Environmental Economics

It's Greener in Dublin

The fairytale suburb where I live--Dublin, Ohio--has adopted the slogan "It's Greener in Dublin."  Now when the city mentions Green, they don't mean it in the environmentally friendly sense.  One of the reasons it's greener is we use a lot of fertilizer and weed-killers.  Located on the banks of the Scioto River (pronounced sigh-OH-ta) upstream from Columbus, all of that fertilizer has to go somewhere right? As they say, s*%t flows downstream:

Some suburban and West Side parents are being advised to not give their infants tap water to drink.

Water in Griggs Reservoir was found yesterday to have unsafe nitrate levels, Columbus officials announced last night at Columbus City Council.

But all is not lost--economics may be able to save the Scioto.

Quote of the day

"Let's quit the debate about whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes; let's just focus on technologies that deal with the issue," [President] Bush told workers at the Limerick Generating Station, a nuclear power plant here in Montgomery County. "Nuclear power will help us deal with the issue of greenhouse gases."

Horseshoe crabbing on my vacation is out

OK. So I'm planning my vacation and one morning I'd like to go horseshoe crabbing. Then, I hear that the daggone NJ Department of Environmental Protection has banned horseshoe crabbing for two years. Catch and release is fun too, but I like to bait my eel trap with those critters.

Would you be willing to pay $18,000 to kill an elk?

Rocky Mountain National Park has a problem.  Too many elk, not enough natural predators.  So park officials have developed a 20 year plan to thin the elk herd by 1,000 elk or so.  The cost?  $18,000,000. 

New factories for the natural monopoly

Utility plans exclude conservation:

[NC's] largest utilities say they'll need to spend more than $10 billion on three new nuclear reactors and two coal-burning plants to meet projected electricity demand within a decade.

But environmental groups say the utilities' forecasts leave out two key factors: conservation and alternative energy sources. Adding those to the mix could delay the need for new plants, they say.

Efficiency, Schmiciency

Pronounce THAT!

The non-corps study of the Army Corps of Engineers' NOLA levees finds fault with the levees. Being nitpicky, surprise, I find fault with parts of the article (New study of levees ...).

We haven't seen gas prices this low in a month

Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/fwd/wrgp.html

Did it require a federal investigation?

Or, could have we resolved this with about 45 minutes in an econ 101 class (which we did, all across the country)? From Gas Prices Legitimate ...

Despite suspicions among consumers about rapidly rising gasoline prices and record oil industry profits, a federal investigation concluded Monday that the jump at the pump over the last year had not been the result of unlawful price manipulation.

The Federal Trade Commission said the sharp increase in fuel costs was attributable to market forces — namely big drops in supply and production and runs on inventories after major damage to refineries, ports and pipelines. In a report that Congress ordered last year after hurricanes struck the nation's refining hub on the Gulf Coast, the commission found no evidence of price collusion or improper reductions of inventory or supplies to increase company profits.

"The evidence collected in this investigation indicated that firms behaved competitively," the commission said.

Introducing the Env-Econ Panic Scale

In browsing through some popular news sources, I noticed that the headlines for this year's NOAA hurricane predictions ranged from hysterical to subdued.  So I decided to rank the headlines on the new Env-Econ Panic Scale (EEPS).

EEPS scores range from 1 to 5 with 1 being a headline that soothes, and 5 signalling the end of the world as we know it.  So here we go:

The sky is falling...government 2006 hurricane forecasts are out

I know how much John likes hurricane forecasts, so I thought I would beat him to the punch.  The National Oceanic and Atmoshperic Administration's 2006 hurricane forecast is out and it's not pretty...but the experts are still arguing over the reason.