Moral Licensing

People compensate.  If they save water, they use more electricity, because their "budget" of moral behavior is increased.  It should be possible to decompose this into "price" and "moral income" effects.  In this case, the weekly feedback raises the "price" of using water, but substituting away from water results in using more electricity.  Since they are not substitutes (or are they?), it sounds like an income effect, right?


For better or for worse? Empirical evidence of moral licensing in a behavioral energy conservation campaign 

 Verena Tiefenbeck et al. Energy Policy, June 2013, Pages 160–171 

Abstract: Isolated environmental campaigns focusing on defined target behaviors are rolled out to millions of households every year. Yet it is still unclear whether these programs trigger cross-domain adoption of additional environment-friendly behaviors (positive spillover) or reduced engagement elsewhere. A thorough evaluation of the real net performance of these programs is lacking. This paper investigates whether positive or perverse side effects dominate by exemplifying the impact of a water conservation campaign on electricity consumption. The study draws on daily water (10,780 data points) and weekly electricity (1386 data points) consumption data of 154 apartments in a controlled field experiment at a multifamily residence. The results show that residents who received weekly feedback on their water consumption lowered their water use (6.0% on average), but at the same time increased their electricity consumption by 5.6% compared with control subjects. Income effects can be excluded. While follow-up research is needed on the precise mechanism of the psychological process at work, the findings are consistent with the concept of moral licensing, which can more than offset the benefits of focused energy efficiency campaigns, at least in the short-term. We advocate the adoption of a more comprehensive view in environmental program design/evaluation in order to quantify and mitigate these unintended effects. 

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Pipeline Follies

Did somebody hack the NYTimes?

If the Times starts using actual logic and evidence again, there are going to have to be some changes made. They'll have to fire Paul Krugman, for example.

But, for now, it appears that someone made a mistake and published something that attacks liberal orthodoxy. Amazing.

Nod to Anonyman

I don't think you are TRYING hard enough

Fuel companies fined for their petty refusal to an additive in gasoline.

Look, the law says they have to do it. Stop fooling around, guys.

Of course, their lame excuse is that the additive does not actually exist.

The answer is that if your government is smart enough to imagine what it wants, the least you can do is actually make the stuff.

(Nod to Anonyman)

Renewable Energy is cheaper than coal (?)

Mr. Overwater sends this link (without, I should note, making any claims it is right or wrong. Just thought KPC would be interested, and KPC is interested. KPC is clearly trying to be like Herman Cain, and refer to KPC in the third person. Or maybe Herman Cain wants to achieve the deserved obscurity that KPC achieved long ago? Either way, here is an excerpt from the Google site):

In 2007 we launched our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE lt C) initiative through Google.org as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy. We’ve retired this initiative and continue to support renewable energy in a variety of other ways.

Our approach to RE cheaper than C
Through RE lt C, we made several investments in companies working on potentially breakthrough technologies. For instance, we invested in companies like Brightsource Energy and eSolar to help expand their work on concentrating solar power technology, and in Potter Drilling to advance its innovative geothermal drilling technology. We also sponsored research to develop the first Geothermal Map of the US, helping better understand the potential for geothermal energy to provide renewable power that’s always available. And we’ve had an engineering team working to improve a type of concentrating solar power technology called the solar power tower.

Being a broken record is repetitive, by definition. But the fact is that facts have shown over and over that it is a fact that RE gt C, in fact. Wishing it weren't so is just a giant waste of resources.

As proved by the fact that all of the enormous amount money wasted on wind power has gotten us nothing but a bunch of big towers, sort of an exercise machine for giants to hang dirty clothes on.

Overall, there is one simple truth: if it requires a subsidy to compete, it's NOT CHEAPER! Conversely if it IS cheaper, then it does not require a subsidy to compete.

And the wind cries.....wasteful! Here is some background, for you nuke-haters. In the US, perhaps 100 workers, and more than 30 citizen/bystanders, have been KILLED by wind turbines breaking or malfunctioning.

At Chappaquidick, one innocent person died.

At Three Mile Island, and in fact the total for all US nuclear power operations, cumulatively? That would be zero.

So, a lot more people are killed every year by wind turbines than have died, total, from nuclear power.

This is Why We Need the Interwebs

In several forums I have argued that the contribution of blogs and the interwebs to our knowledge of the "truth" in news is one-sided: We don't so much learn about definitive truth as we get decisive and embarrassing corrections of bullshit masquerading as news reporting. The idea that there is "truth" is shaky; the idea that there is demonstrably false crap is where bloggers come in.

A fine example of this genre is KPC pal M.G.'s piece on shale oil. I'm pretty sure this would embarrass the Times reporter, if the Times reporter were capable of embarrassment (meaning, he couldn't be a Times reporter, I guess). The Times keeps firing its "public editor," who is supposed to be their conscience. I don't think the current public editor is long for this world, if he is going to commit actual journalism like this.

NYT and Bubbles

I was pleased to see that the NYT actually had reverted, if briefly, to being a newspaper instead of a hack mouthpiece for the Obama regime.

They had this very plausible story about the "green energy bubble." And it's true: many of the companies that were recently photo ops for some grinning Obama regime rep (including Mr. Obama himself) have gone belly up. They only were created to suck down subsidies from idiots. A classic bubble. The Green she go boom. Pop go a bunch of weasels.

But then I looked more closely. Far from focusing on the actual bubble, the one in green energy, the one that has already burst, the Green Lady of News is actually forecasting a bubble in...natural gas. The discovery of enormous new reserves of cheap, clean-burning fuel is very annoying to the Green Energy Gods, the apparatchiks of the regime who want to use public money to pay off their pals. And for the "peak idiocy" bunch....fugeddaboudit. Natural gas is a disaster for the authoritarians who want us all to return to sad stone age lives perched in caves and contemplating the sins of "late" capitalism.

Amazing. Just when you think the NYTimes can't sink any lower, they submerge into the muck.

(Nod to the Blonde)

Monday's Child is full of links

(but lazy, so M'sC doesn't publish until Tuesday)

1. China's workforce stretched thin.

2. Cobra on the loose, may take "weeks" to find it.

3. From Anonyman: The chart indicates that nuclear is a small % of energy consumption, but nuclear is only used to generate electricity. So they should have a chart showing electricity production (or consumption) where nukes would be 20-25%. The trick here is that petroleum, which the chart indicates is 37% of energy consumption all goes in our cars. So getting rid of nuclear electricity production would only make our electricity "dirtier" as we would use more coal. He's talking about this article, which is dumb even for the NYTimes.

Very Interesting Description of Japanese Nuclear Problems

Great article. Very interesting and informative. Original source.

And the comments are fascinating, too.

(Nod to Mr. Overwater)

UPDATE: Interesting, but wrong, or so it appears. Updates from people who know what they are talking about (or else an elaborate hoax. I can't tell.)

Environmentalists are BAD for the Environment

John Tierney: The Man

“Efficiency advocates try to distract attention from the rebound effect by saying that nobody will vacuum more because their vacuum cleaner is more efficient,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “But this misses the picture at the macro and global level, particularly when you consider all the energy that is used in manufacturing products and producing usable energy like electricity and gasoline from coal and oil. When you increase the efficiency of a steel plant in China, you’ll likely see more steel production and thus more energy consumption.”

Consider what’s happened with lighting over the past three centuries. As people have switched from candles to oil-powered lamps to incandescent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of light has plummeted. Yet people have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700, according to an analysis published last year in The Journal of Physics by researchers led by Jeff Tsao of Sandia National Laboratories.

“The implications of this research are important for those who care about global warming,” said Harry Saunders, a co-author of the article. “Many have come to believe that new, highly-efficient solid-state lighting — generally LED technology, like that used on the displays of stereo consoles, microwaves and digital clocks — will result in reduced energy consumption. We find the opposite is true.”

These new lights, though, produce lots of other benefits, just as many other improvements in energy efficiency contribute to overall welfare by lowering costs and spurring economic growth. In the long run, that economic growth may spur innovative new technologies for reducing greenhouse emissions and lowering levels of carbon dioxide.

But if your immediate goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions, then it seems risky to count on reaching it by improving energy efficiency. To economists worried about rebound effects, it makes more sense to look for new carbon-free sources of energy, or to impose a direct penalty for emissions, like a tax on energy generated from fossil fuels. Whereas people respond to more fuel-efficient cars by driving more and buying other products, they respond to a gasoline tax simply by driving less.

A visible tax, of course, is not popular, which is one reason that politicians prefer to stress energy efficiency. The costs and other trade-offs of energy efficiency are often conveniently hidden from view, and the prospect of using less energy appeals to the thrifty instincts of consumers as well as to the moral sensibilities of environmentalists.

(Nod to Anonyman and his candy-ass Prius)

Some Visionaries Fail, But Not All Failures are Visionaries

Had a conversation in Germany once, with a quite sensible man. We discussed the large number of solar panels on nearby homes. Germany, as I have written, has a climate where the sun is visible for about 90 minutes, some time in late July. That's it for the year.

I said it was not rational to force people to invest in solar panels.

He crowed, triumphantly, that it WAS rational, because of the enormous subsidies from the EU and the German government.

I stared at him, and tried (gently) to point out that he was ASSUMING it was rational. The fact that an activity is subsidized just means that the state takes your money at gunpoint, and agrees to give part of it back if you agree to do something you otherwise would not do.

In this case, only an idiot would put solar panels on houses in dark, snowy, cold Germany. Unless "the government" pays you to do it. But the government is bribing you with your own money, to do something that no sensible person would do. Yes, subsidies change the incentives. So does slavery.

My friend actually laughed, and said, "You economists. You never want to take anything on faith!" As if faith and religion were a big part of the lives of the German people. Or as if faith meant that installing solar panels at a cost per kw/hr that is triple the generation costs of other available technologies actually made sense, instead of being a boondoggle for the "Green Industry" pirates who run the EU like a whipped dog.

Anyway, a great story (shared by the Blonde) about faith-based energy policy in California. Just so many excellent little nuggets in this story. Glad to see that Californians can be just as ridiculously faithful as Germans can.

P-Krug Gets Schooled

Tyler comes up really, really big here.

I particularly like point #3, both parts A and B. To paraphrase:

A. Offshore drilling WAS regulated. Why isn't the failure an indictment of regulation?

B. The standard public choice critique is certainly not that markets are perfect. It is that government agencies are subject to problems of information acquisition, capture by industry, and desire for increased revenue. I have almost never heard a libertarian say that markets perform perfectly. The core of the free market position is that government agencies can be counted on to perform less well than P-Krug imagines.

In short, you can't criticize the model of perfect competition unless you are also willing to abandon the model of perfect government.

As usual, and as has been argued here before, LvM said it best:

Scarcely anyone interests himself in social problems without being led to do so by the desire to see reforms enacted. In almost all cases, before anyone begins to study the science, he has already decided on definite reforms that he wants to put through. Only a few have the strength to accept the knowledge that these reforms are impracticable and to draw all the inferences from it. Most men endure the sacrifice of the intellect more easily than the sacrifice of their daydreams. They cannot bear that their utopias should run aground on the unalterable necessities of human existence. What they yearn for is another reality different from the one given in this world...They wish to be free of a universe of whose order they do not approve.
(Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics)

P-Krug is a smart guy. But he has been whoring his intellect in service of his daydreams for a decade now.

UPDATE: I have to add this, from a comment by David--

Krugman's first foray into this was to argue that the oil spill was proof that liability didn't work. In other words, we have a disaster in a heavily-regulated industry with liability caps, and we conclude from that that liability doesn't work.

Nice!

UPDATE: Related post.... Nicely done, sir. Thanks for the tip in comments.

Peak Idiocy

Of all the idiotic things that people believe, the whole "peak oil" thing has to be right up there. It is literally impossible for us to run out of oil. We have never run out of anything, and we never will.

If we did start to use up the oil we have...(though, counting shale oil, we still haven't used even 10% of the total KNOWN reserves on earth, and there are lots of places we haven't looked)...but suppose we were on our way to using it up. Three things would happen.

1. Prices would rise, causing people to cut back on use. More fuel effcient cars, better insulation on houses, etc. Quantity demanded goes down.

2. Prices would rise, causing people to look for more. And they would find more oil, and more ways to get at it. Quantity supplied goes up.

3. Prices of oil would rise, making the search for substitutes more profitable. At that point (though not now!) alternative fuels and energy sources would be economical, and would not require gubmint subsidies, because they would pay for themselves. The supply curve for substitutes shifts downward and to the right.

This is econ 101. Even Paul ("I sold my soul to become a wanker") Krugman would credit this scenario.

But we ignore econ 101. And so we get this debacle. Ethanol was bad enough when it was just inefficient to produce and wasting more energy than it created. But we actually went further and bought too much of the stuff.

Yikes.

(Nod to Anonyman)

How Many Citizens Does It Take to Choose a Lightbulb?

Trick question: you don't GET to choose your own light bulb.

Interesting story. Just gets better and better, as it develops.

As the story concludes....

Call your senators and your congressional representative instead. Tell them you've had enough of command-economy enviro-thuggery. And invite them to put cap-and-trade in a place where a solar array would be both impractical and painful.

(Nod to North Ohio Boy)