Why to
care about biodiversity.
California/Oregon salmon fisheries are
in trouble.
More.
About
the high world price of rice. The
ups and downs of high food prices.
Why dams alone
do not fix water problems. An
elementary point about water that still seems too hard for some.
What if public schools
were abolished: There are decent public schools and terrible ones, so there is no use generalizing. Nor is there a need to trot out data on test scores. Let me just deal with economics. All studies have shown that average cost per pupil for public schools is twice that of private schools. A proposal to
radically improve (pdf) parental choice: Private school tuition is about half that of the average per pupil revenue of public schools. Private school tuition in Michigan averages about $2,500, with significant variation among schools. This amount is much less than half of the expenditures of the public school system, which is consistent with the national pattern. However, just as the per-pupil expenditure for public schools is a significant underestimate of the government school costs, private school tuition also underestimates private school costs. … Once all private and taxpayer-funded costs are included for both systems, the ratio of total public school costs to total private school costs is less clear, but is probably about 2:1.
The US’s oil reserves
may be a bit bigger than previously thought.
More.
Major political fight in Mexico
over the national oil company. The drilling of oil wells is
wildly unbalanced: In the entire history of the world oil industry, a total of 4.6 million wells have been drilled, with the US accounting for 3.2 million of those!
Africa is four times the size of the US (minus Alaska), yet in the last eight years there have been only 6,280 wells drilled on the continent while 209,400 have been drilled in the US.
There is undoubtedly as much oil in Africa undiscovered as there has been produced in the history of the world oil industry.
The same can be said for Latin America. As for the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has drilled only 1,000 wells in the past eight years, almost all of them production wells, not exploratory wells.
Iraq, with the second highest total amount of proven reserves - 110 billion bbl - has drilled only 100 wells over that period. A
suggested pattern in developing world oil production.