March 26, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said “Hold my beer…” then announced that...
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The Coal Bailout Nobody is Talking About
Photo: Mike Poresky/CC BY (Flickr)If you are reading this blog, chances are you are either an energy economist, grid geek, or maybe my mother. Regardless, this administration seems intent on trying...
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The Billion-Dollar Coal Bailout Nobody Is Talking About: Self-Committing In...
Xcel Energy's Sherco Generating Station Coal Power Plant Photo: Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons This interview was first published on May 21, 2019, in Forbes. Nearly two-thirds of the United States’...
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Is the USDA Relocation Just Good Old-Fashioned Rent Seeking?
Photo: aisletwentytwo/CC BY 2.0 (Flickr)One of things I cherish about economists is their ability to call BS when they see it. In research settings economists tend to have a reputation for asking...
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Tribute to Dr. Frank Ackerman, a Second Draft
The confidence a good mentor places in you can give you confidence in yourself. When a good mentor is willing to invest in you, you can become willing to invest in yourself. Good mentors can be hard to...
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Three Possible Solutions to Uneconomic Coal Generation
Photo: Rennett Stowe/Flickr This year, utility regulators in Missouri and Minnesota are looking into a practice known as self-committing, which research from UCS shows is costing customers a billion...
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Three Ways Advocacy Has Enabled Market Forces to Clean up the Power Grid
Economics and market forces are powerful but often get all the credit for the gains in decarbonizing the power grid. Certainly, they deserve a lot of credit: without favorable economics,...
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Baby Shark Cereal and Maple Syrup Collusion: Why Competition in Our Food...
Ian Ransley/FlickrThe cereal aisle in your typical American supermarket is remarkable. With box after box on top of box, the aisle looks like a technicolor version of The Wall from Game of Thrones....
View ArticleThe Lacey Act: Protecting the Protector
Question: Which U.S. law that protects endangered species, tropical forests, and U.S. jobs is now in need of protection itself? Answer: The Lacey Act. For the last 100 years the Lacey Act has...
View ArticleMany Good Reasons to “Eat Local”
As an analyst and communicator at UCS, I know how difficult it can be to tell a complicated, nuanced story in our sound-bite-oriented media culture. So even though it was not totally surprising, it was...
View ArticlePutting A123 in Context
You’ve probably already heard the news this week about a clean energy company that received a government grant filing for bankruptcy. What you may not have heard quite so clearly is that clean tech is...
View ArticleFor Your Thanksgiving Pie, Make the Whipped Cream Organic (A Farmer Will...
What with buttery mashed potatoes, cheesy macaroni, and pies begging to be topped with whipped cream or ice cream, Thanksgiving turns out to be a pretty dairy-heavy holiday. Which makes the findings of...
View ArticlePlaying a Shell Game with a Power Plant: Ratepayers Lose
Ever wonder how your utility company sets your electricity price? Most of us don’t think much about our electric bills; we just pay them and figure there isn’t much we can do about it if the rates...
View ArticleThe $11 Trillion Reward (Or, How Congress Could Improve Health, Save Lives,...
It’s August in Washington, DC, and that means two things—the tomatoes at my farmers market are juicy and delicious, and Congress has cleared out and gone home. Both highly anticipated events, but this...
View ArticleFrom New York to New Mexico, Modest Public Investments Support Healthy Food...
In a recent post, I wrote about the health benefits—and attendant reductions in health care spending—that could be achieved if public policies helped all Americans to eat healthy foods instead of...
View ArticleA Food Day Wish List: More Veggies, Less Corn
Okay, yes, sometimes corn is a vegetable. But most of the time, it’s something else entirely—highly processed corn syrup in a can of soda, for example, or a fast food burger made from a corn-fed cow....
View ArticleWhat Are We Doing with our Planet’s Land? A Report from Berlin
I’m in Berlin at the Global Land Project conference, a biennial gathering of about 1000 scientists who study how we Earthlings use our world. I gave a talk on beef compared to other meats in the...
View ArticleCharles Mann and The Atlantic Miss The Mark in a Confused Climate Change Piece
A recent climate change article by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic left me scratching my head. The title, “How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen” piqued my interest. It’s something I...
View ArticleWho’ll Plant the Trees for Our Grandchildren to Use?
Thinking about trees often makes you think about your grandchildren. Both start small, can live for many decades, and will grow old in a world very different from ours today. And they’re connected. I...
View ArticleCarbon Pricing, Income Inequality, and Shakespeare: Highlights from the 2015...
While many of you were probably enjoying the last days of the holiday season, this past weekend I and thousands of my fellow economists made our way to Boston for the annual American Economic...
View ArticleKing Coal's Stages of Grief, Part 2: Financial Risk and the Economics of Coal
This post continues my series on King Coal’s Stages of Grief, and focuses on more denial—this time about economics. Yesterday the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) noted that the production...
View ArticleYour Memorial Day Beer Choice Can Support Sustainable Farmers and Local...
In the spirit of enjoying adult beverages this Memorial Day weekend (responsibly, of course!), I want to share a bit about the burgeoning craft beer industry in the United States and why the trends are...
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