Is a renewable natural gas plant more than a pipe dream?

HERE’S a case in which the municipal bond market may help confound the experts.

The experts, you may recall, were confounded by the price of oil. By now, oil should be selling for $110 a barrel, right? Instead, oil has flirted with the $55 a barrel level.

Then there’s the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season. This year there were five hurricanes and four tropical storms, the fewest since 1997. How many of the experts thought that this year’s season would trump last year’s record 28 storms, and wreak havoc along the fragile, rebuilding Gulf Coast? The experts are just as convinced that we are due to drown in our own animal waste. Remember all those stories published and televised earlier this year about vast hog farms in the Carolinas that produced enormous reservoirs of waste, fouling the atmosphere and polluting the groundwater? The thing that unites all these stories is that they are usually framed as inevitabilities: this is horrible and there’s nothing we can do about it.