Health risks from poor malaria control, unsafe water, and indoor air pollution are responsible for an important share of the global disease burden—and they can be addressed by efficacious household health technologies that have existed for decades. However, coverage rates of these products among populations at risk remain disappointingly low. We conducted a review of the medical and public health literatures and found that health considerations alone are rarely sufficient motivation for households to adopt and use these technologies. In light of these findings, we argue that health education and persuasion campaigns by themselves are unlikely to be adequate. Instead, health policymakers and professionals must understand what users value beyond health and possibly reengineer health technologies with these concerns in mind.

This paper summarizes the lessons learned from implementing a realistic, game-based simulation of California’s electricity market with a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fixed-price forward financial contracts for energy. Sophisticated market participants competed to maximize their returns under stressed (high carbon price) market conditions. Our simulation exhibited volatile carbon prices that could be influenced by strategic behavior of market participants. General uncertainty around carbon price as well as the deployment of strategies that were privately profitable but adversely affected overall market efficiency resulted in total costs of electricity supply that were significantly higher than would have been observed in perfectly competitive allowance and electricity markets. 

We observed several striking phenomena in our game. First, all teams in our game found themselves in a position to prefer higher carbon prices, even those holding high-emitting power plants. This occurred both because electricity price rose faster with carbon price than the average variable cost of producing output for most teams and because the initial allowance allocations functioned as “free money” with a face value that could be increased through the unilateral actions of market participants. Second, teams exercised unilateral market power on both selling and buying sides of the carbon allowance market, with the net effect being a carbon price far above that which would have been expected based on allowance supply and demand in a perfectly competitive market. Third, disagreement among teams over the appropriate price of carbon allowances combined with the exercise of unilateral market power in both electricity and allowance markets dramatically increased electricity prices and often resulted in the use of a more expensive set of generation units to produce the electricity demanded.  Numerous authors have pointed out that electricity markets are extremely susceptible to the exercise of market power, and emissions allowance markets can exacerbate this problem, as demonstrated in Kolstad and Wolak (2008). Fourth, there was very little liquidity in the secondary market for carbon allowances until right before the final emissions “true-up,” with a flurry of trading at the last minute, which resulted in inefficient market outcomes as several trades failed to be completed before the deadline.

These findings have several important policy implications. First, policy measures that increase the transparency and liquidity of the carbon allowance market would make both the allowance market and the electricity market work better. In our simulation, all market participants showed a strong unilateral desire to limit the amount of information publicly available about conditions in the carbon market, much to the detriment of market performance. Second, guardrails that constrain market outcomes, such as price floors and ceilings, can play a valuable role by limiting carbon price volatility.  Third, position and holding limits can reduce the ability and incentive of market participants to attempt strategies that, while privately profitable, have a negative impact on overall market efficiency.

Abstract

We compare the cost of generating electricity with coal and wind in Chile’s Central Interconnected System (SIC). Our estimates include the cost of marginal damages caused by coal plant emissions.

On average, we estimate that the levelized cost of coal, including externalities, is $84/MWh. It is efficient to abate emissions of air pollutants (SO_x, NO_x and PM_2.5) but not of CO₂. Then the cost wrought by environmental externalities equals $23/MWh, or 27% of total cost. Depending on the price of coal, the levelized cost of coal may vary between $72 and $99/MWh.

The levelized cost of wind is $144/MWh with capacity factors of 24%. This cost includes the cost of backup capacity to maintain acceptable loss of load probability (LOLP), which equals $13/MWh or 9% of total cost. The levelized cost of wind varies between $107/MWh with capacity factors of 35% to $217/MWh with capacity factors of 15%.

We conclude that wind is competitive only when it achieves capacity factors around 35% and coal prices are very high. So far the average annual capacity factor achieved by existing wind farms in Chile has been less than 20%, which suggests why wind has developed only slowly.

Abstract

Over the past century peak oil forecasts have had a profound influence on US national security policy.  Unquestioned acceptance of a variety of oil scarcity forecasts, all of which proved wrong, repeatedly led policymakers to assume that rival powers sought to seize dwindling supplies.  Perennial expectation of resource conflict gradually elevated the perceived importance of Middle East (ME) oil, which was thought to be the last left on earth.  In response, increasingly aggressive US policies were adopted to secure a US share of ME oil.  Belief in a scarcity imperative for aggressive policy is here called “oil scarcity ideology.” Over the course of three iterations of the scarcity syndrome from 1909 to 1980, pre-emptive action to avert scarcity became a national security norm. 

During the 1970s Cold War scarcity ideology became particularly complex and dangerous.  Widespread belief in a new generation of peak oil forecasts engendered fear that an Arab oil weapon could cripple the US economy.  Even more ominously, the CIA forecast an impending Soviet production collapse.  From these two forecasts security experts inferred that an oil-starved USSR would try to seize Iranian oil production by force.  If the Soviets were not deterred by President Carter’s verbal warning against such action, some security experts urged that the US must launch its own invasion, occupying Iran’s oilfields to preempt the Soviets from seizing them.  If conventional force failed to halt the Red Army, the US must resort to nuclear war. In conjuring this oil-marauding USSR from scarcity ideology, security policymakers actively disregarded a great deal of market information indicating that global production would not soon peak and that Soviet production would not soon collapse.  The non-apocalyptic outlook was shared by a large cohort of market analysts, academics and government agencies.  Nonetheless, the National Security Council (NSC) was able to persuade the President to proclaim that the US would use unlimited force to protect Persian Gulf oil supply.  Carter’s threat, now known as the Carter Doctrine, has rationalized Persian Gulf force projection ever since.

The essay plan is as follows.  I first describe early iterations of the scarcity syndrome that recurred around the 20^th century World Wars.  In both iterations, scientists and high officials of the Department of the Interior convinced national security policymakers that (i) US oil would soon run out, (ii) that Western Hemisphere supply could not meet the shortfall, therefore (iii) aggressive policies were required to wrest a share of ME oil from rival powers.  I then describe how peak oil theories advanced during WW2 formed the basis of Cold War scarcity ideology, in which the Soviet Union played the rival’s role. Finally, I consider implications of this historical record for international security theory.  My research utilizes two sources not widely available, (i) recently declassified documents from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and (ii) the historic petroleum trade journal collection of The University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library.