Latest Revisions Show Stronger Growth of both Real and Nominal GDP

The third estimate of Q3 2012 US GDP came out on December 20, just as the holiday season was in full swing and as the limited public appetite for economic news was focused on the fiscal cliff. The report deserved more notice than it got. The Bureau of Economic Analysis revised its estimate of real GDP growth upward to a respectable 3.1 percent from the 2.7 percent of the second estimate, which came out in November. The latest estimate looked even better set against the anemic 2.0 percent reported in October’s advance estimate. The latest report also revised the estimate for nominal GDP growth upward to 5.9 percent, the fastest in almost four years. >>>Read more

Follow this link to view or download a classroom-ready slideshow with charts and analysis of all the latest GDP and NGDP data

Classroom Debate Topic: Should We Keep the Charitable Deduction or Scrap It?

Here's a great topic for a debate that will fit in either your micro class (altruism, poverty, preferences) or your macro class (tax reform, fiscal cliff): What should we do about the charitable deduction? Keep it or scrap it?

Yale University's Robert J. Shiller has just weighed in with a New York Times op-ed titled "Please Don't Mess with the Charitable Deduction." He defends the deduction as an essential part of the great American tradition of giving.

Earlier this year I took the opposite position in a pair of posts. (Part 1 and Part 2). I argued that the popularity of the charitable deduction rests on a set of false premises. In reality, the deduction is best viewed not as a tax expenditure, and that not more than a third of the giving that qualifies for the deduction goes to truly charitable purposes. Furthermore, warnings that the nonprofit sector would face collapse without the charitable deduction are greatly exaggerated, if not altogether baseless.

What do your students think? Using these opposing pieces as a starting point, put them to work doing their own research and then let them try out their debating skills.

US CPI Drops Sharply in November; Inflation Expectations Remain Well Anchored

U.S. Consumer price inflation, which has been unusually volatile over the past year, turned sharply negative in November. According to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the all-items CPI fell at an annual rate of 3.7 percent during the month of November. That was the most rapid rate of decrease since the worst months of recession in late 2008.

Much of the recent volatility in the CPI has come from the energy sector, particularly gasoline. Consumer inflation spiked at the end of the summer when gasoline prices rose 8.6 percent in August and 6.7 percent in September. Gas prices then fell by 0.5 percent in October and by 6.9 percent in November. >>>Read More

Follow this link to view or download a classroom-ready slideshow with charts of the latest CPI data

Michael Levi talks to James Stafford about Falling Oil Prices, the Shale Boom, and Carbon Pricing

In this exclusive interview, Oilprice.com publisher James Stafford talks with energy security expert Michael Levi, the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), discusses. The interview was originally posted on Oilprice.com and is reproduced here with permission.

There’s been plenty of talk about potentially radical US foreign policy changes as a result of the shale boom. While one shouldn’t expect any dramatic US foreign policy move away from the Middle East, factors are influencing a greater focus on Asia. Only one thing is certain in this transforming world: The shale boom is real and the implications are many and difficult to predict.

In an exclusive interview with Oilprice.com publisher James Stafford, energy security expert Michael Levi, the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), discusses:  

•    Why oil price stability is still all about the Middle East
•    Why the oil and gas industry is heading towards transformation
•    Why oil prices could drop substantially
•    Why the US shale boom is real
•    Why the shale oil boom won’t lead to major US foreign policy changes
•    Why Keystone XL is pretty much non-essential
•    Why we won’t see any radical change in renewables in the next five years
•    The carbon pricing remains the best way to achieve meaningful results on climate change


Oilprice.com: What is the number one threat to energy security today?

Michael Levi: I am not a huge fan of using the word 'energy security' because it means different things to different people, and that makes it very easy for people to talk past each other. What I would say the number one risk to the stability of global oil prices--which can have big economic and security ramifications--is the potential for major conflict in the Middle East and instability in oil-producing countries.

Oilprice.com: Are there any other regions that have this same destabilizing potential?

Michael Levi: The Middle East is always the place where focus is rightly drawn, because it is the place where you can have outsized disruptions. One of the things that I tend to emphasize is the need to focus and prioritize concerns, and it is very easy to get [drawn into] every 100,000 or 200,000-barrel-a- day change somewhere in the world that might have big consequences for one particular country, but does not necessarily have outsized global consequences or national consequences that policymakers need to think about. If I spend my time trying to think through what policymakers should be paying attention to, my focus, when it comes to disruptions to the oil system, tends to come back to the Middle East.

Oilprice.com: The UK-based think tank Chatham House has published a new report seeking to demonstrate how the oil and gas industry is under significant pressure that will lead to a transformation. How do you see a potential transformation of the industry taking shape?

Michael Levi: I think it is important to start with a distinction, particularly one that is important in the US: the oil and gas sectors, to some extent, are becoming two genuinely separate sectors, rather than one integrated one.

In the past, most natural gas was produced as associated gas together with oil, and that made oil and gas as a single entity very clear, something that made a lot of sense. Now you have a lot of non-associated gas; gas being produced separately, often by companies that do not engage in much oil production. They really have distinct challenges and opportunities, and as a result, different sets of pressures.

For the natural gas industry, at least in the US, the big challenges are low prices in the glut of gas on the market that is not being matched by demand. A big part of this is certainly idiosyncratic; there are people who are drilling to hold leases and cash flow, and they are doing that en masse, which is a problem for the whole industry.

At the same time, they have not been able to coalesce around the efforts to boost demand.

The oil world is a completely different story and you have pressures from different directions right now. On the one hand, you have a surge in opportunities for development in countries where geopolitical risks are relatively low. In the US, Canada, and Brazil you may need to still worry about regulatory changes, but you are not worried that terrorists will come and capture your workers.

Related Article: Shale Gas Will be the Next Bubble to Pop - An Interview with Arthur Berman

At the same time, for a lot of the companies, that is not enough and they are still looking globally, and they still face challenges from nationalism and unstable regimes. On top of that, they are entering a period in which there is probably more uncertainty in prices than there has been for a long time. You have this collision of growth and supply from outside OPEC, together with potential Iraqi growth and substantial investment from within OPEC that really opens up the possibility of a big, if temporary, price drop in the next five or so years. That complicates the outlook for companies, on top of everything else.

Oilprice.com: Really? You believe that prices could drop in the future?

Michael Levi: I think prices could drop substantially. If you look at the most recent IEA report or the most recent OPEC outlook, you see that if all currently planned investment goes ahead, then at prices resembling current ones, supply would greatly outstrip demand.

Either countries will pull back with production and investment in OPEC and allow supply to match demand at relatively high prices--and I think that is the most likely outcome--or they will not be able to decide who has to pull back, and there will be an excess of supply on the market that pushes prices down quickly. That is self-correcting, because low prices cannot sustain the big gains in North American production. But you can still have temporarily low prices that really shake things up for some producers, depending on the properties of their investment.

Oilprice.com: Speaking of the IEA report, predictions that the US could pass Saudi Arabia to become the world's largest oil producer by 2017 have come under a lot of criticism. What do you think of the IEA’s predictive mathematics?

Michael Levi: Predictions are always wrong in one way or another, and I am not going to second-guess those who have thought to a much greater depth in these analyses. There is a range of estimates out there, but the IEA ones are relatively modest.

The bigger issue is: what are the implications? Everyone likes to talk about how their projections show that the world is being reborn anew, and will be fundamentally different from what it was in the past.

There is a temptation to oversell, and I think it is reasonable that people react negatively to efforts to oversell the consequences of the changes going on in energy.

Oilprice.com: What are your views on the shale boom? Do you believe it can live up to the hype?

Michael Levi: It depends on what hype we are talking about. I think the shale boom is for real. I think that a lot of the criticism that we do not know long-term production rates and so on are important to look at. But even if you assume that returns on wells are substantially lower than most people think they are right now, our projected output is still quite high, because producers’ economics are dependent primarily on what happens in first few years after they drill. We know roughly what happens in the first years after producers drill.

The hype that says that this will all replace coal without any government intervention, gas prices will be $3 forever, or that we will be the dominant exporter in the world, are out of contact with reality. We have temporarily depressed prices, they will rise a bit. Hype always has the ability and the tendency to outstrip reality, but in this case, reality is pretty radical itself.

Oilprice.com: Could the shale boom lead to a change in US foreign policy priorities, away from the Middle East?

Michael Levi: An economic analyst will typically tell you that the US shale boom will fundamentally change US vulnerability to energy events in the Middle East. But not every policymaker listens to their economic advisors.

I do not think that US policymakers will step back and say, 'We need to revisit our strategy in the world, because of this oil boom.' I do think that what is happening will weigh on ongoing
discussions that already exist about future US priorities.

The most obvious one is the discussion from the US Department of Defense over how much to shift from the Middle East to Asia. Within that existing debate, I have no doubt that people who want to see more of a shift will emphasize what is happening in US energy. I think it will have some influence, but ultimately, I do not see a radical change as being likely.

Oilprice.com: Now that Barack Obama has won a second term, what do you see happening with the Keystone XL Pipeline? Will it go ahead? Is it essential to US energy security?

Related Article: Polluters Must Pay In 'The New Era Of Responsibility': Jeffrey Sachs

Michael Levi: I made a prediction once on the Keystone XL Pipeline, so I have lost my license to make future predictions. The Keystone XL Pipeline is non-essential to US energy security; it is also not disastrous to climate change. It has been overblown by both sides in the debate. It is one pipeline that would carry a modest, but non-trivial amount of crude, and that would help create economic incentives to increase production, again, by a modest but not earth-shattering amount.

The more fundamental question is whether the US is going to let economically-rational infrastructure go ahead. I think if you replicate a pattern like the one that some would like to see for Keystone and you start blocking pipelines all over the place, then that becomes a larger economic problem.

In the end, will it make the US more secure in any meaningful way? I doubt it. Prices for Canadian oil rose more during the Libya conflict than the prices for Brent Crude, or WTI. It is hard to say that Canada gives the US potentially more security aside from in extreme circumstances.

Oilprice.com: One would have thought that the natural gas boom would be good for the environment, but the cheap gas prices have also hit coal prices, and we are seeing Europe sucking up unused US coal. Is this a trend we can expect to continue?

Michael Levi: I think it is a trend we can expect to continue to some extent, particularly if Europe does not make stronger moves away from coal. The state of our knowledge about global coal markets is pathetic. All we can say right now is, directionally, more gas in the US means cheaper coal, which leads to more exports, but we are still far from being able to really put quantitative meat on those bones, and making some meaningful net assessment.

Oilprice.com: What do you believe is the best way to achieve meaningful results on climate change? How much of an influence will Hurricane Sandy have on this debate?

Michael Levi: I think Hurricane Sandy has put the debates into a prominent place, which is essential to moving it forward.

Ultimately, I still believe that carbon pricing in one form or another is essential to achieving deep cuts in economically-sensible ways. That can come in the form of a tax, resurgent cap and trade, or clean energy standard; there are all sorts of ways to do carbon pricing. In the long haul, I think you come back to that, particularly if you care about doing this is an economically efficient way. [Italics added]
 
Oilprice.com: What changes in public interest on climate change have you noticed over the years? Do you think that at this rate climate change will ever gain the support it needs to be effectively tackled?

Michael Levi: Ever is a long time. I think we are back in a building phase. If you look at the first decade of this century, you had a solid 5 or 6 years that was really about building broad support for action on climate change, about test driving different approaches, and by the time you got to 2008, there was actually pretty broad support, particularly in the Senate for action on climate change. You had 2 presidential candidates competing to see who had the best climate strategy. Then you had the financial crises. You had intense polarization. You had a deep, deep recession, and climate action became a much lower priority.

A lot of people got used to saying in early 2009 that we would come back to climate change when the economy got better. The only mistake that people made in that analysis was thinking that that was only a couple years off. It turns out that it is even further off.

One of the emerging barriers to action on climate change is that doing things to exploit oil and gas have been set up as 100% incompatible with serious efforts to deal with climate change. That stark choice makes it very difficult to build coalitions that will move anything forward. We have actually moved in the last couple of years into a considerably more difficult situation than we were even 4 years ago, when a candidate like John McCain could say, 'I support oil and gas production, and I support a strong cap and trade system.' The president talks about things like that today, but gets considerably weaker support for it, and that ultimately needs to change.

Oilprice.com: How can this change?

Michael Levi: I have a book out next spring, talking about this. The first step is for each side to recognize that accepting a lot of what his opponents want will not fatally undermine what it wants. Oil and gas will need to understand that serious action on climate change will not fundamentally undermine what they want to accomplish in the next decade or two. People who want to take action on climate change need to fundamentally understand that expanding access to US oil and gas production will not fatally undermine their own goals. Compromise is not an oxymoron.

The second thing that needs to happen is there needs to be some rebuilding of trust. That is difficult; you do not just do it by hanging out more at the bar. You need to do small deals that show that you can work together.

You can think of all sorts of ideas; you could tie royalties from increased oil and gas production to financial support for renewable energy. You could provide support for carbon capture and storage demonstrations that support enhanced oil recovery. You can work to improve environmental permitting so it is easier to build pipelines and power lines that take renewable energy to places where they can be used.

There are a host of things that are small (but not trivial) win-wins that might help rebuild confidence. Ultimately, both sides need to accept that a political deal is better than trying to go for an outright win.

Oilprice.com: What role do you see renewable energy playing in the future?

Michael Levi: In the near future, renewable is cost-competitive in niches, but it is still not broadly competitive in the US economy. It has a potential to be.

Renewables have cost and intermittency challenges. There is important progress that is being made in renewable energy. I think a lot of that story has been buried in the oil and gas discussion in the last couple of years, but we are seeing record-low prices across the board, and we are seeing record-high deployments. It is important to remember that we still need government support in all these areas if you actually want to see costs come down meaningfully.

Oilprice.com: How do you define the ‘near future’?

Michael Levi: I do not see a radical change in the relative price of renewable energy and fossil fuels in the next 5 years. Ten years is more difficult to predict, but I would be skeptical. When you start to look ahead one or two decades, particularly when you add in policy uncertainty, it is very difficult to predict what will happen.

Oilprice.com: Can the US afford to turn its back on nuclear energy?

Michael Levi: If you mean by turning its back, you mean a phasing-out of nuclear energy, I do not think that is sensible to do. Nuclear energy provides 20% of our electricity, and the marginal cost of production is extremely low for existing power plants. The real question is can the US afford to turn its back on nuclear in the future as a source of zero-carbon energy growth? The answer is: we do not know, because we do not know what the alternatives will be, or if there will be significant alternatives. So you want to keep nuclear alive as an option; that means trying to figure out ways to bring down costs, particularly financing costs. It means looking for ways to resolve, or at least partly resolve the waste questions, and it means looking for ways to potentially innovate on small modular reactors to provide a different economic model and a different construction model for nuclear power.

Green Illusions: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Alternative Energy

Are solar, wind, and other alternatives the magic bullets that will solve the world’s environmental and energy problems? Take a closer look, says Ozzie Zehner in Green Illusions . Zehner not only argues that green energy has technological, environmental and economic limits, but also that without an appropriate policy context, some forms of alternative energy could do more harm than good.

The dirty secrets of clean energy

The first part of Zehner’s book—by far the best—is devoted to explaining why neither photovoltaic, nor wind, nor biomass, nor any of the other alternatives to fossil fuels will be able to deliver a future of abundant, cheap, clean energy. Chapter by chapter, he brings out the environmental and economic limitations of each technology. Among the highlights— >>>Read more

US Unemployment Drops to 7.7 Percent, Lowest Since January 2009; Payroll Jobs Continue Steady Rise

The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.7 percent in November, according to today’s data release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was down 0.2 percent since October, and was the lowest rate reported since January 2009. Payroll jobs increased by 146,000 in the month, continuing a moderate but steady trend.

The unemployment rate is the ratio of unemployed persons to the civilian labor force, based on a monthly survey of households. Both the numerator and denominator of the ratio decreased in November. The ratio fell because the number of unemployed persons decreased by more than the number of the employed. Both the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio decreased slightly, with both figures returning to the values reported in September. >>>Read more

How Can We Tell if Fiscal Policy is Sustainable? Three Views

As negotiations over fiscal policy heat up, one thing nearly everyone agrees on is that U.S. fiscal policy should be sustainable. The trouble is, there are sharp disagreements about just what sustainability means. This post explores three different meanings of fiscal policy sustainability and explores their significance for current budget debates.

Sustainability as solvency

 The first, and simplest, meaning of sustainability makes it a synonym for solvency. The proposition that we do not have to worry about debts and deficits because the government can never “run out of money” has become a mantra among followers of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). >>>Read more

Follow this link to view or download a classroom-ready slideshow with simulations of debt dynamics under various fiscal policy assumptions

Recommended for your Classroom Discussion of the Fiscal Cliff: Lee Arnold’s New Video on the Debt and Deficit

This new video from Lee Arnold is a great tool to spark a classroom discussion on the budget negotiations underway as the United States approaches the “fiscal cliff.” It uses great animated graphics and a polished voice-over to lay out the way that the CBO baseline revenue projections would interact with scheduled changes in spending to determine the future course of the debt and deficit.

Many students will be surprised to find that the CBO baseline projections produce future budget surpluses that would bring the debt down to nothing over time. Economists familiar with the CBO methodology will understand how this happens. The projections are based on the assumptions that all laws on the book as of late 2012 will come into force without further changes.

Of course, the whole debate over the fiscal cliff centers on what changes are likely to be made or not to be made—will scheduled across-the-board defense and nondefense spending cuts be allowed to happen? Will all of the Bush tax cuts, along with more recent temporary payroll tax cuts, expire on schedule? Will Congress again enact legislation limiting the impact of the alternative minimum tax? Will scheduled cuts in Medicare reimbursements come into force, or will Congress again pass “doc fix” legislation postponing them? You will have to watch your favorite news site for daily updates on the outcome of negotiations to learn the answers to these questions. Although the video can’t give the answers, it does provide the framework you need to see the impacts of these and other possible changes to current legislation.

Another strong point of the video is the way it brings out the importance of Medicare spending for the future budget. Arnold shows that without fundamental changes to the health care system, Medicare will account for a greater and greater share of the federal spending over time. By comparison, the social security system is much more under control.

There are a few things I would spin differently or emphasize differently than Arnold does. For one thing, I would explain a little more carefully just what items are included in and excluded from the CBO baseline projection, and compare it with alternative fiscal scenarios that produce more pessimistic fiscal projections. Tax reform is another topic that I would have liked to see discussed in more detail. The emphasis in this video is on projections of total revenue, not on changes that could, or should be made to broaden the tax base and modify marginal tax rates to make the system more efficient. Maybe that will be the topic of another video. There are 50 videos in all on Arnold'’s site, both micro and macro, and he seems to be adding new ones all the time.

US CPI Data: Late Summer Inflation Spike Ends in October; Deflation Risk Nosedives on Election Results

U.S. inflation data released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that a two-month spike in headline inflation seems to have run its course. Both headline and core inflation measures are now close to or below the Fed’s 2 percent target. In a related development, the Atlanta Fed reports that deflation probabilities have nosedived since President Obama won re-election earlier this month.

The headline all-items CPI increased at an annual rate of just 1.81 percent in October, down from 7.48 percent in August and 7.06 percent in September. Most of the decrease came from a drop in energy prices, which had soared in the previous two months. New and used car prices also fell. Increases in the prices of food and apparel partly offset the decreases in energy and vehicles.

Measures of underlying inflation, which had not followed the late-summer spike of the all-items CPI, remained moderate.>>>Read more

Follow this link to view or download a classroom-ready slideshow with charts of all the latest US inflation data

Austerity Bomb? Don't Panic. Keep Your Eyes on Real Fiscal Reform

Austerity bomb” is the metaphor of the day. First introduced by Brian Beutler, it has now been endorsed by Paul Krugman as a replacement for “fiscal cliff.” Both are bad metaphors. They invite us to think that the most important thing on the national agenda is to avoid the cliff or defuse the bomb before disaster strikes. Instead, we need to stay calm keep our eyes on the prize, that is, on real reform of our muddled fiscal policy. Unless we are willing to look beyond what happens at the end of the year, we risk being panicked into a deal that will leave us in an even worse fiscal mess than we are in now. Here are the three long-term considerations that should be at the center of budget negotiations: >>>Read More

October Data Show Stronger Labor Market as Workers Return and Part-Time Work Falls

The October jobs figures released today by the BLS showed a stronger U.S. labor market. The unemployment rate edged up by 0.08 percentage points, just enough to raise the headline rate from 7.8 to 7.9 percent. However, a look at the underlying data showed that the uptick in the headline rate was a “good” increase of the kind that we often see  as previously discouraged workers return to a strengthening labor market.

The labor force increased by 578,000 workers in October. The number of employed persons, as measured by the household survey from which these data come, increased by 410,000.>>>Read more

Follow this link to view or download a classroom-ready slideshow with charts of the latest jobs data

Bringing Hurricane Sandy into your Econonomics Class: Links on Price Gouging and Climate Change

Hurricane Sandy has dominated the news this week. How can you tie the storm into your econ class? Here are some links that should help.

• In this post on Slate, Matthew Yglesias gives a brilliant explanation of why "price gouging" laws make it harder to prepare for and respond to natural disasters.
• Writing for the blog of the Council for Foreign Relations, Michael Levi reminds us that measures to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere do not have immediate effect. Because of climate inertia, they take decades to affect air temperatures and even longer to affect ocean levels. Reducing methane emissions works a little faster, but not tomorrow. In short, don't expect measures to mitigate climate change to stop storms like Sandy. Investment in more resilient infrastructure has to be part of the package.
• In "Playing God," Written for Foreign Policy, economists Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman write that with efforts to halt climate change on life support, scientists are looking at some radical geoengineering options to save our planet. But could the cure be worse than the disease?

Is Wall Street’s Thirst for Water Really a Dire Threat? Nonsense, Says David Zetland

Journalist Frederick Kaufman made a few waves last week with an article on water markets in Nature and a related interview in Wired. His cautionary story envisions a global water derivatives market that would allow speculators to rake in billions while poor farmers, priced out of the market, would be unable to irrigate their crops. Some typical passages:

Making money come out of the tap means that fresh water must be given a price anywhere it is traded—a global price that can be arbitraged across the continents. Those in Mumbai or midtown Manhattan who understand the increasing value of water in the world economy will speculate on this undervalued ‘asset’, and their investments will drive up the cost everywhere (Nature)

The implications are dire: the destruction of aquatic ecosystems, the extinction of innumerable species and the risk of regional and international conflicts—the much-dreaded  ’water wars’  of the twenty-first century.

Does any of this make sense? Not much, says water economist David Zetland. He explains how little foundation there is for Kaufman’s dire vision. . . >>> Read more

US Q3 GDP: Good News in the Headline but Bad News in the Details

We all breathed a sigh of relief when yesterday’s advance estimate of U.S. Q3 GDP showed the economy growing at an annual rate of 2 percent. In normal times, 2 percent would be a disappointment; it is a sign of how far we are from normal that we can only think how much worse it could have been.

In fact, it could yet be worse. The advance estimate of real GDP is notoriously subject to revision. The BEA tells us that the average revision, without regard to sign, is 1.3 percentage points from the advance to the latest estimate. A downward revision of no more than average size would put us at 0.7 percent growth, well below the anemic 1.3 percent reported in the third estimate for Q2. Of course, an upward revision is, statistically, equally likely, so let’s hope for the best.

Even as we accept 2 percent growth with relief, there are some discouraging details deeper in the tables that the BEA attaches to its press release. >>>Read more

Follow this link to view or download a classroom-ready slideshow with charts of the latest GDP data

Is China Still a Currency Manipulator?

“On day one, I will label them a currency manipulator.” So spoke Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s Presidential debate, threatening, as he has innumerable times, to hit China with new tariffs if it doesn’t stop using a cheap yuan to steal U.S. jobs. But does the label still fit?

We all know the story by heart. Without intervention by China's central bank, market forces would push the value of the yuan higher, making it easier for U.S. producers to compete with Chinese goods. Instead, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) manipulates the exchange rate by making massive purchases of U.S. dollars for its foreign exchange reserves. The result: huge current account surpluses that enrich China’s politically powerful exporters at the expense of American workers. If we just had a president with the courage to tell them to stop, we could get America moving again.
Unfortunately, although it still sounds great in a stump speech, the story may be out of date. Let’s look at it piece by piece. >>>Read more

Why do we Need Government to Tell Business to be Energy Efficient?

In response to my interview "The Myth of Affordable Energy," my friend and fellow blogger Gary Alexander asks a question that is so good that I would like to take a separate post to answer it.

Gary asks:

Ed, I need your clarification on a comment you made in the opening section, in which you said that the increase in energy efficiency in the U.S. is "pretty remarkable, considering that we haven’t really had a policy environment that is supportive of efficiency. Think what we could do if we did."

My question: Isn't efficiency (getting more done with the same or less) a constant goal of most businesses? Why would these businesses need an official federal government policy to direct this efficiency from afar? Nearly every technology has increased efficiency and/or lowered cost over time, in the natural course of conducting business in a cost-conscious manner. Or am I missing something?

Excellent question.

The goal of businesses is to make a profit. Part of their strategy for doing that is to adjust their input mix to minimize the total cost of producing their product. I that sense, yes, they are constantly pursuing the goal of efficiency and the government does not need to nudge them to do so.

However, businesses have no inherent goal to economize on any one input. For example, if market prices signal that plastic is cheap and steel is expensive, an automaker will substitute plastic bumpers, door handles, and so on for steel. Vice-versa if plastic is expensive. An automaker has no inherent goal of reducing its use of steel, just reducing costs.

What we need, then, are not government policies that tell businesses to act efficiency in response to market prices. What we need are policies that safeguard the integrity of the price system itself. That is why we need policies that are consistent with the principle of full-cost pricing.


As I discussed in the interview, that means doing two things.

First, it means stopping government subsidies that make the prices of some inputs artificially low. For example, without subsidies to corn farmers and ethanol blenders, we would use less corn ethanol in our automotive fuel. According to most studies I have seen, less ethanol would mean a more efficient fuel mix.

Second, it means fixing government policies that allow businesses to take resources without paying for them. Promarket economists like my early mentor Murray Rothbard have long argued that pollution is a form of "taking" via uncompensated harm to other people and their property. That means harm to people and property owners who live downstream or downwind from a specific factory or power plant, and in the case of some pollutants, it means harms that are felt even more widely, even globally.

Look at it this way: A business owner is like a dog owner. Just as the burden of cleaning up the dog's poop is the owner's responsibility, and becomes part of the cost of owning a dog, the harm that pollution does to downwind residents and property owners is a both a moral and an economic responsibility of the businesses.

In an ideal world, the market would capture pollution costs and impose them back upon the polluter. Downwind property owners and individuals would sue under the tort concepts of nuisance and trespass. The court costs and damages would give the needed price signal to the polluter to cut back on the use of inputs that cause heavy damage in favor of cleaner ones.

But that is in an ideal world, one where streets were privately owned, one where street owners would write anti-poop clauses into the contracts they entered with dog walkers and go to court to recover damages from dog walkers who did not respect those contracts. For better or worse, we do not live in that kind of Heinleinian anarcho-capitalist utopia.

Instead, we have government streets and government imposed fines on irresponsible dog walkers. In my mind that is better than just absolving the dog owners of their responsibilities and leaving the rest of us to step in the poop.

Similarly, to safeguard the integrity of energy pricing, we can use government fines, or pollution charges, or taxes, or whatever you want to call them. So much per ton of SO2, so much per ton of carbon, whatever. Yes, in some philosophical sense, that is a second best, a less elegant solution than one that internalizes all pollution costs through voluntary contracts and the enforcement of property rights. Yes, it is hard to get the prices just right. But it is the best hope we have for making our planet cleaner, healthier, more sustainable and--importantly--more efficient.

Interview: The Myth of Affordable Energy

The following interview was conducted by James Stafford and originally published on Oilprice.com. It is reproduced here with permission.

Oilprice.com: Access to cheap energy is vital to economic growth. What do you see happening with the economy over the coming years as the time of cheap oil comes to an end?

Ed Dolan: In my view it is a myth that cheap energy--“affordable energy” as many people like to say--is vital to growth. The idea that there is a lockstep relationship between growth of GDP and use of energy is widespread, but the data simply does not bear it out. Instead, what they show is that the world’s best-performing economies have become dramatically more energy efficient over time.
The World Bank uses constant-dollar GDP per kg of oil equivalent as an energy efficiency metric. From 1980 to 2010, the high-income countries in the OECD have increased their average energy efficiency by 55 percent. The United States has done a little better than that, increasing its energy efficiency by 81 percent over that period. That’s pretty remarkable, considering that we haven’t really had a policy environment that is supportive of efficiency.

Think what we could do if we did.


Even after the efficiency gains in efficiency we have made, we still have a long way to go. The US economy is still 15 percent less energy efficient than the average for high-income OECD countries, giving it plenty of room to improve. Switzerland is almost twice as energy-efficient as the US, and the UK is 68 percent more efficient.

Some people say that the only reason the United States has been able to grow while using less energy is the deindustrialization of its economy, outsourcing heavy industry to China. However, compare the US with Germany. Germany is an export powerhouse and Europe’s best-performing economy, yet its energy efficiency has increased at almost the same rate over the last 30 years as the United States, an 80 percent gain in efficiency compared to 81 percent. Furthermore, despite being proportionately more industrialized than the US and a major exporter, Germany squeezes out 41 percent more GDP from each kg of oil equivalent.

In short, we don’t have to hypothesize about the possibility of someday breaking the lockstep relationship of growth and energy use—we and most of the rest of the advanced world are already doing it.

Oilprice.com: What effect can you see America’s Oil & Gas boom having on foreign policy?

Ed Dolan: On the whole, I see it as beneficial. Energy dependence has led us to buy a lot of oil from countries that are unstable and/or unfriendly to us. Anything we can do to reduce that dependence gives our foreign policy more room to maneuver. The beneficial effects reach beyond our actual imports and exports. The US gas revolution is having repercussions all the way to Russia, where Gazprom is seeing its market power undermined, and Russia, as a result, is losing some of the geopolitical leverage its pipeline network has given it.

Oilprice.com: From Siberia and Poland to China and Qatar – the shale revolution has politicians salivating at the thought of a cheap and abundant source of energy. But can the results seen in the U.S. be easily replicated in other parts of the world?

Ed Dolan: I think you’re going to have to ask someone with more engineering background for the technical details, but from what I read, the answer is that it won’t always be easy. It is my understanding that some countries where shale seemed just recently to have great promise have already encountered disappointments in practical exploratory work. Poland I think is an example. Furthermore, the environmentalist opposition to fracking seems even stronger in many European countries than in the United States.

Still, I am hoping that the shale revolution will pan out in at least some countries. Think how much difference it would make, say, to Ukraine’s foreign policy if they were able to break their dependence on Russian gas.

Related Article: Forget Renewables, We Need Cheap Oil - An Interview with Gail Tverberg
Oilprice.com: Gail Tverberg has written a recent article suggesting the world is suffering from high-priced fuel syndrome, which has the following symptoms:

•         Slow economic growth, or contraction
•         People in discretionary industries laid off from work
•         High unemployment rates
•         Debt defaults (or huge government intervention to prevent debt defaults)
•         Governments in increasingly poor financial condition
•         Declining home and business property values
•         Rising food prices
•         Lower tolerance for immigrants
•         Huge difficulty in funding retirement programs, programs for disabled, and regular pension plans
•         Rising international tensions related to energy supply

Do you think this is too convenient and an oversimplification of the problems facing world economies at the moment? What would you blame for the plethora of economic woes being experienced at the moment?

Ed Dolan: I don’t buy the argument at all. Yes, when countries are hit by unexpected upward shocks in fuel prices, we do see short-run results like slower growth and layoffs, but those are short-term problems. When the proper structural adjustments are made, countries with high fuel prices manage to achieve strong growth and full employment.

Where are fuel prices lowest? If you look up the data and rank countries by retail fuel prices, you find the low-price end of the rankings crowded with countries like Egypt, Cambodia, Iran, Pakistan—not exactly economies we would like to emulate.

We’ve got big economic problems, but a lot of them don’t have much to do with energy.
What about a healthcare system that delivers mediocre results at the world’s highest cost? Health care isn’t all that much energy driven.

What about our steady move down the international rankings in education—are you going to blame that on the high cost of heating classrooms? Hardly.

Oilprice.com: Oil prices have been near to the $100 a barrel mark for some time now, and don’t look likely to drop back to previous low levels. What effect could this increased price have on oil importing economies compared to oil exporting economies?

Ed Dolan: Clearly, any oil price increase has the short-term effect of transferring wealth from using countries to producing countries. However, the long-run effects are what matter.

In the long run, high prices just accelerate the trend for using countries to become more efficient and less dependent. Meanwhile, the producing countries often don’t manage their oil riches well. They fall victim to the “curse of riches.” The curse takes the form partly of a loss of competitiveness in their non-energy sectors (the so-called “Dutch disease”). Partly it takes the form of corruption of their political systems. Russia is a poster child for both aspects of the curse of riches.

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Oilprice.com: Renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuels, so how can people be persuaded to choose the less economical option of renewables over the likes of coal and natural gas?

Ed Dolan: There is only one right way to promote renewables, and that is to introduce full-cost pricing of all forms of energy. Full-cost pricing is a two-part program.

First, it means pricing that covers the full production costs for every form of fuel. No subsidies for anyone—not for oil, not for ethanol, not for wind or solar.

The second half of full-cost pricing is to include all of the nonmarket costs, what economists call the “external costs” or “externalities.” The most publicized of these are pollution costs, whether those take the form of local smog, oil spills, climate change, or bird kills. Some people, I am one of them, would like to count in something for the national security costs of dependence on unfriendly and unstable foreign sources of energy supply.

Full-cost pricing accomplishes two things. First, it levels the playing field so that each form of energy competes on its economic merits, not whether corn-growing states have early primaries or oil companies have big SuperPacs. Second, by raising prices to consumers to a realistic level, it accelerates the trend toward energy efficiency that is already underway.

Subsidies for renewables are just plain wrong, even if you look at them from a hard-core environmentalist point of view. With a subsidy, on the one hand, you say, “produce more green energy” and other the other hand, you turn around and tell the consumer, “waste more green energy.” We don’t want to waste energy from wind or solar any more than we want to waste oil and gas. We shouldn’t forget that even the greenest renewables can have significant environmental impacts.
The whole “affordable energy” idea is based on the myth that if we don’t include those external costs in the price—the pollution costs, the national security costs—they just go away. They don’t. Keeping prices artificially low just transfers those costs to someone else, someone unlucky enough to live downwind, someone who owns beachfront property that gets eroded away as the sea level rises, someone who has to go off to fight a war to keep the shipping routes open. There are two things wrong that. First, it’s immoral. If we believe in the market economy, the rule of law, and all that, we have to respect people’s property rights and their human rights. Second, it’s inefficient. It doesn’t strengthen our economy, it weakens it. If there’s one thing we can’t afford, it’s “affordable energy.”

Oilprice.com: Obama has made clear his desires to cut the $4 billion a year tax breaks given to oil companies. What affect do you believe this would this have on the US economy and the US oil industry?

Ed Dolan: If it is done as part of a comprehensive move toward full-cost pricing, it could only strengthen the US economy. The oil industry would whine, but if we cut subsidies and tax breaks for competing energy sources at the same time, oil will remain a competitive part of the energy mix for many years to come.

Oilprice.com: The oil industry has enjoyed decades of subsidies and grants, so do you think it is unreasonable to already start cutting the subsidies to renewable energies and expect them to survive on their own?

Ed Dolan: As I explained above, the answer is yes, provided it is done as part of a package that reforms our energy policy as a whole in the direction of full-cost pricing.

Oilprice.com: Economic growth is generally dependent on the access to energy. As the supply of energy grows, so too does the economy (more or less). Global oil supplies are pretty much stagnant, so do you predict that only nations that successfully convert to a renewable energy mix with an abundant supply of cheap energy will be able to experience continued economic growth at a similar level experienced by the developed countries of recent years?

Ed Dolan: Again, I just don’t buy the doctrine that growth is dependent on ever-increasing energy use. For sure, those countries that pursue sound policies, like full-cost pricing to rationalize their energy mix and promote efficiency, are the ones that are going to keep growing.

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Oilprice.com: As the arctic ice melts at a rapid pace the world’s superpowers are jockeying for position to exploit the region’s vast oil & gas & mineral deposits. Environmental groups are rightly concerned, but is this a resource that we cannot afford to ignore?

Ed Dolan: Arctic oil, like any other source of energy, should pay full freight for any environmental impacts it has. If it can bear those costs and still be competitive, I think it should be in the mix. I am worried about Russia, though. It has a dangerous combination of an environment-be-damned attitude and low technical competence that could lead to headline-grabbing disaster worse than the Gulf blowout or Exxon Valdez.

Oilprice.com: What effect do you see the shale revolution having on investments in renewable energy?

Ed Dolan: If I were trying to make money by generating electricity with wind or solar, I’d be worried about gas. I don’t have all the relevant numbers at my disposal, but my gut feeling is that even if you price in full environmental costs for wind, solar, and gas—including environmental costs associated with fracking—gas is still going to be pretty competitive.

Oilprice.com: What are your views on Ben Bernanke’s QE3?

Ed Dolan: I’ve written repeatedly about QE over at Economonitor, so I am on record as saying we should try it. The trouble is, QE is not a magic bullet. Properly executed and properly communicated, it can help support the recovery, but it can’t do it alone.

That is one point where I agree 110 percent with Ben Bernanke. Here is what he said in a speech at the Fed’s Jackson Hole conference at the end of the summer:

It is critical that fiscal policymakers put in place a credible plan that sets the federal budget on a sustainable trajectory in the medium and longer runs. . . Monetary policy cannot achieve by itself what a broader and more balanced set of economic policies might achieve.

Oilprice.com: How do you see the EU solving its debt crisis?

Ed Dolan: I’m afraid I’m a euro pessimist. The US debt situation is hard enough to resolve, but Europe’s is worse. At the same time, whatever you say about gridlock in Washington, our political decision making is a model of streamlined efficiency compared with the EU.

Oilprice.com: Do you think the EU was doomed to fail from the start with the format that it has? Could more success be seen in a split EU, with the northern/richer nations using one currency, and the southern/poorer nations using a different currency?

Ed Dolan: Doomed, I don’t know, but flawed, certainly. Just recently, I was looking back at what economists were writing about the prospects for the euro back in the early 1990s, when it was still just a project. They were telling us, for one thing, that Europe is too diverse to be ideal for a currency union—and that was when there were only 15 EU countries. Second, they said that you can’t run a monetary union without a central government, a fiscal union, and a banking union. You still don’t have any of those.

I am not sold on the idea of a northern euro and a southern euro. If the currency union doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Break it up. Sure, some countries will find it works for their special circumstances to tie their currencies to a large, stable neighbor. I could see the Danes or the Latvians keeping a link to the German currency, for example, and I’m sure the Vatican will continue to use whatever currency Italy uses. But a formal, north-south divide doesn’t make much sense to me.

Oilprice.com: In terms of tackling the current economic situation in the US, of the two main presidential candidates, who do you suggest is the best man, and why?

Ed Dolan: I do not think we can tackle the current economic situation without a thorough-going fiscal policy reform that includes three key elements: Spending cuts, revenue increases, and a rewrite of the whole tax system to eliminate loopholes and cut marginal rates. Furthermore, the package can’t be heavily front-loaded like George Osborne’s austerity program in the UK, which has sent their economy back into recession. Ours should be back-loaded, with an element of stimulus now and an ironclad commitment to move the budget toward surplus as the economy improves. It’s a lot to ask for.

We are not going to get good budget policy out of the GOP unless members of that party make a clean break with mantra that they will not accept a dime of new revenue, not even if it comes from eliminating the most loathsome tax loopholes. Personally, I am never going to vote for a candidate for President, the Senate, the House, or any office who has signed that nonsensical Grover Norquist tax pledge.

At the same time, I have been very disappointed at the lukewarm support Obama has given to the kind of program I would like to see. During the first debate, Romney said that when Obama didn’t “grab” Simpson-Bowles—that was his word, and a good one—it was a failure of leadership. That was one point where I agreed with Mitt.

Then, you also have to take into account the vote for Congress. I’m afraid there is going to be continued gridlock as long as the GOP controls the House. In the Senate, there are at least a few people in both parties who are willing to meet behind the scenes and talk compromise, but not in the House, not right now, anyway. Maybe what we need in the White House is someone who is a real politician, a negotiator and dealmaker in the mold of a Clinton or an LBJ. Instead, we have the choice between a manager and a law professor. I’m not optimistic that either of them will be able to do what needs to be done.

Forward guidance: Does Bernanke Talk Too Much about How Good his Exit Strategy is?

In an October 1 speech to the Economics Club of Indiana, Chairman Ben Bernanke addressed the risk that the Fed’s latest round of quantitative easing (QE) could lead to inflation. Here is his resolutely reassuring answer, as quoted by Dave Altig on the Atlanta Fed’s Macroblog:

I’m confident that we have the necessary tools to withdraw policy accommodation when needed, and that we can do so in a way that allows us to shrink our balance sheet in a deliberate and orderly way. …
Of course, having effective tools is one thing; using them in a timely way, neither too early nor too late, is another. Determining precisely the right time to ‘take away the punch bowl’ is always a challenge for central bankers, but that is true whether they are using traditional or nontraditional policy tools. I can assure you that my colleagues and I will carefully consider how best to foster both of our mandated objectives, maximum employment and price stability, when the time comes to make these decisions.

I wonder, though, if there is such a thing as being too reassuring. This conclusion, although a bit unconventional, comes from combining two ideas about monetary policy that are increasingly mainstream.>>>Read More