Skip to Content

John Farrell

Minneapolis, MN
Commenter for
5 years 15 weeks

Recent Comments

Posted on 05/09/12 at 11:16 am in response to Needed to fix parking blight: Lots of trees

Provide shade for vehicles while generating electricity up above. A great idea as we transition to oil-free electric cars, too.

See this NY Times story for more: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/science/earth/26parking.html

Posted on 05/10/11 at 12:38 pm in response to The Deets: Is Target better than other stores at catching shoplifters?

Ed,

Target isn't better at catching shoplifters. The reason they have so many marks on the police report is that Target calls police and prosecutes every single shoplifting incident, at enormous public expense. Furthermore, they have more shoplifters because they are simply the largest retail presence in Longfellow.

You might want to read some of the material from my colleague Stacy Mitchell on the cost of big box retailers. Their use of police for every minor crime...

Posted on 01/07/11 at 07:51 am in response to Minnesota's renewable energy objectives are both arbitrary and impractical

I hardly think the law is either arbitrary or impractical. Coal is dirty and nuclear is expensive and this law drives the market toward sources of energy that are cleaner and cheaper.

Your handful of anecdotes hardly provide sufficient evidence to counter that.

Posted on 08/12/09 at 03:10 pm in response to Turning turkey poop into power

The only way Fibrowatt figured out how to make money from burning turkey poo was by getting a special subsidy at the legislature for their particular plant. (MN session laws 2000, Ch. 488).

You can read more about how 1) Minnesotans effectively pay twice as much to burn turkey litter as we do to use it for fertilizer, 2) we could have gotten far more renewable energy if we'd spent the same $/kilo-watt hour on wind turbines from this testimony on the 2000 bill:...

Posted on 02/01/08 at 01:55 pm in response to Are ethanol plants draining the state's water resources?

The water impact of ethanol production highlights the diseconomies of scale inherent in making biofuel production too large. In addition to pricing out farmer ownership and increasing transportation costs, the larger facilities draw substantially more water from the local supply. Disclaimer: we recently released a paper on the economies and diseconomies of scale in wind and ethanol production.

The small and mid-sized plants that made the industry a Minnesota mainstay and allowed...