As I've been redesigning my professional web site a bit, it struck me that I should probably add a blog feature. Occasionally, it is useful to get one's thought on the internet—for the benefit mostly of the like-minded, but sometimes just as a therapeutic tool to rant and ramble and huff and puff about what is going on in the world. So if you can't help yourself to read what I write, please be my guest. Agree or disagree as you please.

What can you expect me to blog about? I think I will focus on the topics that are most on my mind: energy and the environment, international trade, and public policy. Now the last item opens the door pretty much to everything. As you may know, I have been advocating liberalization of marijuana policy in Canada, and I will explain why in a forthcoming blog. I will populate my blog also with a handful of older items that were e-mail communications and articles I put together for the Sauder School of Business web site.

My esteemed colleague and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman write a blog for the New York Times, probably read by thousands of followers. Well-informed and referenced, reading his column is always informative and never a waste of time. Naturally, the focus of his attention is often economic and social policy in the United States. If you want to follow blogs that take a distinctly Canadian perspective, I recommend the Globe and Mail's Economy Lab. Several of my Canadian economist colleaguges contribute to this. Note that some of these blogs require subscriptions. Another Canadian economics blog is Worthwhile Canadian Initiative with contributions from my colleagues Stephen Gordon, Nick Rowe, Mike Moffat, Frances Woolley, and Livio di Matteo.

I would also like to single out a blog from one of my Canadian colleagues who share my interest in the economics of energy and the environment: Professor Andrew Leach at the Alberta School of Business. You can follow his blog at andrewleach.ca.

You may wonder about the software I use for this blog. I have programmed a light-weight blog system that gives me full control over content and appearance, without a heavy-duty database system. The PHP script that powers this blog comes to about 400 lines of code, with another 150 lines of CSS. Simple does it.