For those of you who don’t know, Pandora is a free online radio service that plays music for users based on their individualized preferences.

Pandora is a wonderful, easy to use website.  To get started, you type in the name of one of your favorite songs or artists, and the radio begins playing similar music.  To fine tune the player, you can add more songs or artists, or mark a song with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to indicate your preferences.

Pandora is also very good at finding good music, for me at least.  When I initially went to Pandora, I typed in my favorite artist, Ben Kweller, and was instantly showered with some of my other favorite artists including Weezer, Ben Folds, and the Barenaked Ladies.  In addition, I discovered more great artists I had never heard of before including Sherwood, whose first CD “Sing But Keep Going,” is on my list of all time favorite CDs.

But due to pressure from the RIAA, Pandora, along with many other similar online radio services such as Last.fm and Slacker, may be shut down.  From Pandora’s Founder:

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

The Senate just voted to increase CAFE standards in a new energy bill. I guess doing this is better than nothing for reducing oil use, but there is a much better option available: a tax on gasoline.

Raising the CAFE standards creates some problems. Raising the standards is expensive, the standards are full of loopholes, and the penalty for violating the standards is virtually nothing for big automakers (Andrew Kleit, “CAFE Changes, by the Numbers,” Regulation 2002: 32-5.). On the plus side, the new CAFE standards would no longer create differing standards for cars and “light trucks” (i.e. SUVS).

A better “free market” solution would be to simply estimate the external cost of consuming a gallon of gasoline and tax gasoline by that amount so that gasoline can be purchased and sold efficiently. For example, gasoline should not be priced at merely the total cost of production plus a small tax. It should be priced at the entire cost of production, plus the cost of pollution, congestion, geopolitical instability, and any other costs that its consumption creates.

Do people root for political philosophies the same way they root for a sports team?  Ilya Somin @ the Volokh Conspiracy writes:

David Bernstein asks: “Why do people develop ‘religious’ beliefs about secular issues?” In this article, I provide an answer: Because, in most such cases, there is little incentive to learn the truth. The article focuses on political beliefs, where it is rational to be ignorant because there is so little chance that any individual vote will determine the outcome of an election. As a result, those citizens who do bother to acquire political information often do so for reasons other than the pursuit of truth. For example, they enjoy having their preexisting prejudices reinforced, “rooting” for their political “team” (much like sports fans enjoy rooting for the Red Sox or Yankees), or the like.

I’ve studied (briefly) the idea that people gain utility when their beliefs are reinforced in economics, and I feel that it is a very real concept.  People really don’t like to change their minds, which is perhaps why for maximum reinforcement, some individuals will often take the entire platform of a political party as their own, rather than thinking about every individual issue for themselves.  If you take every view of the right, you’re going to be pretty happy watching Fox News, or if you take every view of the left, you’ll really enjoy reading the New York Times.  If you’re somewhere in-between, you’re going to face resistance to your views, which makes many people feel uncomfortable (thus providing less utility).

From the New York Times (via my dad):

Google and Pacific Gas & Electrichave unveiled their vision of a future in which cars and trucks are partly powered by the country’s electric grids, and vice versa.

The companies displayed on Monday six Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrid vehicles modified to run partly on electricity from the power grid, allowing the vehicles to go up to 75 miles on a gallon of gas, nearly double the number of miles of a regular hybrid. They also modified one vehicle to give electricity back to the power company.

The highly unusual test takes the hybrid, which is now familiar on American roads, a step further by using extra batteries to hold energy made and distributed by a power company. The technology is eagerly awaited by energy experts and environmentalists, but is not yet ready to go commercial because the additional batteries are not yet durable enough.

I read about something like this during my sustainable transportation research.  The idea is that the car could charge during night when electricity is cheap and sell back any excess electricity during peak hours (leaving enough to drive to work and back and wherever else is needed).

I wrote an article a while ago about the downsides of producing ethanol as a transportation fuel.  These downsides, in short, are:

• Ethanol has a negative energy balance.  Ethanol from corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass requires 29%, 50%, and 57% more energy, respectively, to create the ethanol than the energy contained within the fuel.
• Because ethanol production requires a significant amount of energy, and most energy in the US is produced from coal, the small reduction in CO2 and other polluting emissions from burning ethanol versus gasoline will be more than offset by the power needed to produce the ethanol.
• Ethanol crops have a notoriously low energy yield per hectare.  Thus, it requires a large amount of land to produce a meaningful amount of ethanol.  Last year, 20% of the total corn crop was used to produce ethanol, and it offset only 1% of US oil use.

I don’t think that ethanol is a viable fuel of the future unless huge, unlikely technological advances are made.  But if we absolutely had to use ethanol, corn is not the biomass we should be using to produce it.