Environmental Economics

Day 1 on the frontier

Just a quick update of day 1 on the frontier:

Plane left Columbus on time--arrived in Baltimore 1 hour late.  Flew in circles.  Dinner with Mom and Dad.  Got to hotel in DC around 9:00.  Found out my coauthor and presenter of our paper had a cancelled flight and was driving from Columbus--in weather bad enough to shutdown Reagan National and Dulles airports.  Panic sets in, because he has all of the presentation stuff and I have no idea what he planned to say.  Luckily he made it.  We kick off the conference at 8:30 AM--because we are first on the frontier--pure coincidence, trust me.  Common theme for the day pops up immediately--"this stuff is really complicated, do we really need this much complication? " Economists are protective of their assumptions--and get a little defensive when those assumptions are questioned--especially by one of their own. Everything turned out OK, we survived intact.

More details later.  Gotta go to dinner with a bunch of people a lot smarter than me.  Always a good time!

Oregon Inlet

The State of NC subsidizes a commercial fishing port in Wanchese, NC. Commercial fishermen need to pass through Oregon Inlet to get to Wanchese, but it is dangerous so they'll usually go to the port in Hampton Roads, VA. Here is an example of the danger (Trawler runs aground ...):

The ship was an 87-foot trawler called the Lady Helen, the spoil some 100,000 pounds of croaker. And the plunderers - they were gulls and brown pelicans, dozens of them feeding on the losses of three commercial fishermen.

The boat hailed from Carteret County but was headed for Wanchese on Wednesday night after two profitable days at sea.

It was almost there, too, but struck bottom in Oregon Inlet, a waterway known for its quick currents and ever-shifting shoals. With holes ripped along its port side, the boat began taking on water.

Google Reader

I got tired of missing great posts (and being able to steal them) at the other environmental economics blogs so I've been trying to join the blog-world this week with an RSS (Really Simple Sindication) reader. Google Reader has turned out to be the easiest for me to figure out. It's much easier than going to our blogroll and clicking the blogs that I want to check and then reading a bunch of posts. Now I can easily check other blogs every day, read the headlines and a snippet (and click on the link if I want to read the whole thing) or the whole thing depending on how the feed is set up. Here are the blogs in my Google Reader right now:

• Ecological Economics
• Environmental Valuation and Cost-Benefit News
• Globalization and the Environment
• Knowledge Problem
• Oikos
• The Commons Blog
• WSJ Energy Roundup

The other blogs on our blogroll don't provide RSS feeds. Come on guys and gals, get with it! I also noticed that some of the blogs on our blogroll don't reciprocate ... I'd say shame on you but due to time and energy constraints we don't always reciprocate either (our policy is to list only blogs almost totally focused on environmental/ecological/energy economics).

Stern Review seminar video at RFF

I haven't found this on YouTube yet:

The seminar hosted by RFF provided a rare public opportunity in the United States for members of the Stern team and outside experts to discuss and answer questions about the methods and conclusions of the Stern Review and the economic analysis of climate change more generally. Alex Bowen, senior economic adviser to the Stern Review, provided an overview of the benefit-cost analysis undertaken in the report. Jake Jacoby, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and Joe Aldy, fellow at RFF, commented on the Stern Review, discussing the application of benefit-cost analysis in this report and the use of such analysis to inform policy design and implementation. The seminar closed with a panel discussion guided by audience questions.

Scroll to the bottom of the above link for the videos. I'm waiting until Saturday night to watch ... popcorn and a crackling fire!

I'm off to the frontier

Warning, self-aggrandizing below.

I'm heading out this weekend to Washington D.C.  On Monday and Tuesday, I'll be participating in the Frontiers of Environmental Economics Conference put on by Resources for the Future.  I hope to keep a running diary of the happenings--full of my usual charm and wit and inside poop--and will post whenever possible. 

For those interested, the program and papers from the conference can be downloaded here. 

From the conference web-site:

Alan Krupnick, an RFF senior fellow, notes that these papers present innovative ideas that have the potential to change the orientation of environmental economics - moving this subdiscipline into new frontiers - and ultimately contribute to improving public policy. "The papers chosen for this conference survived an intense international competition," Krupnick said. "We believe they represent some of the most forward-looking and provocative thinking about our field, and we are particularly pleased that several are cross-disciplinary in nature."

PS:  If there are any Env-Econ readers in the audience Monday or Tuesday, I fully expect you to start any questions with "Env-Econ.net is my favorite site on the web, so I'm wondering...."  If this doesn't happen at least once, I will consider my work here a failure.

990 pound squids sound yummy

From the AP:

A New Zealand fishing boat has caught what could prove to be the world’s biggest known colossal squid, said the New Zealand fisheries minister, Jim Anderton. The squid — colossal is its species name, or more scientifically, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni — an estimated 990 pounds and 39 feet long, about the length of a school bus, took two hours to land in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. ... “This is going to draw phenomenal interest,” said Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at the Auckland University of Technology. “If calamari rings were made from the squid, they would be the size of tractor tires.”

Krugman on climate change

Sorry, the full piece is in Times Select ($), but here is how it starts ... and ends:

The factual debate about whether global warming is real is, or at least should be, over. The question now is what to do about it.

...

But California’s experience shows that serious conservation is a lot less disruptive, imposes much less of a burden, than the skeptics would have it. And the fact that a state government, with far more limited powers than those at Washington’s disposal, has been able to achieve so much is a good omen for our ability to do a lot to limit climate change, if and when we find the political will.

Trying to deal with my pig poop fixation

From the WSJ Energy Roundup:

“The question…is how do you achieve your goal of less dependence on oil without breaking your…hog farmers?” [President Bush] said. “Here’s how: You develop new technologies that will enable you to make ethanol from wood chips, or stalk grass or agriculture waste.”

EPA releases U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Report)

In honor of today's release of the draft Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2005--you are invited to comment on the report here--I spent some time today browsing (or was it perusing) the WRI Earthtrends Database.  I'm not sure what the two have to do with each other, but somehow one lead to the other, but for the life of me I can't remember why.  Anyway, here's a question:

Q:  Which region do you think is the most efficient producer of carbon dioxide emissions?  Here I define efficiency as C02 emissions per U.S. equivalent dollar of GDP.

A: Below the jump.

Teaching evaluations

I just received my Fall 2006 teaching evaluations and I'm flipping through my junior level environmental economics class written comments. The first question asks: Please use the space below to identify what you perceive as the real strengths and weaknesses of: (a) This course. Here are two comments:

Comment #1: Good class discussions on current environmental topics.

Comment #2: Could have talked more about actual events.