The Costs of Reducing Carbon Emissions: An Examination of Administration Forecasts

How much will it cost the United States to comply with the Kyoto protocol? The estimates range from over 4 percent of gross domestic product and $348 for the right to emit a ton of "greenhouse gases" to only .1 percent of GDP and$14 for the right to emit a ton of gases. In the lowest cost scenarios, U.S. emitters purchase rights to emit from other countries. In the highest cost scenarios, actual U.S. emissions have to be reduced by about 30 percent from what they otherwise would be. Such a cut-back would imply a massive shift from coal- to natural-gas-fired electricity generation. But even the low-cost scenar-ios are excessively expensive because models of the atmo-sphere predict that very little warming would be prevented

An Exploratory Analysis of the Role of Self-Compassion and the Relationship between Religiosity and Depression

Graduate Applie

Did Enron Pillage California?

Revelations this summer about Enron Energy Services' byzantine electricity-trading practices have fueled charges that merchant power producers and traders artificially engineered the California electricity crisis of 2000-01. A careful examination of the suspect trading practices, however, reveals that there's less to those charges than meets the eye. The trading strategies in question all involved the pursuit of arbitrage opportunities, which arise when price discrepancies exist for a commodity in different locations or time periods. Exploiting arbitrage opportunities generally enhances economic efficiency by ensuring that electricity is reallocated where it is needed most. While some of the arbitrage opportunities were artificially manufactured by the companies themselves (in ways that may or may not have violated the law), most of them arose as a natural consequence of the market structure imposed by the California political system. In any case, it's unclear whether the trading strategies in question actually served to increase prices on balance. Even economists who are convinced that they did contribute to the increase in electricity prices attribute only about 5 percent of the alleged overcharges to the strategies at issue. Most of the price spike of 2000-01 is explained by drought, increased natural gas prices, the escalating cost of nitrogen oxide emissions credits, increases in consumer demand stemming from a hot summer and then a cold winter, and retail price controls that prevented market signals from disciplining producers or consumers. The price collapse in the summer of 2001 stemmed from a reversal of those conditions, not the imposition of federal price controls or the elimination of the trading practices in question

Don't Increase Federal Gasoline Taxes - Abolish Them

Many experts believe that gasoline taxes should be increased for a variety of reasons. Their arguments are unpersuasive. Oil is not disappearing, and when it becomes more expensive, market agents will substitute away from gasoline to save money. The link between oil price shocks and recessions, although real in the 1970s, has been much more benign since 1985 because of the termination of price controls. Market actors properly account for energy costs in their purchasing decisions absent government intervention. Pollution taxes, congestion fees, and automobile insurance premiums more closely related to vehicle miles traveled are better remedies for the externalities associated with automobile travel than a simple fuel tax. Gasoline consumption does not necessarily distort American foreign policy, impose military commitments, or empower Islamic terrorist organizations. State and federal gasoline taxes should be abolished. Local governments should tax gasoline only to the extent necessary to pay for roads when user charges are not feasible. If government feels compelled to more aggressively regulate vehicle tailpipe emissions or access to public roadways, pollution taxes and road user fees are better means of doing so than fuel taxes. Regardless, perfectly internalizing motor vehicle externalities would likely make the economy less efficient -- not more -- by inducing motorists into even more (economically) inefficient mass transit use. The arguments advanced against increasing gasoline taxes are applicable to the broader discussion about America's reliance on oil generally. The case for policies designed to discourage oil consumption is nearly as threadbare as the case for increasing the gasoline tax -- and for largely the same reasons

Rethinking Electricity Restructuring

Electric utility restructuring was initiated in the 1990s to remedy the problem of relatively high electricity costs in the Northeast and California. While politicians hoped that reform would allow low-cost electricity to flow to highcost states and that competition would reduce prices, economists wanted reform to eliminate regulatory incentives to overbuild generating capacity and spur the introduction of real-time prices for electricity. Unfortunately, high-cost states have seen little price relief, and competition has had a negligible impact on prices. Meanwhile, the California crisis of 2000-2001 has led many states to adopt policies that would once again encourage excess capacity. Finally, real-time pricing, although the subject of experiments, has yet to emerge. Most arresting, however, is the fact that restructuring contributed to the severity of the 2000-2001 California electricity crisis and (some scholars also argue) the August 2003 blackout in the Northeast, without delivering many efficiency gains. The poor track record of restructuring stems from systemic problems inherent in the reforms themselves. We recommend total abandonment of restructuring and a more thoroughgoing embrace of markets than contemplated in current restructuring initiatives. But we recognize that such reforms are politically difficult to achieve. A second-best alternative would be for those states that have already embraced restructuring to return to an updated version of the old, vertically integrated, regulated status quo. It's likely that such an arrangement would not be that different from the arrangements that would have developed under laissez faire

Orbital Dependent Exchange-Only Methods for Periodic Systems

Various orbital-dependent exchange-only potentials are studied which exhibit correct long-range asymptotic behaviour. We present the first application of these potentials for polymers and by one of these potentials for molecules. Kohn-Sham type calculations have been carried out for polyethylene in order to make valuable comparison of these potentials with each other as well as with Hartree-Fock and exchange-only LDA methods. The Kohn-Sham band gap obtained with the optimized effective potetial method is corrected with the exchange contribution to the derivative discontinuity of the exchange-correlation potential. The corrected band gap obtained with the Slater's exchange potential is 9.7 eV close to the experiment.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. Phys. Rev. B60, 1999, in pres

Microwave propagation through isotropic inhomogeneous photoconductive media

The electromagnetic field equations for microwave propagation through a rectangular waveguide filled with a lossy, isotropic, linear, inhomogeneous material are derived in matrix form and solved numerically by computer. The theoretical effects of photo-induced conductivity and dielectric constant variations on microwave attenuation, phase shift, and voltage standing wave ratio are plotted for typical examples in the X-band frequency range. The theoretical calculations indicate that a two order-of-magnitude change in the conductivity can produce a 25 db change in the attenuation or a 100 degree change in the angle of the reflection coefficient. The theoretical predictions are verified qualitatively by experiments performed on photosensitive cadmium sulfide. An unusually strong, room temperature resonance phenomena was observed experimentally in cadmium sulfide. Electron plasma resonance is the suspected explanation, but no definite conclusions are drawn. Several new microwave applications for photoconductive materials are described. Theoretical calculations coupled with experimental measurements produced accurate conductivity measurement of thin (0.05 mm) silicon wafers at X-band frequencies. This technique could be readily adapted to large-scale automatic conductivity measurements. Microwave measurement of the free electron lifetime in photo-excited cadmium sulfide is also reported --Abstract, page ii