Environmental Economics

We're* official backers of The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change!

From the inbox (Yoram Bauman): 

Kickstarter: My latest project is The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, which I'm working on with Grady Klein (my co-author on the Cartoon Econ books) and the non-profit publisher Island Press. But we need your help to make it a reality... and in return we're offering up some awesome rewards, including a limited number of cameo appearances in the book itself! Check out the fun video and more at our Kickstarter page, and please help spread the word because we've only got a narrow window of time to reach our goal!

I watched the video, thought hard about it and ...

*Note: yes "we" ... you can stop wondering where those ad revenues are going.

Things I've learned about travel and England

I know many of you are wondering to yourself 'Where is Tim and why hasn't he posted in a few days.  I enjoy Tim's posts so much more than John's."  Well, I'm in England (Plymouth to be precise) for a three day workshop on trends in U.S. and U.K. appraches to ecosystem valuation--I'm representing the U.S. perspective in case you were wondering.  Anyway, I will have more on the workshop later, but for now I wanted to give you things I've learned about traveling to England.  Please keep in mind, as if you needed reminding, I am a stupid American.  

Thoughts (In chronological order):

• Getting up at 3:30AM to catch a flight sucks.
• Getting up at 3:30AM to catch a flight after staying up until 12:00AM the previous night sucks more.
• Getting up at 3:30AM to catch a flight after staying up until 12:00AM the previous night on the night when the the U.S. decides to still observe daylight savings time (or goes off daylight savings time, I can never keep that straight) sucks worse.
• Getting up at 3:30AM to catch a flight after staying up until 12:00AM the previous night on the night when the the U.S. decides to still observe daylight savings time (or goes off daylight savings time, I can never keep that straight) only to learn upon landing at Dulles airport that your flight to London has been cancelled...well you can fill the rest in.
• Twelve hours in an airport is boring.
• I can actually sleep on a plane.
• But I chose to first watch a movie (The Life of Pi), because 1) it was free and 2) I'm stupid.
• At Heathrow airport they make you walk approximately 5K (3.1 miles American--see how I slipped in the European metric there?) to get to customs.  That's a long way after sleeping only 5 hours total in the previous 48.
• Paddington Station does look like the kind of place a cuddly bear in a blue raincoat would really want to hang out.
• People in Paddington Station seem as though they are all in a hurry.
• Everything around Paddington Station looks the same.  It is hard to tell the houses from the hotels from the dentist office.
• Light switches--down is on, up is off? Can we get a little uniformity please?
• You have to turn on the outlets or your computer, cell phone and ipad won't charge.  Just sayin'.
• You have to turn on the outlets?
• Again, Down is on, up is off.
• Even if a shower has a faucet on the wall, and even if you stand to the side, it doesn't mean that if you turn on the water you won't get an unexpected freezing shower from the other facucet on the ceiling.
• The open bus tour is a great way to see London if you only have a few hours.
• Correct that.  The open bus is a great way to see London if you only have a few hours and it is above 0 degrees Celsius (That's 32F for you Americans).  Otherwise, it's freaking cold up there.
• A lot of buildings in London are very old and remind me of that movie Mary Poppins or those books by that Charles Dickens guy.
• Fish and Chips is really just fried fish and French Fries.  I think they named it something fancy to trick us stupid Americans.
• Riding trains is fun.  Especially if you have a backwards seat.
• Sheep.  A lot of them. Just an observation from the window of the train.
• Not sure why England has a reputation for dreary weather with sunsets like this...

PhD Comics: Budget Sequestration Explained

Source: PhD Comics

Thank goodness

I was having trouble sleeping at night:

According to reports from across the nation, all 315 million residents of the United States exhaled in relief and expressed a contented sense of reassurance Friday on news that the ExxonMobil Corporation had recorded nearly $45 billion in profits last year. “Oh, thank God!” said visibly relieved part-time drug store cashier Helen Gregory of Youngstown, OH, who called the oil and gas multinational’s total revenues of $483 billion “deeply comforting” and “a true blessing,” echoing the sentiments of every other American from coast to coast. “I can’t tell you how good it is to know that the world’s largest corporation is still unimaginably profitable. Now I can finally get some sleep and stop worrying.” In spite of ExxonMobil’s positive earnings report, every single person nationwide confided a slight sense of disappointment that the company’s annual profits were only the second-highest in corporate history.

via www.theonion.com

Being uncritical and a bit dim, I found the cartoon funny!

Adaptation is not a panacea:

The NY Times has some talented people on payroll.  Brian McFadden creates great cartoons. Below, I reproduce one from today and critique the substance of his cartoon.   Similar to others at the NY Times, he needs to consult his econ 101 notes. ...

Note the guy in the upper middle right panel who is eating a rock. While that's funny, McFadden forgets that international trade in agricultural products guarantees that this 99% dude won't have to eat a rock.  His local supermarket will continue to be filled with tasty affordable stuff. It will just be grown elsewhere in the world as climate patterns shift.  

via greeneconomics.blogspot.com

There is more truth to the rock than Matt acknowledges. Climate change will likely make the food less tasty and more expensive in areas where agricultural quality falls. But, adding to the criticism, lower income people in areas where climate change improves agricultural productiving might eat better at lower cost. 

The stand-up economist at the 2013 AEA Humor Session

Hyperinflation in Hell ... by Yoram Bauman, Ph.D., "the world's first and only stand-up economist".

Black ops

From the inbox:

Status: red
Services Affected: ALL Virtual Machines and Services
Impact to Campus: (Service) is currently unavailable due to an unplanned service interruption.
Planned Operation:
Additional Information: At ~ 5:00pm, ITS has begun the process of shutting down all systems attached to the failed storage in preparation for executing the vendor recovery plan. During this preparation, it has become apparent there are additional underlying issues associated with the virtualization hosts. Because of this, and in an effort to meet our specified time objective, ITS will need to take down all systems and services on the virtualization hosts, including those services previously identified as migrated and stable. These services will need to remain down until until all storage is stabilized. This will likely be sometime on Thursday morning, with our objective being prior to start of business and our focus being on ASUlearn and core services first.

ITS realizes the impact this will have on our services and mission, but at this point it is a necessary cost to restore the services in the most expedient and stable manner.

I'm sure some jackbooted thug will bust my door down if I make fun of this email, but really? Who is writing this thing? Am I in an episode of 24?

And please note that this is very serious. AsULearn is our course management software. I have two problem sets that students can't get access to. 

Anyway, I'm gonna shut down all systems too. 

The effects of recession on outdoor recreation

Subsistence hunting and fishing is an inferior good:

There’s definitely an interesting socioeconomic analysis to be done on the ways in which certain activities that were once deadly earnest attempts to gather food came, in an era of relative caloric abundance, to be luxury pastimes instead. But I’m hard-pressed to explain how Snuffy and Lukey, who never had any kind of job when times were flush, have had their lives affected by extra-Holler financial crises. Perhaps there’s less demand for chickens, Hootin’ Holler’s sole export, which means there are fewer chickens for the two old rascals to steal? More likely, “th’ economic downturn” refers not to anything that would affect us flatlanders, but rather to some apocalyptic event that severed the last tenuous economic tendril connecting Hootin’ Holler to the outside world, leaving its isolated residents with no option but to turn back to the forests and streams for sustenance. This crisis presumably happened decades ago, and so what we’re seeing here is a prequel strip showing the genesis of the Snuffy Smithiverse as we’ve come to know it.

via joshreads.com

Flatlanders don't unnerstand.

Black (bear) markets

The Comics Curmugeon:

Gosh, what are our sheep-killing, camera-stealing, Rusty-menacing doofuses up to now? Just a little light illegal organ harvesting, that’s all! Say, what do you suppose those “other parts” the dark-haired fellow is referring to might be? (SPOILER: Probably aphrodisiacal bear penis.) I also like the way this fellow carefully explains to his friend why his bear-bagging idea is so potentially lucrative. You’d think he’d already know this, but maybe not? “Black market? I … I thought we would just go out and hunt for the sport of it. You know, you and me, in the wilderness, testing ourselves against nature, really getting to know each other … God, I feel like such a fool.”

Someone told me that if you follow the second link you'll learn that a "fortune" is no more than $5000:

A bear gall bladder can fetch up to $5,000 on the black market ... where at least some people believe it contains medicinal qualities.

Project Mayhem

As employment stagnates, manufacturing continues its slump, and overall confidence in the U.S. financial system wavers, the nation's economists have begun abandoning their homes and sending their loved ones overseas. "We've noticed a trend among the leading economic thinkers, be they Keynsians, supply-siders, or students of the Austrian school—they're putting their families on one-way flights out of the country, often leaving half-finished survival bunkers behind them," Paul Klement, an analyst with the Brookings Institute, told reporters Tuesday. "The flights aren't on domestic carriers, either. I think they saw something in that last transportation industry report that really spooked them." At press time, none of the nation's economists could be reached for comment.

via www.theonion.com

The AEA's evacuation order suggested that we regroup on a secret oyster shell barter island in the south Pacific (and proceed to argue over minutiae whilst getting rich and destroying the simplest of barter economies).