The New York Times’ Economix blog has an interesting post on the health implications of agricultural policy. Their take-home message? “Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that we’re supposed to eat less of.”
Economix cites a study by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Their writeup (actually from 2007) concludes:
The Farm Bill, a massive piece of federal legislation making its way through Congress, governs what children are fed in schools and what food assistance programs can distribute to recipients. The bill provides billions of dollars in …

Catherine Rampell, writing for The New York Time’s Economix blog on January 28, ably describes how the “Great Recession” will affect the employment situation for millions of Americans. Basically, many of the jobs lost will be lost for good:
Lots of the bloodletting we’ve seen in the labor market has probably been permanent, not just cyclical. Many employers have taken Rahm Emanuel’s famed advice — never waste a crisis — to heart, and have used this recession as an excuse to make layoffs that they would have eventually done anyway. Some economists …

Instructional, humorous, and applicable: this YouTube video screamed out to me, demanding that itself be posted on the CPR blog. I humbly complied (and highly recommend you watch).

One of the greatest hurdles to implementing widespread renewable energy installations is storing the power for when it is actually usable. For example, wind normally blows the most at night. I read a rather interesting article today in the EU Energy Policy Blog about an innovative (and rock solid) way of solve this, which is already being used across Europe:
The pump-storage technology allows the transformation of low-altitude water into high-altitude water using off-peak electricity, and then the production of electricity at peak periods releasing water through turbines like in any …

Critical to a productive conversation about energy in the United States is an understanding of what the current state of affairs exactly is. One of the best (and quickest) ways to do this is with Sankey Diagrams. Below are two diagrams of US energy flows, the first of which is from a 2007 Science article* by Whitesides and Crabtree (via Sankey Diagrams blog and Thoughts from Kansas). The second is from Energy Information Administration’s 2008 Annual Energy Review (via Sankey Diagrams blog).

The two most interesting conclusions for me are the …

Business and economic policy are tied to energy policy in more ways than we often care to admit. One of the more important of these in the upcoming years is the relationship between the value of the dollar compared to other currencies and the price of oil. Energy Outlook has done some interesting analysis on this. In a 2007 post, Energy Outlook summarizes the relationship between valuation of the dollar and crude oil prices:
So imagine a closed loop, and follow it around a cycle:

The value of the dollar drops.
Non-US demand …