Environmental Economics

Marine Resource Economics listed in SSCI

From the inbox:

APRIL 2008
MARINE RESOURCE ECONOMICS LISTED IN
SOCIAL SCIENCES CITATION INDEX® - WEB OF SCIENCE

Marine Resource Economics is now listed among the following Thomson Scientific products:

Social Sciences Citation Index® (Web of Science)
Science Citation Index Expanded™ (Web of Science)
Current Contents®/Social and Behavioral Sciences
Current Contents®/Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences

The Web of Science provides seamless access to current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from approximately 8,700 of the most prestigious, high-impact research journals in the world.  Users can also navigate to electronic full-text journal articles. http://scientific.thomson.com/products/wos/

Current Contents Connect® is a multidisciplinary current awareness Web resource providing access to complete bibliographic information from over 8,000 of the world's leading scholarly journals and more than 2,000 books.  http://scientific.thomson.com/products/ccc/

AS AN AUTHOR THIS MEANS:

• Increased visibility and citation of your work
• Elevated recognition and status of your research

Marine Resource Economics is the leading journal covering a range of natural resource use and economic and policy issues in the global marine environment

"The Demand for Gasoline Slopes Down"

Via Market Power:

Via Fark:

Dozens of drivers made a mad rush for cheap gas after a station employee accidentally changed the price to 33 cents a gallon. An employee closing Trig's Minocqua Shell for the night meant to drop the price of gas by 1 cent.

But he mistakenly dropped a nine from the $3.299 a gallon in the computer, making the price of gas .329 cents Monday night.

He left about 10 p.m., but drivers could still use their credit cards to buy gas.

Those that did got a bargain, and word spread fast.

Forty-two people bought 586 gallons of gas in an hour and 45 minutes.

...For that many people to be at a rural, northern Wisconsin gas station after 10 p.m. is highly unusual, she said.

Blackbeard

Officials plan to raise presumed Blackbeard cannon:

State underwater archaeologists plan to raise a cannon Monday from a sunken ship that could have belonged the pirate Blackbeard.

They plan to raise the roughly 8-foot-long cannon weighing about 2,500 pounds as part of an ongoing excavation project at the presumed site of Queen Anne's Revenge.

The cannon would be on display Wednesday for the public at the N.C. Maritime Museum expansion site at Gallants Channel in Beaufort.

The current three-month expedition began in August and is expected to recover thousands of artifacts.

Historians believe the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground in Beaufort Inlet in June 1718. State archaeologists have researched the shipwreck for 10 years, but are still waiting to find an indisputable link to Blackbeard.

Here is some background on the "presumed" Blackbeard's cannon.

The 'bridge to nowhere' is going nowhere

I wrote that headline, realized there must be dozens of other identical headlines out there, used The Google and found this one from an Alaska TV station. Anyway, last week the State of Alaska decided the bridge money would be better used elsewhere (Alaska seeks alternative to bridge plan):

Some called it a bridge to the future. Others called it the bridge to nowhere.

On Friday, Alaska decided the bridge really was going nowhere, officially abandoning the project in Ketchikan that became a national symbol of federal pork barrel spending.

See below for my attempt at a benefit estimate for the $400 million bridge.

Field Research

In keeping with the tradition of keeping the general public aware of how hard we (environmental economists) work - here's what I did this evening.

This work is tough, but someone has to do it.

The General

The art of conservation

I'm not much of an art buff, and I can't stand snooty artsy types--you know who you are.  But if I had to pick a favorite current artist it would have to be Hawaiian native Wyland:

Marine Life Artist Wyland has earned the distinction as one of America’s most unique creative influences, and a leading advocate for marine resource conservation. An accomplished painter, sculptor, photographer, writer, and SCUBA diver, he has traveled the farthest reaches of the globe for more than twenty-five years, capturing the raw power and beauty of the undersea universe.

Most big cities proudly display Wyland's work in the form of a 'whaling wall.' 

I'm going to Hilton Head

Field Research. To most, these two words suggestion rest and relaxation. But no, to me, it suggests a trip away from the office to investigate first hand the types of environments and activities that  environmental economists must thoroughly understand in order to develop realistic models. You may not have a deep understanding of the econometric models, ahem, but if you go to the beach often enough you might actually understand beachy behavior. Hence, I'm preparing for a beach trip. No heavy blogging but I will be sharing some pictures from last weeks field research (e.g., a bison's ass) and some beach pictures (e.g., Hilton Head's 2006-07 beach nourishment project).

Oyster Reef Restoration: Good Intentions, Bad Results

From the unintended consequences file:

Divers began removing up to 2 million old tires from the ocean floor [off Florida] Monday after a plan in the 1970s to create the world's largest artificial tire reef became an ecological disaster.

The well-intentioned idea was to create new marine habitat and alternate dive sites. The plan also served to dispose of tires that were clogging landfills.

But little sea life formed on the tires dumped about a mile offshore in 1972. Some of the bundles bound together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor and washing up on beaches. Others are wedging up against the nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.

Which reminds me of the following conclusion drawn by three esteemed environmental economists* in a 2004 report to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation regarding the public willingness to pay for oyster reef restoration programs in the Chesapeake Bay...

Oregon Inlet Bridge

Awhile back I mentioned the new Oregon Inlet bridge options: the long expensive one and the shorter inexpensive one. The state DOT had a public meeting out there on the Outer Banks:

The first alternative is the 17.5-mile Pamlico Sound Bridge that would stretch from Oregon Inlet to just north of Rodanthe. The bridge would consist of two 12-foot lanes along with two eight-foot shoulder lanes. The projected costs for the Pamlico Sound Bridge is $933 million to $1.4 billion.

The second alternative is a parallel bridge which is a 2.7-mile bridge just west of the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge that would stretch from Oregon Inlet to Pea Island. This alternative also would include two 12-foot lanes plus two eight-foot shoulder lanes. The cost of the parallel bridge is $260 million to $309 million.

But then ... bah ha ha ha ha ha (evil laugh):

I don't disagree with this editorial

Building houses closer to the water on an eroding, yet nourished, ocean beach sounds like a dumb idea to me. But that is just me, and I've been known to do some dumb things while thinking that they were smart.

So, I read some articles in the Wilmington Star News last week and didn't really (a) understand, (b) fathom, (c) comprehend, or (d) all of the above that the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission (the quasi-government agency that usually upholds North Carolina's ban on beach hardening) would really allow foolish (in a long term sense) construction.

Read the editorial if you don't believe a guy who has done dumb things himself (yet, my dumb things usually don't involve hundreds of thousands of dollars):

Hundreds of new houses could rise on North Carolina's renourished beaches in coming years, making lot owners and tax collectors as happy as clams in an incoming tide. The question is how long the houses can stand in that tide.