Economic analysis can promote environmental quality. By identifying subsidies, inefficiencies, and new opportunities, economists apply their powerful analytical tools to environmental ends. Yet despite its great potential, economic analysis has failed to improve environmental policy in many areas. Environmental regulators often ignore the importance of secure property rights and advocate regulatory “takings” of property with […]

Beneath Greater Yellowstone, powerful thermal energies relentlessly shift tectonic plates. The subsurface motion creates rifts and faults, occasionally volcanoes and earthquakes. The fundamental tensions are always there. The tectonic plates of culture and political economy are also shifting and generating profound tensions in the new American West. In Oregon and Idaho, hi-tech industries now provide […]