Streetwise Professor

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has clearly set out to be the anti-Gary Gensler. If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is!

Case in point–his move to abandon to the mercies of the courts Gensler’s cretinous, pointless, and incredibly burdensome climate reporting rule. (I use that Sierra Club link to provide some levity. I love the smell of hysterical panic in the morning).

Atkins is also largely reversing GiGi’s anti-crypto agenda. (Well, he is a “crypto peddler” after all, at least according to the Sierra Club!) I am not a crypto evangelist by any means, but broadly support letting consenting adults trade what they want to trade. The regulatory framework for such trading should focus on legitimate investor protection, anti-fraud, and anti-manipulation measures as set out in the SEC’s authorizing statutes. That’s what Atkins’ SEC is striving to do, in contrast to Gensler’s mission to strangle crypto at every opportunity.

In crypto, but more generally, Atkins is also moving sharply away from Gensler’s regulation by enforcement approach, which is another welcome change.

And hot off the presses, Atkins has taken aim at the bloated and (IMO) pointless Consolidated Audit Trail. (Seriously–I found the above announcement while Googling “Atkins CAT” while writing this post. It came out hours before I put pixels to screen). Proposed in the aftermath of the 2010 Flash Crash, it always struck me as a hugely expensive solution to a non-existent problem. Yes, the CAT could assist in forensic evaluations of market events like the Flash Crash and market manipulation, but having worked on such evaluations in markets lacking the CAT, and reading the analyses of others, I conclude it is possible to carry out these analyses without CAT. Put differently, the marginal benefit of the CAT is minuscule relative to the cost.

One issue that has received less attention outside the equity trading community is market structure, and particularly RegNMS. The 20th anniversary of that regulation was the occasion for an SEC conference to reevaluate that regulation. (At the time of the passage of RegNMS, I wrote an article saying that it marked the 30 Years War over market structure that began with the 1975 Securities Act, and wryly suggested that there would actually be a 100 Years War over market structure. We are now at the halfway mark!)

Along with several participants, Atkins criticized a key provision of RegNMS–the so-called “trade through rule” that prevents the execution of a trade on one exchange when a better price is displayed on another. Atkins favors elimination of the rule.

This rule is the keystone of RegNMS, and its removal would reshape the equity exchange environment as thoroughly as the regulation did 20 years ago. Indeed, its elimination would signal that the entire experiment was ill-conceived.

As I wrote in my Regulation Magazine piece, the trade through rule was the “centerpiece” of RegNMS. Its very purpose was to cause a fundamental restructuring of equity trading in the US. And it did.

As I phrased it, the purpose of the rule was to “socialize order flow.” That is, eliminate–or at least sharply circumscribe–the control that an exchange had over the order flow directed to it. The objective of this was to make the exchange landscape more competitive, and specifically to reduce the market power of the NYSE and NASDAQ. At the time of RegNMS’s passage, the NYSE executed 80 percent of the volume of shares listed on it.

Evaluated against its stated objective, RegNMS was a . . .

The equity trading landscape looks nothing like it did in 2005 or before. More than half of trades are executed off exchange. The remainder is divided among 12 exchanges, with the largest having a 10 percent market share:

But to Atkins and the critics of the trade through rule, this represents not great success, but great failure. To the critics, this fragmentation is deleterious.

That is, one man’s competition is another man’s fragmentation.

The post-RegNMS environment has clearly seen dramatic improvements in liquidity and declines in trading costs. This is plausibly, though not definitively, materially the result of increased competition. Moreover, the exchanges have adopted different order types, pricing rules (e.g., taker-maker/inverted v. maker-taker), and trading infrastructures. This means that heterogeneous market participants can choose among heterogeneous platforms, thereby achieving a better match than a one-size-fits-all system would.

The main disadvantage of fragmentation–and a major source of discontent–is that brokers and traders must connect to a variety of platforms, and crucially, must buy data from each. As I wrote some years ago, this creates strong complementarity among the data streams that exchanges provide, which as Cournot demonstrated two centuries ago creates considerable market power which inflates prices. Data is expensive, and economics implies it is too expensive.

What would happen if the trade through rule is abolished? I predict that by effectively re-privatizing order flow it would lead to a massive consolidation of trading venues, and a return to a market structure resembling that of 2004 and before. Less fragmentation, but less competition. Those are essentially two sides of the same coin.

The busy Mr. Atkins has also weighed in on the issue of the frequency of corporate reporting, favoring (fast-tracking, actually) the elimination of the quarterly reporting requirement. Since Trump proposed the same, of course this has led to shrieks and wails–which have been markedly absent when Warren Buffet mooted the idea.

Here’s another issue where I support letting the market decide, as is typically the case when there are trade-offs. Reporting frequency has costs and benefits. A company that provides too little information largely internalizes the cost, in the form of a lower stock price. That is to say, its shareholders internalize the cost. Yes, agency problems mean that managers who make disclosure decisions may act against the interest of shareholders and disclose too little or too infrequently, but that is a problem that is inherent in the corporate form (and the consequent “separation of ownership and control”) that manifests itself in many ways that are not the subject of government mandates and intricate regulations. It’s hard to see why corporate disclosure should be different. Yes, punish false disclosures, but don’t dictate how often companies must avoid lying.

One concern in recent years has been the large number of companies deciding to go private or remain private (rather than IPO’ing). There are myriad reasons companies make these choices, but one of them is the cost of being subject to the reporting obligations imposed on public companies. Easing those obligations somewhat would nudge more companies toward going/remaining public, meaning that the amount of information available to investors and the opportunities available to them might increase if the Trump/Atkins proposal goes into effect.

Overall, Atkins is a welcome relief. Though anyone probably would have been, after Gensler’s Reign of Error (and Terror). I’m ambivalent about his hostility to the trade through rule, but on non-market structure matters he is moving in the right–and pro-market–direction.

Emily Oster is a very well-known young-ish economist, who could be fairly characterized as a celebrity/popular economist who writes extensively on parenting and family issues. She recently published a piece in The Dispatch to explain why “it can be extremely difficult, basically impossible, to separate truth from fiction” these days, or more accurately why it has become (in her view) more difficult.

She appeals to a well-known concept in economics, signaling theory. In brief, once upon a time we had a “separating” equilibrium where one could rely on signals of something to determine the quality of opinions being offered. Now, however, we have a “pooling” equilibrium where there are no reliable signals to allow one to determine whether someone’s opinion was likely to be valid, or whether it was quackery.

Why the breakdown of the signaling equilibrium? According to Oster, it is the democraticization of access to scientific information. In the (alleged) signaling era, only specialists had access to scientific and technical information. Now, however:

Over time, access to scientific research has become more democratized. Open access to scientific journals has become more widespread, and there has been a greater push to try to help the general public get access to and understand research findings. This has a lot of benefits, but it has made it far easier for non-experts to appear like experts when they want to.

I was initially favorably disposed to this argument, but upon further consideration I think it misses the boat. To understand why requires a little background on how signaling works (in theory).

Signaling is a model of asymmetric information. Specifically, it is a “hidden type” model where people inherently differ on some dimension, but this is difference is not observable. This is in contrast to a “hidden action” asymmetric information model, where someone’s action–say, driving like a maniac–is not observable to someone with whom he contracts–like an insurance company.

A simple story. There are two kind of people, the smart and the stupid, but you can’t tell by looking at them. However, smart people incur a lower cost to buy some “signal”–like a college degree–than the stupid do. A separating equilibrium exists when the productivity difference between the two (and hence their wage difference) is smaller than the dummy’s cost of getting the signal but bigger than the smart person’s cost. Here, the smart person buys the signal, but it doesn’t pay for the dummy to do so. In this separating equilibrium, you can tell if someone is smart by seeing if they have bought the signal (the degree), or not.

Is access to information by itself a credible signal? Here’s where my skepticism about Oster’s argument arises.

In Oster’s telling, if “the messaging came from your doctor or national organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)” it was reliable because back in the day only those people had access to scientific journals and the like. Now anyone can get them online.

But is it the information access alone that matters? That is, does having an MD, or belonging to the AAP or CDC have signaling value, independent of the value of the information they disseminate when they have privileged access to it, or not?

If it doesn’t, then opening access to information doesn’t matter. There was no additional information being added by the signaling credential.

If it does, then opening access to information also won’t matter, because people were relying on the signal of the credential/affiliation of the source of the information to assess its quality.

In brief, there is a correlation-causation issue in Oster’s argument. Yes, opening access and a decline in the authority of the credentialed have occurred in parallel, but that doesn’t mean the former caused the latter. Instead, something has undermined the reliability of credentialing, professional affiliation, and “expertise” as signals.

A likely explanation of this is the Wizard of Oz effect. Toto has pulled back the curtain, and revealed the little scientist twiddling the knobs of the Authority Machine.

COVID in particular caused a huge decline in the public’s evaluation of the signal conveyed by credentials, affiliation, and professional reputation as an “expert.” It is more than ironic that Oster mentions the CDC as a reliable signaler . That agency did more than anything, and its senior personnel–notably the execrable Anthony Fauci–did more than anyone, to bring science generally, and government-approved science in particular, into disrepute.

But the entire medical community of the United States was actively complicit in the coercion and fraud imposed on the public during COVID. By doing so, they shredded the credibility of the signal of being an MD or running a hospital or a medical research institute.

Climate science (and I use the term advisably) has also served to discredit the reputation of scientists generally.

Now it is quite possible that people are overgeneralizing, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater by distrusting science generally in the aftermath of COVID and decades of climate hysteria: if so, that is another crime to lay at the feet of Fauci et al. But I think it is indisputable that trust in scientific authority, especially the authority of government or government-adjacent scientists has crashed in recent years.

So if we are now in a pooling world where people give no special credence to degreed people in white coats, it is because some (previously) prestigious degreed people in white coats were revealed to be big coercive frauds, just like the Wizard of Oz. Now the degree and the white coat signals a charlatan, not of an oracle.

It is against this background that one has to understand the rather broad support for the war on Harvard, and higher education generally. For universities were at the forefront of bad COVID advice, and COVID coercion.

But they just don’t get it. At all. The credentialed class still lives in the dream world in which their credentials confer status, rather than scorn.

Look no further than the hysterical reaction of scientists to Trump’s recent Executive Order mandating adherence to basic scientific standards. You know, extremely controversial things like being “reproducible; transparent; open about error and uncertainty; collaborative and interdisciplinary; sceptical of its findings and assumptions; falsifiable; subject to unbiased peer-review; accepting of negative results as positive outcomes and without conflicts of interest.”

Outrageous, right? Well, some scientists think so. In a cri de coeur published in the Guardian, a group of scientists (including the especially execrable Michael “Hockey Stick Shtick” Mann), claim that the EO will “destroy American science as we know it.”

As if that’s a bad thing! (More on this below).

Rising from her fainting couch and clutching her pearls, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists frets that “It all sounds very non-objectional, but it’s extremely dangerous in its details and subtext.”

How’s that for a post-modern, post-truth view of science, with its emphasis on the textual? What is the subtext of reproducibility, exactly? Falsifiability?

The oh-so-concerned scientists claim that since political appointees will judge adherence to the “gold standard” laid down in the EO, science will be politicized, and hence a big step on the road to Lysenkoism. Yes. They really cite Lysenko as their primary example.

First, a huge reason for the aforementioned loss of trust in science is that it is quite obviously already quite politicized. So what these “scientists” really object to is what politician is in control. They have been in control heretofore, and they have been the ones exercising political influence over the direction of science, mainly through influence over the distribution of grants and control of the peer review process.

May I remind you of Michael Mann’s prominent role in Climategate? What he and his confreres object to is somebody raiding their floating crap game. Methinks they doth protest too much. Their protests wreak of defensiveness about what prying eyes are likely to find.

Hilariously, the article contains an unintentional confession of their politicization by stating “the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet and wreaking havoc on our climate” is a “robust, valid conclusion,” when in fact it is a highly politicized and disputed one, and an opinion that Mann specifically has defended not by legitimate scientific arguments, but by obfuscation, conspiratorial attempts to hide evidence (remember “hide the decline”?) and to prevent publication of contrary findings, and malicious litigation. Almost two decades after the Wegman Report utterly demolished the reliability of his hockey shtick, Mann continues to pose as the exemplar of science. He is utterly shameless.

Second, these “scientists” are clearly quite happy to take money obtained through a political process and through government bodies–they just don’t want to have any accountability to those who provide the money.

Which is just another variant of the Harvard Problem.

As for “destroying American science as we know it,” well the problem is that it is now known to be largely extremely dubious, especially in any field that is remotely political (again COVID, vaccines, and climate being the premier examples). Moreover, it is highly doubtful that government largesse produces anything of value remotely approaching the expense.

Going back to Oster, her basic claim is that there are a lot of bad studies out there. Look at the graphs in the linked William Briggs blog post above. Output–measured by number of publications–has skyrocketed, likely due to (a) a reduction in the cost of research (due to increased computational power in large part), and (b) an increase in funding–supply up, demand up, “output” up. But a likely result of this–indeed, a near certainty–is that the marginal and average value of these publications has gone down, likely substantially. That means a higher number of bad studies, which is the real problem that Oster has identified.

Measuring the output of science by looking at expenditures on scientists is ridiculous. The EO is at most a first step in weeding out wasteful expenditure–expenditure that is also likely to be harmful because it produces misleading or actually false information. Requiring adherence to the most basic scientific standards–indeed, the standards that distinguish science from other endeavors of inquiry–will perhaps reduce the frequency of egregious misconduct perpetrated on the taxpayer’s dime, but no more than that. A lot of bad stuff will continue to flow.

So in a way we are in a pooling equilibrium in science and scientific knowledge–a cesspool. Trust the Science is no longer a signal we can trust because too many scientists have proved untrustworthy. Rather than whining about the unfairness of efforts to restore trust like the Executive Order, scientists should be grateful for them, and look in the mirror, see what others see, and reform themselves.

And if they don’t? Well, if they think it’s bad now, just wait.

Debate is swirling about the cause of the Great Spanish Grid Failure of 2025. One major driver of this debate is an almost crazed desire to shield renewables from any blame. Spanish PM (and Socialist knob) Pedro Sanchez (who barely managed to get elected, perhaps due to a lack of help from Napoleon Dynamite) is especially crazed, given that Spain had become Exhibit A in the greatness of renewables, and that he has been a huge supporter of them.

All sorts of theories have been bandied about. For his part, Pedro is going with Induced Atmospheric Vibration, in which extreme temperature variations caused frequency fluctuations. (Which the grid could not handle, ahem ahem.).

Every electrical grid is a complex, highly interconnected physical system with myriad feedback mechanisms, and is characterized by “tight coupling” (everything must work together in a specific sequence or the system collapses). Indeed, the electricity grid is arguably the most tightly coupled major system in the modern world.

This is the kind of system in which “normal accidents” occur. I’ve written about them several times (hence the “again” in the title).

Normal accidents mean that there are myriad combinations of events, each one of low probability, that can combine to cause a systemic collapse. Though any individual combination may have a low probability, the vast number of possible combinations means that the probability of collapse is non-trivial.

The ex post forensics of the Spanish collapse–if not fatally compromised by politics, which is a big if–will no doubt establish a one-damn-thing-led-to-another causal chain. It is quite possible that not all of the links in this chain will be related to renewables, which no doubt Pedro and others will seize upon to vindicate their baby.

But recall from my earlier discussion of normal accidents that these links are necessary conditions–absence of any one of them would have prevented the collapse. The more links in the chain that are renewables-related means that greater reliance on renewables implies a greater probability of systemic failure.

Perhaps Pedro is right and the original shock was an IAV, which is not itself directly attributable to renewables. But as it stands now, crucial elements in the causal chain definitely appear to include tripping off of two major solar facilities in Spain, and a very small share of power production from spinning resources (due to a high renewables share) that resulted in a deficiency in system inertia. Thus, two major elements of the causal chain likely strongly implicate renewables.

Many “normal accidents” involve causal chains that came as a complete surprise to those reviewing them ex post. This is definitely not the case with respect to the electricity grid and renewables. There have been many Jeremiahs warning of impending doom from over-reliance on them. Indeed, the Spanish grid operator itself sounded the alarm as recently as February.

Will this almost real time validation of the warning lead to a major rethink of the advisability of continuing to push renewables ahead of the complementary investments (batteries, greater transmission capacity, technical mitigants of the inertia issue) necessary to prevent a severe degradation of grid reliability? Will it lead to a sober evaluation of the costs of these complementary investments and/or the cost of degraded reliability, and a recalibration of renewables plans that takes these costs into account?

Given the huge political and ideological investments made in the renewables push, I highly doubt it. Not in Europe, anyways.

In another normal accident-related story, the New York Times did a major tick tock on the Reagan Airport helo-plane collision that resulted in the deaths of 67. Again no doubt due to its massive political and ideological investment, it all but buried a crucial necessary condition. Specifically, the failure of the pilot undergoing an evaluation flight to heed the specific directions of the Warrant Officer performing the evaluation to (a) reduce altitude, and (b) make a left turn. Instead she–and that’s the important detail–continued to fly straight, high, and level right into a descending passenger jet.

If she had followed the WO’s directions, the tragedy would have almost certainly been avoided. Here, human error was a necessary condition. But since that human error was committed by someone of a protected class–a female military officer, one who had been a Biden aide no less, and noted in her obit as being an advocate for sexual harassment victims–the NYT (and myriad other media outlets) downplayed that detail.

The valence of this issue is particularly great in the current environment, where SecDef Peter Hegseth is challenging DEI in the military generally, and the role of women in the military specifically.

The lesson from these episodes? That in these abnormal times, honest assessments of normal accidents are nigh on impossible. Which means that their likelihood will be tragically higher than necessary.

Today the Iberian peninsula returned to a state like that experienced by previous occupants like the Carthaginians or Umayyads: electricity free. Around 1238h local time, the grid crashed in Spain and Portugal: parts of France are affected too.

In brief, frequency crashed suddenly, indicating that generation was insufficient to meet load. And here’s the deal with frequency crashes in renewables dominated systems: when the frequency falls, it can’t get up.

In conventional power systems that rely on thermal and nuclear generation spinning generators absorb most fluctuations through the inertia inherent in large numbers of massive spinning machines. Having other spinning machines on standby is also essential to absorbing shocks. Renewables dominated systems lack this inertia, and have inadequate backup, and are thus extremely brittle: they cannot absorb sharp fluctuations in generation or load, and such shocks can cause the system to collapse.

Today, “can” became “did.”

Perhaps the shock was weather-driven, due to a sudden drop in wind or solar production. Or perhaps it was a sudden increase in load due to a temperature shock: Portugal’s grid operator mentioned “extreme temperature variations” and a “rare atmospheric phenomenon.” That could be interpreted as either a weather driven load shock, or a weather-drive generation shock, or both. Or perhaps a transmission problem cut off power from an important source.

Whatever the initial shock, the ultimate culprit is either directly or indirectly an over-reliance on renewables. Directly in the case that generation volatility inherent in renewables caused the frequency drop. (I am currently working on a project to quantify renewables output in various US markets). Indirectly in the case of a shock to demand that a renewables-heavy system could not absorb due to its inherent lack of inertia.

The grim irony here is that Spain had just bragged that it obtained 100 pct of its power from renewables.

If that’s victory, what does defeat look like? (And that claim not completely honest, by the way: nukes and thermal generators were supplying spinning reserves and other ancillary services).

This was inevitable, just as it is inevitable that playing Russian roulette with an automatic will end badly. In other words, Iberia just found out the consequences of fucking around with renewables.

The question is whether lessons will be learned. Given that this isn’t the first time this has happened, and countries around the world have doubled down on their renewables death ride regardless I am skeptical: these people NEVER admit error. At least the Trump administration is pumping the brakes, though not hard enough for my comfort. But Germany, the UK, Australia, etc., appear to want to pursue the “energy transition” in the worst way. The worst way being a transition to no energy that occurs with probability one in finite time.

It is thus particularly hilarious to read this from Bloomberg. Great timing!

Today’s Green Daily newsletter looks at how the US has become further isolated from other rich nations that are continuing to push towards net zero https://t.co/zHdOhacsYj

— Bloomberg (@business) April 28, 2025

On noes! Not isolation from the lemmings plunging over the renewables cliff! Anything but that!

Yeah, we’ll be enjoying our isolation from you all shivering or sweltering in the dark.

And speaking of the dark, Spain has to black start its grid. You know, just like that modern economic powerhouse Cuba has had to do several times recently.

Good luck black starting in the black of night in a system loaded with solar. Hell, even when the sun is shining solar generation declines throughout the afternoon–just when Spain needs more generation to get things spinning again.

Perhaps you find my schadenfreude in poor taste. Well, after being lectured and hectored for years about how I and others of like mind are evil because of our Cassandra-like warnings about the idiocy and insanity of renewables, I really don’t care Margaret. Just like with COVID, the oh-so-superior bien pensants have declared their moral and intellectual superiority over and over to justify destructive policies regarding climate change and energy, and to beat dissenters into silence and submission. They should feel grateful that demonstration of their manifest inferiority results in only scorn, rather than lampposts. And as for the non-bien pensants who are suffering, well, they have voted for these politicians and enabled these policies. If they feel betrayed or deceived, hopefully bluntly pointing out whom is really to blame will rip the scales from their eyes, even if it doesn’t drive them to fitting ropes to said lampposts.

The estimable Francis Menton has noted repeatedly that the “energy transition” has set loose upon the world a host of innumerates who assure us that they know best when in fact they know less than nothing. And perhaps to coin a phrase, I would add that they are ineconimate, i.e., know nothing about economics. Arrogance and ignorance is a lethal combination. Such people will make us poor, and likely shivering in the dark.

Alas, the mind eating virus has even infected many who were once sensible, or at least periodically sensate or sentient. Such as the FT’s Tim Harford. (I am guessing that the brain eating ameobae at the FT have finally gotten to him.)

Harford wrote that instead of saying “I could’ve had a V8” 40 years ago, we should have said “I could’ve subsidized solar and then all our energy and climate problems would have been already solved.”

In a nutshell, Harford invokes learning by doing, which he refers to as Wright’s Law in honor of an aeronautical engineer in the 1930s who first identified this phenomenon. It has since been documented in numerous other areas, starting probably with Liberty Ships in WWII.

Yes, LBD is a thing. It has been part of the theory of economic growth since at least the 1970s, starting most notably with Paul David’s work on the antebellum cotton spinning industry in the US, and earlier than that even with work by Kenneth Arrow. Robert Lucas taught about it in the economic growth undergraduate (!) course I took as a small child at Chicago in 1981, FFS. (What a privilege and experience it was to be in that course.) I was so taken by the subject that my paper for George Stigler’s economic policy course in 1982 (when he won the Nobel Prize) examined empirically learning by doing at the Springfield and Harpers Ferry Arsenals prior to 1860. It’s hardly a new idea, or an unexplored one.

Alas, there are numerous problems with Harford’s application of LBD/Wright’s Law to solar.

One issue is: who is to say that the highly touted reductions in the cost of solar aren’t due to LBD?

That is, since cumulative output in solar panels has indeed increased dramatically over the years, learning would presumably have taken place and that plausibly accounts for some of the cost reductions. Harford himself says “PV is now so cheap that the question is moot.” So, perhaps LBD did its work.

Empirical evidence would be nice. And at most what Harford is saying is that we could have learned earlier. But if the learning has taken place (as evidenced by it being “so cheap”), albeit belatedly, solar should be taking over the world now, without subsidies, right?

Further, if Harford really means that too little learning has taken place, or it has occurred too late, then that would require (a) externalities/spillovers in learning, (b) the large subsidies to solar (which Harford pooh-poohs) were in fact too small and/or too late to generate the right amount of learning at the right time, and (c) market participants were unaware of the spillovers and did not take obvious steps to internalize them. He provides support for none of these.

With respect to externalities, it is not obvious that LBD effects are largely external to firms. Firms may be able to keep the benefits of their experience largely to themselves. To the extent they are internalized, there is no rationale for subsidies, and competitive firms will treat current production in part as an investment in future lower costs and expand output accordingly without need for government support or protection.

(NB. Non-compete agreements may be one way firms attempt to keep the benefits of experience internalized. I will soon write a post on the idiocy of the FTC’s ban of such agreements.)

I have analyzed LBD in the US shale sector in detail. I have found extensive learning effects, but the evidence for learning spillovers is weak. A firm’s own experience contributes more to its productivity than collective industry experience. This is evidence that learning is internalized.

Further, firms respond rationally to spillovers–by trying to internalize them. Mergers, consolidation, and concentration are means of internalizing learning. I note that consolidation is coming to shale only after more than a decade after the industry dramatically increased output and drilling experience.

In shale, it is plausible that much of the learning is done by service firms who internalize the benefits. Thus, even to the extent that industry experience explains productivity improvement, to the extent that service firms who, well, service the industry are the ones who generate this learning, these industry experience effects may be internalized as well.

That is, just because there is learning by doing, doesn’t necessarily mean that there are learning spillovers of the type that justify subsidies (or tariffs) to increase output (and hence learning). And if there are, there are strong economic incentives to internalize them. And if there aren’t, there’s no justification for subsidization. (David’s work on the cotton industry addressed the question of whether tariffs to stimulate domestic cotton cloth output were justified because of learning spillovers.)

All of these factors undercut the argument that the PV industry learned too little, too late. Where is the evidence that PV is unlike shale, and characterized by large learning spillovers which industry participants did not attempt to internalize through merger or other means? (I would also like to highlight the irony that Harford’s argument would imply that shale, for which there is actual evidence of LBD, should have been subsidized decades ago.)

Harford also has a myopic focus on PV cost, and fails to consider the total cost of renewables, including solar. Like other renewables, solar has intermittency and diffusiveness problems. Moreover, it has large and predictable output fluctuations (e.g., the “duck curve” problem in which solar output plunges when the sun starts to set). Due to these inherent features, useful solar will require beyond revolutionary innovations in battery technology (something Menton has analyzed in detail) that are not anywhere on the horizon.

(I note that battery technology has been the subject of massive research. It has also experienced tremendous growth in cumulative output, which has presumably contributed to learning. Yet it is nowhere even close to being an economical way to address output variability for renewables.)

Word to the wise: we are not going to be able to learn our way out of the sun rising, and more importantly setting. Or out of rain, clouds, and hailstorms. Or out of voracious needs for land to site renewables. Or out of the difficulties of disposing defunct panels.

Solar is part of a complex energy system. The cost of solar panels is actually among the least important aspects of the cost of relying on solar as a source of energy.

And talk about hindsight. Harford laments our failure to gaze into the distant future and foresee with precision the obsession with CO2 and climate change, and supersize solar panel output in time to provide cheap solar power when those obsessions became manifest. Yeah, and I should have invested in Apple when Harford says we should have subsidized solar. Or Bitcoin in 2013.

In sum, Harford’s woulda, coulda, shoulda lament in the FT is yet another example–as if more were needed–of the intellectual vacuity of those hyping the “energy transition.” Harford invokes a respectable economic concept–learning by doing–but does so in a superficial way that betrays a complete lack of understanding of it. And in a way that also betrays a lack of understanding of the real challenges of transforming an extremely complex energy system. Cheap solar panels may be a necessary condition for a cheap transition, but it’s hardly a sufficient one, or indeed, even likely an important one.

Alas, learning by doing doesn’t appear to apply in the writing of newspaper columns.

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously wrote:

By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? (WN IV.ii.15)

This came to mind when reading this Bloomberg article about an “efuels” venture:

At its plant, electrolyzers break down water into hydrogen and oxygen, using electricity generated from nearby wind and solar farms. The hydrogen is then transported to a reactor, where it meets CO2 captured from local refineries, setting off a series of complex chemical reactions aided by patented catalysts. The result is a synthetic fuel with the same chemical properties as its fossil fuel-based cousins.

Yes, this process can create “equally good” fuel as traditional hydrocarbons. But at what cost? Well, they could tell you, but then they’d have to kill you:

How Infinium fits into that future remains to be seen. Schuetzle is tight-lipped about the company’s exact plans. While acknowledging that Infinium’s e-fuel is “more expensive” than conventional fuel, he didn’t disclose the cost difference. 

Probably not the 30x of Adam Smith’s Scottish wine, but evidently a large enough multiple to frighten the horses if disclosed.

Because of this cost differential, this industry will come into existence only as the result of heavy-handed government policy, in the form of subsidies, kneecapping competitors (namely traditional fuels), or more likely both. And echoing Smith, the question becomes “is it a reasonable law or policy to rig they system to favor this technology, merely to encourage the making of efuels?”

Smith did not answer his question because it answered itself. And the same is true of mine.

To repurpose an old joke, the government wants to address climate change in the worst way, and it is. Picking technologies that are feasible but exorbitantly costly in order to achieve a putatively desirable objective is a tried and false modus operandi of government. And this has been especially true of environmental and energy policies in the United States going back to the dawn of the EPA in the early 1970s, and the energy crisis of the mid-to-late 1970s.

I recall the “synfuels” boondoggles of the late-70s, e.g., making oil from shale. No, not the shale revolution you might be thinking of that actually resulted in the economical production of vast amounts of crude oil and natural gas, but taking shale rock in Wyoming with embedded hydrocarbons, subjecting it to energy intensive transformations (redolent of those described above for the efuels project) to produce oil at vastly higher cost than even the then-elevated price of conventionally produced oil. The government spent billions back when a billion actually meant something on this effort (and other synfuel efforts). And every dollar was wasted.

And reading the Bloomberg article demonstrates that the government, in its wisdom, is doing Adam Smith one better: it wants to mandate technologies that don’t really exist (unlike Smith’s “glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls”):

Some regulators seem to agree with that thinking. The EU will phase out government subsidies for e-fuel made with fossil fuel-sourced CO2 by 2041. 

In its place, governments will mandate that efuels be made from CO2 obtained from air capture, a technology that the Bloomberg article describes as “nascent” but is more accurately described as “pie in the sky” (literally, in this case).

This generation of efuels will come into existence only as the result of government diktat, just as the first generation–ethanol and biodiesel–did. And the efuel technological greenhouse forcing is just one small part of an array of mandating of technology choices, all in the name of fighting global warming. The electrification of everything is if anything a more extreme example: the EPA’s mileage mandates (intended to make ICE vehicles uncompetitive with EVs), its emission standards for fossil fuel generation, and the lavish subsidization of inefficient (because diffuse and intermittent) renewables are if anything more egregious than growing the efuels industry like orchids.

But bureaucrats are geniuses, and will only do what’s best, right? Right? To disabuse yourself of such notions, refer back to the synfuels case discussed above. Or consider two more recent examples.

One was the European policy to force the replacement of gasoline engines with diesel ones in passenger vehicles, with the unintended–but totes foreseeable–result of increased particulate emissions (and widespread fraud by automakers to conceal that). Europe had to jettison that policy, so it has substituted another: eliminating ICE vehicles altogether. I’m sure that will work out swell.

Another that I find particularly rich is the sulfur standards for marine fuels introduced in 2020. In another unintended (but again foreseeable) consequence, the resulting reduction in particulate emissions is allegedly contributing to global warming. The irony behind this (compounded by the fact that efuels funder Bill Gates is also a fan of this technology) is demonstrated by serious proposals–recently experimented with–to inject particulates into the atmosphere to, yes, mitigate global warming.

So why do governments repeatedly adopt excessively costly policies to address putative problems? One part of the answer is hubris combined with the knowledge problem: they think they know a lot more than they do. But that’s not the entire answer.

At root, I think the more fundamental driver is public choice-related. Specifically, specific technologies have specific constituencies who would benefit from their subsidization (or other forms of policy support). They exert influence on legislators and bureaucrats to implement policies that favor them. (It is not a coincidence, comrades, that Bill Gates and the like have connections with many of these schemes.)

In contrast the effects of policies such as a carbon tax or cap and trade are much more diffuse and far less predictable because the ultimate outcome would be determined by market processes in a complex system. Adjustments would occur on myriad margins, not just by large firms but billions of individuals. The winners and losers in such a process are unknown, unknowable, and highly diffuse–these are not the concentrated interests that exert disproportionate influence on public policy.

(NB: I am not endorsing a carbon tax or cap and trade. I merely assert that they would be better ways of reducing carbon emissions than subsidizing or mandating technologies to do so. An exercise in the Theory of the Second Worst, if you will.)

In sum, political systems produce bad “solutions” to problems because of the very nature of politics, a nature that Mancur Olson and others pointed out years ago. A nature in which “public choice” means that the public gets screwed.

It is a challenge to identify the worst of the worst Federal agencies, but the Environmental Protection Agency is clearly a heavy favorite.  (The security organs are in a class by themselves.  Here I refer to civil regulatory agencies.)

In a strong effort to cement winning this dubious distinction, last week the EPA announced new tailpipe standards that reduce by 50 percent allowable emissions of CO2 (relative to an already reduced 2026 level).  This is transparently intended to throttle internal combustion engines (ICE) and jam electric vehicles (EVs) down our throats.

The administration is crowing about this:

“Three years ago, I set an ambitious target: that half of all new cars and trucks sold in 2030 would be zero-emission,” Biden said in a statement, adding that the country will meet that goal “and race forward in the years ahead.”

Biden said in a statement issued in his name—written by someone else, of course, because he couldn’t form these sentences by himself.

 In numbers pulled straight from its collective ass, the EPA claims the reduction in CO2 emissions will produce $100 billion in benefits annually, the vast bulk of which are due to chimerical gains from ameliorating climate change. 

As the much-missed Sonic Charm (still mordant on X, but not in the blogosphere) said: all large calculations are wrong.  And that goes exponentially for any calculation involving alleged climate benefits and costs.  Despite all the claims about scientific consensus (which should make you neuralgic in the aftermath of Covid, where almost all claims about The Science flogged by governments and the media have turned out to be the inversion of the truth), estimates of the impact of changes in CO2 emissions on climate are speculative in the extreme.  And those speculations pale in comparison to estimates of the impact of climate changes on welfare, including effects on wealth, income, and living standards.

Climate is a complex system.  Economies are complex systems.  Only fools and the evil have the hubris to claim to know how small changes in one variable will affect outcomes in the interaction between two complex systems. 

Where does the EPA fit here? Both, clearly. 

It is particularly perverse that the EPA is attempting to socially engineer economic outcomes—namely, what vehicles people drive—at a time when the manifold defects of EVs are becoming clearly manifest.  Their performance sucks in multiple ways, including limited range, declining range over time (as batteries age), poor performance in cold weather, and long recharging times (human time is valuable—did the EPA take that into account? I crack myself up sometimes).  Repair costs are astronomical.  And the putative environmental benefits are dubious when the entire vehicle lifecycle is considered, or when the environmental impacts of mining the myriad materials EVs need are taken into account.  Moreover, there are other environmental costs—notably substantial road degradation and substantially increased particulate emissions from tire wear, both due to the great weight of EVs.

Increased awareness of these effects is turning EVs into the Typhoid Marys of automobiles.  Sales are well below what had been projected as consumers have become aware of the clear inferiority of EVs relative to ICE vehicles in doing the things people want—and need—their vehicles to do.  EVs are clogging dealer lots, and they don’t want to buy more.  Resale values are in the tank.  Insurance costs are prohibitive. 

EVs are far more expensive to drive off the lot, and are more expensive to operate, than ICE vehicles.  Is it any wonder why Ford is drastically cutting its production of electric F-150s, and why every other auto manufacturer is hedging on its previous promises to go all electric in the near future?

Two rental car companies—Hertz and Sixt—have recently pulled the plug on their EV fleets (figuratively and literally) because the economics are so atrocious.  The disastrous Hertz plunge into electrics cost the CEO his job.   

EV skeptic Toyota is looking pretty damned smart now, ain’t it?

The inadequacies and defects of EVs are particularly pronounced for anyone who lives outside of a major metro area, and the more exurban or rural you are, the less suitable EVs are for you.  So this regulation represents another front in the war on suburban, exurban, and rural America.

And maybe that is part of the plan.  Recall my post on the war on cars generally.  They want you to walk the road to serfdom, and to jam people into villages (soothingly named “15 minute cities”), just like castellans did in the 11^th century. 

Put differently: from the perspective of the progressive, globalist types who want to eliminate personal mobility (for the proles, that is, not for them), all the aforementioned bugs of EVs are features because they drastically raise the cost of mobility. 

Not to mention the strains that increased EV usage will place on already creaking electricity grids and generation systems.  The interaction between this regulation, and the EPA’s equally (or even more malign) regulations of power plants, poses extreme risk to the nation’s electricity system.

To compound the lies, the administration claims that this will be a boon for the domestic automobile industry:

Biden added that U.S. workers “will lead the world on autos making clean cars and trucks, each stamped ‘Made in America.‘”

As. Fucking.  If.  This regulation will wreak havoc on the existing ICE-centric US auto industry (and the entire supply chain for it), with all of the baleful consequences that will have for capital value and employment.  The US industry has shown little prospect of having a comparative advantage in EV manufacturing.  Note the huge losses Ford has racked up on a per vehicle basis on its electronic version of the stalwart F-150.  GM’s EV operation has also frolicked in pools of red ink. 

Trump claimed that the US auto industry would face a bloodbath due to Chinese manufacturing of cars in Mexico.  That is nothing compared to the ensuing bloodbath—economic bloodbath; it’s a metaphor!—if the EPA guts the ICE industry. (“Guts” is a metaphor too! Can’t assume anything these days, right?)

These regulations are beyond sickeningly perverse.  They represent an extreme exercise of arbitrary power in the service of a delusional ideological agenda embraced by a tiny sliver of the citizenry. 

And when I say extreme, I mean by the standards of rational behavior, not by the standards of the current American administrative state. Sadly, what the EPA is doing has strong parallels in what virtually every other Biden administrative agency is doing—don’t get me started on GiGi’s SEC.  Or the FTC.  Or the DoL. 

Extremism in the exercise of administrative power is definitely a vice.  It is the enemy of personal freedom, personal choice, and economic prosperity. 

Rein in the administrative state?  Is that even possible?  Doubtful.  The only sure remedy is the Carthaginian one.

The Braindead Administration–sorry, sorry, the Brandon–I mean Biden!–Administration (understandable confusion there)–has announced a pause on permitting on new liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals. And how long a pause? How ’bout to a quarter ’til never:

The review will take months and then will be open to public comment which will take further time, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters in a teleconference.

This policy, if one can dignify it with such an appellation, is a sop to the ecoloonies upon whom the administration depends for support:

The growth [in LNG exports] has set off protests from environmentalists, part of Biden’s base. Activists say new LNG projects can harm local communities with pollution, lock in global reliance on fossil fuels for decades, and lead to emissions from burning gas and from leaks of the powerful greenhouse gas methane.

In brief, the administration (regime, really) wants to kneecap the remarkable energy revolution of the past 20 years, which has seen technological innovations that have turned the US from a nation worried about where its next MMBTU would come from to a natural gas production powerhouse, and which have allowed others to share in its bounty with the world.

But you see, to the ecoloonies that’s the bad news. Really bad. Climate change, dontcha know.

But even evaluated on those (dubious) terms, the policy is demented. Because the ecoloonies don’t understand basic economics. They are myopic, linear thinkers who are incapable of analyzing the ultimate impact of their policy.

In their thinking, less LNG exports from the US equals less fossil fuel consumption equals lowers carbon emissions equals saving the polar bears. Even overlooking the (again dubious) last step in the logical chain (hey, I’m a a generous guy) the analysis is flawed. Where it definitely breaks down is the third, and arguably the second, steps.

Yes, reducing US natural gas output (by choking one source of demand) will reduce world natural gas production. But the resulting higher world price will induce higher output by competing producers (e.g., Qatar, Australia, PNG, Africa, etc.), resulting in a net decline in world gas production smaller than the decline in US production–and it is world production that matters when considering “well mixed” GHGs. Further, some production that would have otherwise been exported will be consumed domestically instead, meaning that a given decline in exports does not result in an equal decline in production.

But more importantly, the rise in the price of gas relative to other fuels–notably coal–will induce substitution towards those fuels. Since those fuels are more carbon intensive than natural gas, it is possible, and indeed likely, that the net effect of the policy would be to increase the output of GHGs.

So at the very least, the amount of reduction in GHGs resulting from this policy will be far smaller than the reduction in US LNG exports that it will cause, and plausibly will result in an increase of GHGs.

Well played! All pain, no gain!

But the economic idiocy of ecoloonies is an old story by now. Perhaps you’ve read of the recent finding that the ban on “single use” plastic bags in New Jersey led to a tripling of consumer plastics consumption because of the substitution effects that the ban induced. Again, myopic, linear, one-step ahead thinking led to a policy that produced perverse results.

The foregoing analysis focuses on only one dimension–GHG output. But one also has to consider the cost incurred to achieve any GHG gains (if there are any, that is). But trade-offs (costs vs. benefits) is not something that ecoloonies do. They are monomaniacs, and monomaniacs don’t evaluate trade-offs.

This policy will also shtup European allies, whom in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine Biden promised would receive bountiful supplies of US gas.

To paraphrase Animal House: “You fucked up, Europe! You trusted Biden!”

The administration pinky swears that

the pause would not hurt allies, saying the plan will come with exemptions for national security should they need more LNG.

Yeah, because it’s just like turning the faucet on and off, right?

If you believe what they say, you are truly an idiot and probably believe they’ll respect you in the morning.

But none of this should be a surprise. After all, this is an administration that is infested with members of the “elite,” and which counts on the “elite” for its support. According to a recent Rasmussen poll:

An astonishing 77% of the Elites – including nearly 90% of the Elites who graduated from the top universities – favor rationing energy, gas, and meat to combat climate change. Among all Americans, 63% oppose rationing.

Face it. They hate your guts and want you to suffer. This “pause” on LNG exports is just another manifestation of their hatred.

In 2010, along with my UH colleagues Victor Flatt and Praveen Kumar, I taught what I believe was the first academic carbon trading course in the world. My lectures in the course related to the economic challenges of creating traded commodities, specifically the challenges of merely defining what the commodity is and monitoring adherence to the standards so established.

Now, this may seem trivial, but even something like “wheat” poses challenges due to heterogeneity related to quality (even within a given variety, such as soft red winter wheat) and monitoring whether the wheat traded under a contract adhered to the relevant terms agreed to by the parties. Indeed, as I noted in an early article of mine, the genesis and early development of commodity exchanges like the Chicago Board of Trade and the Liverpool Cotton Exchange was not driven by the desire to trade futures: these were cooperative, private efforts to define property rights and to create a mechanism to standardize commodities and to adjudicate contractual disputes primarily over quality. Only after these challenges were met was it possible to trade futures. Standards (and their enforcement) are obviously a necessary condition for trading standardized instruments like futures.

The major intended takeaway from my lectures in 2010-11 was that the problems of standard definition and especially standard enforcement were even more daunting in carbon than in traditional commodities like wheat or cotton, and that this was especially true with respect to carbon offsets–things like contracts to plant trees to capture carbon.

How do you define what is being bought and sold? How do you monitor whether the offset contracted for performs as agreed? How do you address contract performance failures? The Chicago Board of Trade struggled for years to overcome these issues in wheat and corn and oats in the post-Civil War era, even though the trade was relatively geographically concentrated, the contracts were of relatively short duration (typically for a single consignment), and the commodity was relatively simple.

All of these challenges are far greater for carbon, let alone for offsets. Sources of carbon emissions are numerous and diffuse and costly to monitor. With respect to offsets, they are highly heterogeneous; have very long lives; require continuous investment and upkeep; and have highly unpredictable performance (e.g., the forest that you plant may burn down, or be ravaged by insects). These contracts are far more complex than a deal to buy 10,000 bushels of SRW winter wheat for delivery in Chicago next month. Moreover, many offsets are located in countries with weak–and sometimes close to non-existent–legal systems.

Furthermore, the incentives of the parties to these agreements can be perverse, especially for “voluntary” offsets. A buyer who pumps its ESG score by purchasing offsets that turn out not to perform seldom suffers serious adverse consequences (although there is some backlash against “greenwashing”), and the seller has a strong incentive to collect the cash and not make the necessary expenditures to ensure that the offset performs as promised.

I taught the class in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, and I suggested that there were a lot of similarities between offsets and the kinds of deals that wreaked havoc in the banking system in 2008-2009, where bankers paid their bonuses upfront based on imagined profits predicted by highly speculative models to be realized over several years churned out garbage securities.

In 2010 I was therefore extremely skeptical about the viability of markets for offsets. And the defects that I talked about have been increasingly recognized in the last year or so.

I believe that the actions of Shell during the last week represent an authoritative recognition that these predictable–and predicted–problems have come to pass. Like other (especially European) energy firms. Shell made ambitious carbon reduction pledges that it intended to meet largely through the use of offsets. But reality has reared its ugly head, and Shell is all but abandoning this strategy. Other companies (e.g., Microsoft) say that they are still committed, but if they are even remotely interested in spending their shareholders’ money wisely, they will eventually have the same come to Jesus moment as Shell.

A Shell-funded mangrove restoration project in Senegal (Bloomberg).

This represents another grievous blow to the ambitions of the Net Zero fanatics. Offsets are a major component of Net Zero plans. Renewables are another part–and reality is catching up with that too (as the travails of Danish renewables developer Orsted and German turbine manufacturer Siemens demonstrate).

But will the fanatics be deterred? Alas, it appears not. Indeed, they appear to be doubling down, as illustrated by lunatics like Michael Gove:

Michael Gove has insisted the UK needs 'big, hairy, audacious' environmental goals such as the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, during a live debate at #ftweekendfestival https://t.co/jD1bEkY8c0

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) September 2, 2023

Net Zero and the policies intended to bring it about–including extensive reliance on renewables and offsets–are a guaranteed recipe for an impoverished future. This was predictable–and predicted–more than a decade ago. But when will the madness end? I am guessing not before these policies cause economic catastrophe.

Ask him/her (but please inquire about pronouns first!) whether the Hunga Tonga eruption accounts for a significant proportion of this summer’s supposedly historically high temperatures. This puts the warmist on the horns of a dilemma a la the famous meme:

The likely answer you’ll get is no, because the warmist desperately wants to attribute this year’s weather to anthropogenic causes. (NB: weather is climate when it advances their narrative, but isn’t when it doesn’t.). Suggesting a natural driver of warm temperatures this year would undercut that narrative.

But! Unlike terrestrial volcanoes which have an often powerful cooling effect (due to their release of sun reflecting aerosols, especially H2SO4), Hunga Tonga is an undersea volcano: its eruption resulted in the release of substantial quantities of water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas.

Therefore, denying the impact of Hunga Tonga on 2023 summer temperatures is. . . wait for it . . . CLIMATE DENIAL! Because this would entail denying that greenhouse gasses materially impact global temperatures.

So if they say “No!” then point at them like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and scream “DENIER!”

On a more serious note, Hunga Tonga does seem to provide a fairly clean natural experiment to measure the climate sensitivity coefficient empirically in a way that does take into account feedbacks. If the amount of water vapor released into the atmosphere can be measured with some accuracy, the forcing can be calculated. Combining this with the measured temperature anomaly is an empirical measure of sensitivity that does not require a layer cake of modeling assumptions about feedback.

But that’s a job for scientists. In the meantime, you can entertain yourself by putting warmists on the hot seat.