

Justin Trudeau Talks Climate Policy (finally)
A version of this post was published by the Globe and Mail here Justin Trudeau has just come out and said that carbon pricing should be left to the provinces. You could almost hear the economists groan as seemingly another party leader talked crazy on climate policy. But the federal government deferring to provincial climate policy may now be the right approach for the federation. First some background on why mainstream economists would flunk a political leader advocating a p

That zany Obama gets crazy on oil and gas
For about a year now there have been rumblings that Obama is getting serious about methane GHGs from oil and gas. For a while it was unclear just exactly what the US was contemplating. But today's report in the New York Times indicates that the Obama administration is considering methane targets for upstream oil and gas to be -45% below 2012 by 2025. Fugitive emissions, which are essentially methane, are a big deal in the Canadian oil and gas sector, with about 35% of the sec