#nondepletion

[gardenitaly27]

The consequence of Rooibos (Aspalathus linearis), Honeybush (Cyclopia intermedia) and also Sutherlandia (Lessertia frutescens) on Testicular The hormone insulin Signalling inside Adagrasib-Induced Diabetes mellitus inside Wistar Subjects

Compound replacement therapy (ERT) is the standard-of-care treatment of Pompe disease, the lysosomal safe-keeping condition a result of deficiency of chemical p alpha-glucosidase (GAA). 1 issue of ERT with recombinant man (rh) GAA is actually antibody creation in opposition to GAA. Likewise, throughout adeno-associated computer virus (AAV) vector-mediated gene shift pertaining to Pompe illness, growth and development of antibodies against the GAA transgene item along with the #Link# AAV vector prevents healing usefulness and vector readministration, correspondingly. The following a new nondepleting anti-CD4 monoclonal antibody (mAb) ended up being administrated intravenously prior to supervision associated with an AAV2/9 vector coding GAA to be able to curb anti-GAA responses, leading to a substantial decrease in anti-GAA immunoglobulins, such as IgG1, IgG2a, IgG2b, IgG2c, along with IgG3. Transduction productivity throughout liver which has a following AAV2/8 vector has been greatly improved through the administration associated with anti-CD4 mAb together with the original AAV2/9 vector, indicating a variety of great benefit produced by power over the particular resistant a reaction to the initial AAV2/9 vector. Anti-CD4 mAb along with AAV2/9-CBhGAApA significantly increased GAA task inside heart and also bone muscles and also a important reduction of glycogen accumulation. Used with each other, these information demonstrated that the addition of nondepleting anti-CD4 mAb together with gene treatment handles humoral immune system replies in order to each vector and transgene, producing crystal clear restorative profit inside mice using Pompe disease.Collagen fibril ultrastructure along with program were reviewed in different connective flesh simply by PLM, SEM, TEM, along with AFM. In tendon, bovine collagen fibrils had been significant and also heterogeneous using a right subfibrillar arrangement. That they ran densely loaded, similar, and direct modifying their course merely within periodic crimps where fibrils demonstrated a local deformation (fibrillar crimps). Some other flesh such as aponeurosis, structures communis, skin, aortic wall membrane, as well as muscle as well as neurological sheaths revealed thin even fibrils which has a #Link# helical subfibrillar set up. These kind of fibrils came out inside concurrent or helical design using a wavy, undulating study course. Structures demonstrated big fibrils as with muscle, using fibrillar crimps but much less jam-packed. Slimmer uniform-sized fibrils also have been noticed. Fibrillar crimps seem to be associated with the actual subfibrillar agreement becoming present only throughout big fibrils using a direct subfibrillar set up. These kinds of stronger fibrils respond mainly for you to unidirectional tensional allows, whereas the actual adaptable slimmer fibrils together with helical subfibrils can hold intense curvatures without having harm, thus giving an answer to multidirectional loadings.History: Person attrition throughout longitudinal reports can easily bring in methodical bias, favoring contributors which go back for follow-up, while increasing the likelihood that runners with issues will probably be underestimated. Our purpose ended up being to check out the performance regarding house follow-up (Residence F/U) to finish a final review evaluation upon most likely "lost" members by simply: 1) evaluating the outcome of such as along with excluding probably "lost" individuals (e.gary., those who needed House F/U to accomplish the last evaluation) on the costs associated with examine complications; A couple of) evaluating their bond between time along with quantity of complications for the desire for future #Link# Property F/U; about three) determining predictors of those that needed Property F/U. Methods: All of us employed data from your randomized managed demo (RCT) carried out coming from 1991-1994 among cardio-arterial sidestep graft surgical treatment sufferers that looked at the result involving Large imply arterial pressure (Road) (treatment) versus.

[azspot]

When Locke spoke of creating property by mixing our labour with the land, he had fallow land in mind. This is precisely not the nature of artistic and scientific creation, where the creator ‘mixes’ his ideas with those of others to create a new work. Think of the relationship between rock ’n’ roll and the blues, between Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Baz Luhrmann’s, between older scientific theories and the newer ones that build on them. Knowledge and creative works are nonrivalrous, nondepletable goods subject to network effects. To control them like ‘tangible property’ is to reduce their social utility. The domain of the various bodies of law that make up ‘intellectual property’ is a very different kind of property, perhaps so different that it shouldn’t be understood as such.

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious

[altajackuniverse]

How to Bring Discipline to Your Sustainability Initiatives

Why Your Business Should Embrace Sustainability

 Sustainability has become a part of life for many companies.  For many, it’s simply a matter of meeting demands from customers seeking socially responsible goods and services.  For others, it’s about addressing pressure from stakeholders or pursuing their own corporate values. For still others, business sustainability is a strategic responsibility, especially those in a resource-constrained environment.  Whatever the reason, sustainability is sufficiently pervasive that defining it and executing business programs, products, and practices with an eye to their environmental and social implications has become a demanding managerial exercise.   Sustainability Identifies Opportunities   For some, sustainability has identified opportunities that they might have otherwise missed.  Whether it was to cut costs, reduce risk, and generate revenues.  Consider the multinational consumer-goods company Unilever, which changed the shape of deodorant to use less plastic in packaging and created a concentrated laundry product that sharply reduces its use of water. German pharmaceutical company Bayer expects to save more than $10 million a year with a resource-efficiency check it developed to improve operations by using by-products and reducing wastewater. Global chemical company DuPont has recorded $2 billion in annual revenue from products that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and another $11.8 billion in revenue from improvements in nondepletable resources.    Why Do Some Struggle Over Sustainability   To better understand the challenges that companies face with creating value from sustainability.  We worked with sustainability groups to identify managers to collaborate on analyzing their programs. What we found is that companies often have more initiatives than they can effectively manage.  The sustainability movement is flexible, including everything from environmentalism, resource management, corporate governance, and human rights.   Some managers in different regions may be enthusiastic about their efforts without taking a company-wide perspective.  In most cases, their efforts are too fragmented to create much value, either for the company or for society.    How Sustainability Provides Solutions   Thankfully, that kind of problem's solution is well known.  We found that if they applied performance management principles to their sustainability initiatives most companies would benefit.  Companies must keep their sustainability programs focused, set specific goals, create accountability for performance, and communicate the financial impact.   

Where To Focus Must Be Agreed

  Getting leadership attention to sustainability initiatives is one of the biggest challenges companies face.  In a recent report for the United Nations Global Compact, 84 percent of the 1,000 global CEOs surveyed agreed that business “should lead efforts to define and deliver new goals on global priority issues,” but only a third said that “business is doing enough to address global sustainability challenges.”   Why Do Some Fail To Focus   The problem at many companies is often one of focus.  Two-thirds of companies in a representative sample from the S&P 500 have more than 10 different sustainability focus topics.  Some have more than 30. That’s too many, making it difficult to imagine how a sustainability agenda with more than 10 focus areas can break through and get the necessary buy-in from leadership to be successful.  If top management doesn’t prioritize, then departments won’t either. The result is fragmented, decentralized, and not aligned with one another or with overall top-level goals.  This slows the social and environmental impact but also the economic value.  A recent McKinsey Global Survey found that companies having a unified strategy and no more than five strategic priorities were almost three times as likely to be among the strongest performers.  Both financially and on measures of sustainability.  Coca-Cola, for example, has set for itself a strategy it describes as “me, we, the world,” which is it's approach to improving personal health and wellness among the communities in which it operates and the environment.   The company reports making material, tangible progress on metrics related to three specific areas of focus: “well-being, women, and water.”  The company does not ignore other issues such as climate change and packaging, but it has made it clear that this is where it wants to lead.    Why You Need To Analyze Your Value Chain   To develop your priorities, it’s important to start by analyzing what matters most along the entire value chain.  You can accomplish this through internal analysis and consultations with stakeholders, including customers, regulators, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This process should enable companies to identify their sustainability issues with the greatest long-term potential and thus to create a systematic agenda.  You don’t want to create a laundry list of vague desirables.   After consultations, BASF, the global chemical company, put together a “materiality matrix” exhibit which is shown above.  This chart ranked the importance of 38 sustainability-related issues, based on their importance to BASF and its stakeholders. This type of exercise helps companies to recognize the important issues early and get internal stakeholders to agree on what will create the most value.  Their focus needn’t be mechanical but should instead reflect discussion on the strategic, reputational, and financial merits of different efforts.  

Set Specific Sustainability Goals

 After completing your initial analysis, the next step is to translate this information into external goals that can be distilled into business metrics. These goals should be specific, ambitious, and measurable against an established baseline, such as greenhouse-gas emissions.  Your goals should have a long-term orientation and be integrated into your business sustainability strategy. Finally, the intent of your goals should be unmistakable. One company stated as a goal: “Reduce the impact of our packaging on the environment.”  From a different company came a sharper version: “Eliminate 20 million pounds of packaging by 2016.”  Along the same lines, “reducing emissions” is a vague and almost meaningless phrase.  It doesn’t say by how much the company should reduce emissions, by when, or compared with what benchmark.  The approach taken by another sustainability leader is stronger and more specific: “Reduce 2005 CO2 emissions by half by 2015.”   Build Internal Support For Your Sustainability Goals   It is important to build adequate internal support to meet your goals.  Our analysis found that the companies that excelled at meeting sustainability goals made sure that they involved the business leaders responsible for implementing them from the start. One global manufacturer announced in 2010 that it would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and energy consumption by 20 percent by 2020.  To reach their goal, they set up energy assessments and energy-management plans, established global programs to optimize procurement and building standards, trained and developed internal “champions” and coordinated best practices, and began to use renewable energy where possible.   They communicated their early wins internally through a newsletter and regular conference calls.  Four years into their ten-year effort, the project is already net present value positive.   Encourage Sustainability Innovation   Setting ambitious external goals motivates your organization.  It also forces resources to be allocated and promotes accountability.  An analysis of companies that are part of the Carbon Disclosure Project found that those that set external goals did better when it came to cutting emissions.  They also had better financial returns on such investments. Stronger goals, seem to encourage innovation.  People may feel more motivated to find ways to meet them.  Lack of goals is a sustainability killer: “What gets measured gets managed” is as true of sustainability as it is for any other business function. And yet that is not happening.  An independent analysis of S&P 500 companies suggests that as of this writing only one in five S&P 500 companies sets quantified, long-term sustainability goals.  Half of the companies do not have any published sustainability goals.   

Communicate Sustainability's Financial Impact

  Despite growing evidence of the value of investing in sustainability, many executives still have doubts.  Senior management gives sustainability lip service but not capital if they do not see financial benefits. “Sustainability metrics can seem like random numbers and don’t do much,” one chemical-industry executive told us. “For our businesses, sustainability efforts have to compete directly with other demands, which means that financial impact is key.” Nearly half of the research participants reported that the pressure of short-term earnings performance is at odds with sustainability initiatives.  A constructive response is to make the case that sustainability can pay for itself, and more.  This needs to be done rigorously, reinforced with fully costed financial data and delivered in the language of business.    Make Sustainability's Business Case   This is much easier said than done.  At Intel, although business leaders were interested in saving water, they saw little financial justification to do so: water was cheap.  Advocates of the initiative were able to calculate that the full cost of water, including infrastructure and treatment, was much higher than the initial estimates.   Saving water, they argued, could create value in new and unexpected ways.  Because of those arguments, Intel went ahead with a major conservation effort.  The company now has a finance analyst who concentrates on computing the financial value of sustainability efforts.  Making the business case for sustainability might sound like an obvious thing to do, but apparently, it isn’t. Only around a fifth of survey respondents reported that the financial benefits are clearly understood across the organization.    Measure Sustainability's Savings   Sustainability initiatives can be difficult to measure because savings or returns may be divided across different parts of the business.  Some benefits, such as an improved reputation, are indirect.  It is important, not only to quantify what can be quantified but also to communicate other kinds of value. An initiative might improve the perception important stakeholders have of the company, the better to build consumer loyalty, nurture relationships with like-minded nonprofits, and inform policy discussions.    Visit Our Web Accessibility Blog Visit Our Business Sustainability Blog

Create Sustainability Accountability

  The top reason that respondents gave for their company’s failure to capture the full value of sustainability is the lack of incentives to do so, whether positive or negative. According to the United Nations Global Compact, only 1 in 12 companies links executive remuneration to sustainability performance.   While 1 in 7 rewards their suppliers for good sustainability performance. Among survey respondents, 1 in 3 named earnings pressure and lack of incentives as reasons for poor sustainability results; 1 in 4 named lack of key performance indicators and insufficient resources.    Exhibit Good Sustainability Practices In this area, a number of companies exhibit good business sustainability practices from which others learn.  Some are strong when it comes to tracking data and reporting indicators, tracking carbon emissions and energy use, monitoring water use and waste, and recycling. Adidas demonstrates one useful approach.  The sporting-goods company breaks down its long-term goals into shorter-term milestones.  Its suppliers, for example, are given strategic targets three to five years ahead, as well as more immediate goals to encourage them to focus.  The effort makes it very clear what is expected of suppliers for the current year. The beer company MillerCoors does something similar.  It tracks and quantifies progress in ten areas, ranging from water to energy to packaging to human rights, using its own sustainability-assessment matrix.  The idea is for MillerCoors to understand its performance, in quantitative terms, in areas that are often difficult to quantify.   Read the full article

[sofarkrakow]

22nd edition - August 25th, 2017

Although summer isn't over yet, we figuratively bid it goodbye with 22nd edition of Sofar Sounds Krakow. It was a very special day because for the first time ever in history of Sofar Krakow's gigs, it was held in a private house with a decent-sized garden in Łagiewniki, Cracovian district. All of the instruments were set up in the garden. The weather was perfect for such a concert, and mosquitos were having quite a fine supper later that evening.

FJORS, a four-piece band with a wonderful feeling of what they are doing. Usually, they combine the sounds of classical instruments like cello, kalimba or a harp with a bit of electronics, but that day the band played a semi-acoustic set. The songs they prepared for that evening created an extraordinary climate of closeness, and a wonderful and pure voice of the singer filled the air with charm. One can say that people basked in those magnificent tunes. FJORS played songs written mostly in English, except one with Polish lyrics - “Sen” (“A Dream”). It seemed, at the beginning, as another simple love song, but alternatively turned into a strong confession of a broken-hearted soul, and because of those lyrics some people in the audience probably felt the goosebumps on the skin of their arms. When the band ended their set, people were in rapture.

And the good spirit took over the place. The second to play was Leepeck, the talented musician, composer and a songwriter from Warsaw. As he said, his pseudonim derrived from combination of Lee Marvin and Gregory Peck (famous Hollywood actors). He described his music as alternative folk. Leepeck released his debut album “BORDERLINE” in April 2017 and despite a numerous musicians playing on the album on various instruments, at Sofar he played in a duet with Piotr Czajer who played on banjo. Folk connotes with telling great stories on a vaste range of topics, and Leepeck took the greatest and nondepletable theme of love playing and interacting with the audience. Subtle love songs floated in the air and the musician casted a spell on the audience making them feel the summer atmosphere of peace and joy. All of it combined with a soothing voice ideal to ease the pain. If it weren't for the mosquitos, one could lay in the grass, look at the sky and dream.

MITKA with a guest singer Helaine Vis ended the event with a touch of magic. Halaine Vis amazed the audience with her jazzy feeling as well as clean, gentle and captivating voice. The musicians involved in the project, including a trumpet player whose part was exceptionaly good, created a unique mood, a cheerful and peaceful vibe of summer. What a performance! Their set was ideal for the venue and the weather that day. One cover they performed, a song “1335” by Dillon, was so skillfuly played that one could think it was their original song. Vis felt it perfectly. Once again, it was a splendid moment to lay down and enjoy the last warm evenings of the year. The summer may be over in a month or so, but the good spirit will prevail in memories of such events as the 22nd Sofar Sounds Krakow, thanks to the incredibly talented musicians that played on that event and took all of the people gathered there to a one-of-a-kind place where music lovers can find happiness.

[raymondcastleberry]

Milton Friedman on Energy

Born on this day 105 years ago, free-market economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was one of a kind.

Even the dyspeptic Paul Krugman called his rival “the economist’s economist … a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived.” The Economist (issue of November 23, 2006) called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century…and possibly all of it.”

Milton Friedman’s major professional mark was in monetary economics. But as a public intellectual, writing popular books and a biweekly Newsweek column, he became conversant in different fields, including energy.

Friedman understood how, for much of US history, major energy regulation was sponsored by some segment of the industry. “Few U.S. industries sing the praises of free enterprise more loudly than the oil industry,” he stated in 1967. “Yet few industries rely so heavily on special government favors.”[1]

The same can certainly be said today for the nuclear, wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicle, and carbon-capture industries. From time to time, an interventionist proposal might also emanate from an oil, coal, or natural gas company.

Friedman’s harsh reaction to President Nixon’s wage and price control order of August 1971 is particularly important for the energy debate, for this action, not the Arab Embargo, created the oil shortages and a decade of spiraling regulation. The negative effects of the wage and price controls were so great that federal price controls on energy have not been part of the debate since.

Friedman explained how a surplus of regulation caused a shortage of oil and gas. He did not buy the “running out of resources” argument, elegantly dressed as Harold Hotelling’s fixity/depletion model, as did so many economists–even those at Resources for the Future.

Near the end of his long career, Friedman weighed in on the global warming debate with a blurb for Thomas Gale Moore’s book for the Cato Institute, Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming (1999). Friedman opined:

This encyclopedic and even-handed survey of the evidence of global warming is a welcome corrective to the raging hysteria about the alleged dangers of global warming. Moore demonstrates conclusively that global warming is more likely to benefit than to harm the general public.

Some salient Friedman quotations follow with commentary.

Energy Economics

“I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.”

– Milton Friedman to Robert Bradley, e-mail communication, September 8, 2003.

Comment: This is a very profound view. Many economists, viewing minerals as fixed and thus depletable, have tried to separate natural gas, coal, and oil from so-called nondepletable goods. Friedman is saying that there is no special scarcity value for minerals, energy, or other natural resources. This puts him in the camp of Julian Simon and Ludwig von Mises, not Hotelling-inspired economists.

Energy Depletion

“[Oil, gas, and coal are] producible … at more or less constant or indeed declining cost because of the improvements in the technology of drilling and exploring and so on.”

– Milton Friedman, “The Energy Crisis: A Humane Solution” (Cato Institute: 1978).

Comment: This is Friedman’s nod to what Julian Simon memorialized as the “ultimate resource”—human ingenuity. (Friedman, by the way, felt that Simon’s empirical work on human improvement should have qualified him to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Simon died in 1998.)

Protectionism

“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up. Once imposed, tariffs are seldom eliminated.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 5–6.

Comment: Think about wind power and (on-grid) solar power, particularly in reference to the federal Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC), first established in 1992. Now 25 years old, the PTC has been extended nine times: in 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2015.

Nixon’s Price Control Order: August 15, 1971

“I regret exceedingly that he decided to impose a ninety-day freeze on prices and wages. That is one of those ‘very plausible schemes … with very pleasing commencements, [that] have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.’”

– Milton Friedman, “Why the Freeze is a Mistake,” Newsweek, August 30, 1971.

“Individual price and wage changes will not be prevented. In the main, price changes will simply be concealed by taking the form of changes in discounts, service, and quality, and wage changes, in overtime, perquisites and so on…. But to whatever extent the freeze is enforced, it will do harm by distorting relative prices.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why the Freeze is a Mistake,” Newsweek, August 30, 1971.

“By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.”

– Milton Friedman, “Morality and Controls,” Newsweek, October 28, 1971.

Comment: Friedman’s criticism ranges from economics to civil liberty to human morality. Regarding oil and gas, quality changes could not compensate for such intervention, leading to physical shortages.

1970s Energy Crisis

“It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

“The present oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of government mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

“Lines are forming at those gas stations that are open. The exasperated motorists are cursing; the service-station attendants are fuming; the politicians are promising. The one thing few people seem to be doing is thinking….

“How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?”

– Milton Friedman, “FEO and the Gas Lines,” Newsweek, Marc 4, 1974.

“The long gasoline lines that suddenly emerged in 1974 after the OPEC oil embargo … and again in the spring and summer of 1979 after the revolution in Iran, [came after] a sharp disturbance in the supply of crude oil from abroad. But that did not lead to gasoline lines in Germany or Japan, which are wholly dependent on imported oil. It led to long gasoline lines in the United States, … for one reason and one reason only: because legislation, administered by a government agency, did not permit the price system to function.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 14.

“There is one simple way to end the energy crisis and gasoline shortages tomorrow—and we mean tomorrow and not six months from now, nor six years from now. Eliminate all controls on the prices of crude oil and other petroleum products.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 219.

Comment: Price controls on oil and on natural gas were removed in the 1980s, and markets went from shortage to surplus where they have been—with rare exceptions—ever since.

Milton and Rose Friedman explained prices controls and shortages in their most popular book, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 219:

Economists may not know much, but we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail. That is what New York City and, more recently, other cities have done for rental dwellings, and that is why they all suffer or will soon suffer from housing shortages. That is why there were so many shortages during World War II. That is why there is an energy crisis and a gasoline shortage.

Milton Friedman’s timeless energy insights should be appreciated for all time.

[1]“Oil and the Middle East,” Newsweek, June 26, 1967. Reprinted in Milton Friedman, An Economists Protest (Glen Ridge, NJ: Thomas Horton and Daughters, 1973), p. 21.

The post Milton Friedman on Energy appeared first on IER.

from Raymond Castleberry Blog http://raymondcastleberry.blogspot.com/2017/07/milton-friedman-on-energy.html via IFTTT

[fitness-super-market-blog]

Bdesh Inks $ 185 Deal WITH Weralt Bankers to Boosted Nondepletable Energy(Solar)

Date: 2019-08-30 16:53:08 Bangladesh Inks $ 185 1000003 Deal WITH Carnals Bankers to Boosted Renewable Energy(Solar) Read more at https://getsolarenergy.market-lead-local-seo-agency.com/bdesh-inks-185-deal-with-weralt-bankers-to-boosted-nondepletable-energysolar/

[chillfiltr-blog]

Callum Pitt - Away From The Rousing Parades

Callum Pitt often builds his songs out from a small, quickly-established melodic theme. For his new single Away From The Rousing Parades, I hear echoes of a Josh Ritter circa Animal Years, with a similar youthful vitality and nondepletable store of lyrical fire. He goes from an acoustic guitar intro that feels borrowed from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, to a final coda of big energy, stacked vocals, piano, and strings.

Customary to the writing style of Pitt seems to be a deft use of melody and dynamics to create narrative lifts, and drops: a moody series of peaks and valleys to carry the story forward. The lead vocal achieves a bright sense of optimism here and continues to build on a tuneful and bardic persona.

This song is currently featured on our Roots Collection playlist.

[wiltiapes]

Energy-4

-Energy Sustainability

--Increasing efficiency is the least expensive & currently quickest way to decrease energy usage

--Energy Conservation: Using less energy

-Sustainable Design: Increasing efficiency of buildings & communities

--Energy Efficient Homes: Incorporate solar orientation into heating or cooling of home

--Passive Solar Design: Takes advantage of solar radiation

--Thermal Mass: Property of building materials that allow for heat retention

-Renewable Energy

--Potential Renewable: Easily regenerated indefinitely as lon as it’snot over harvested

--Nondepletable: Cannot be used up in a reasonable time scale

[raymondcastleberry]

Milton Friedman on Energy

Born on this day 105 years ago, free-market economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was one of a kind.

Even the dyspeptic Paul Krugman called his rival “the economist’s economist … a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived.” The Economist (issue of November 23, 2006) called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century…and possibly all of it.”

Milton Friedman’s major professional mark was in monetary economics. But as a public intellectual, writing popular books and a biweekly Newsweek column, he became conversant in different fields, including energy.

Friedman understood how, for much of US history, major energy regulation was sponsored by some segment of the industry. “Few U.S. industries sing the praises of free enterprise more loudly than the oil industry,” he stated in 1967. “Yet few industries rely so heavily on special government favors.”[1]

The same can certainly be said today for the nuclear, wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicle, and carbon-capture industries. From time to time, an interventionist proposal might also emanate from an oil, coal, or natural gas company.

Friedman’s harsh reaction to President Nixon’s wage and price control order of August 1971 is particularly important for the energy debate, for this action, not the Arab Embargo, created the oil shortages and a decade of spiraling regulation. The negative effects of the wage and price controls were so great that federal price controls on energy have not been part of the debate since.

Friedman explained how a surplus of regulation caused a shortage of oil and gas. He did not buy the “running out of resources” argument, elegantly dressed as Harold Hotelling’s fixity/depletion model, as did so many economists–even those at Resources for the Future.

Near the end of his long career, Friedman weighed in on the global warming debate with a blurb for Thomas Gale Moore’s book for the Cato Institute, Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming (1999). Friedman opined:

This encyclopedic and even-handed survey of the evidence of global warming is a welcome corrective to the raging hysteria about the alleged dangers of global warming. Moore demonstrates conclusively that global warming is more likely to benefit than to harm the general public.

Some salient Friedman quotations follow with commentary.

Energy Economics

“I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.”

– Milton Friedman to Robert Bradley, e-mail communication, September 8, 2003.

Comment: This is a very profound view. Many economists, viewing minerals as fixed and thus depletable, have tried to separate natural gas, coal, and oil from so-called nondepletable goods. Friedman is saying that there is no special scarcity value for minerals, energy, or other natural resources. This puts him in the camp of Julian Simon and Ludwig von Mises, not Hotelling-inspired economists.

Energy Depletion

“[Oil, gas, and coal are] producible … at more or less constant or indeed declining cost because of the improvements in the technology of drilling and exploring and so on.”

– Milton Friedman, “The Energy Crisis: A Humane Solution” (Cato Institute: 1978).

Comment: This is Friedman’s nod to what Julian Simon memorialized as the “ultimate resource”—human ingenuity. (Friedman, by the way, felt that Simon’s empirical work on human improvement should have qualified him to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Simon died in 1998.)

Protectionism

“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up. Once imposed, tariffs are seldom eliminated.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 5–6.

Comment: Think about wind power and (on-grid) solar power, particularly in reference to the federal Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC), first established in 1992. Now 25 years old, the PTC has been extended nine times: in 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2015.

Nixon’s Price Control Order: August 15, 1971

“I regret exceedingly that he decided to impose a ninety-day freeze on prices and wages. That is one of those ‘very plausible schemes … with very pleasing commencements, [that] have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.’”

– Milton Friedman, “Why the Freeze is a Mistake,” Newsweek, August 30, 1971.

“Individual price and wage changes will not be prevented. In the main, price changes will simply be concealed by taking the form of changes in discounts, service, and quality, and wage changes, in overtime, perquisites and so on…. But to whatever extent the freeze is enforced, it will do harm by distorting relative prices.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why the Freeze is a Mistake,” Newsweek, August 30, 1971.

“By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.”

– Milton Friedman, “Morality and Controls,” Newsweek, October 28, 1971.

Comment: Friedman’s criticism ranges from economics to civil liberty to human morality. Regarding oil and gas, quality changes could not compensate for such intervention, leading to physical shortages.

1970s Energy Crisis

“It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

“The present oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of government mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

“Lines are forming at those gas stations that are open. The exasperated motorists are cursing; the service-station attendants are fuming; the politicians are promising. The one thing few people seem to be doing is thinking….

“How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?”

– Milton Friedman, “FEO and the Gas Lines,” Newsweek, Marc 4, 1974.

“The long gasoline lines that suddenly emerged in 1974 after the OPEC oil embargo … and again in the spring and summer of 1979 after the revolution in Iran, [came after] a sharp disturbance in the supply of crude oil from abroad. But that did not lead to gasoline lines in Germany or Japan, which are wholly dependent on imported oil. It led to long gasoline lines in the United States, … for one reason and one reason only: because legislation, administered by a government agency, did not permit the price system to function.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 14.

“There is one simple way to end the energy crisis and gasoline shortages tomorrow—and we mean tomorrow and not six months from now, nor six years from now. Eliminate all controls on the prices of crude oil and other petroleum products.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 219.

Comment: Price controls on oil and on natural gas were removed in the 1980s, and markets went from shortage to surplus where they have been—with rare exceptions—ever since.

Milton and Rose Friedman explained prices controls and shortages in their most popular book, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 219:

Economists may not know much, but we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail. That is what New York City and, more recently, other cities have done for rental dwellings, and that is why they all suffer or will soon suffer from housing shortages. That is why there were so many shortages during World War II. That is why there is an energy crisis and a gasoline shortage.

Milton Friedman’s timeless energy insights should be appreciated for all time.

[1]“Oil and the Middle East,” Newsweek, June 26, 1967. Reprinted in Milton Friedman, An Economists Protest (Glen Ridge, NJ: Thomas Horton and Daughters, 1973), p. 21.

The post Milton Friedman on Energy appeared first on IER.