Environmental Economics

Quote of the Day--For once, it's not my fault edition

From the Washington Post:

"I have heard time and again that a husband goes out and puts the bulb into the house, thinking he is doing a good thing....Then, the CFL bulb is changed back out by the women. It seems that women are much more concerned with how things look. We are the nesters."

Wendy Reed, director of the federal government's Energy Star campaign explaining why American households have been slower to adopt compact flourescent lightbulbs than most developed countries*.

*as you'll recall I took the CFL plunge sometime back--and my wife hasn't switched them back yet.  What's taking the rest of you so long?

Economist's View excerpts Larry Summers on climate change

I, in turn, excerpt Economist's View:

Larry Summers begins a series of two columns on approaches to solving the global warming problem. In this column, he looks at potential pitfalls with existing plans as embodied in the Kyoto protocol, and in the next he'll examine other approaches with more attractive features, but which presently have less political momentum:

Girl Economist, we were just getting to know you

The Redheaded Chick is signing off:

There comes a time when one has to cut their losses and recognize when she is doing a poor job. The truth of the matter is that I just can't keep up with this blog in a meaningful way. Teaching at an institution with a high teaching load, being on tenure track, and eagerly waiting for an adoption referral and preparing for a baby just take up too much of my energy right now. I wish I had something interesting and witty to add to the blogosphere, but right now I don't. So for now, I need to say "so long".

The good news is that there are lots of great, great blogs out there. Environmental Economics is my personal favorite, and the most relevant for what I do. Greg Mankiw posts often and posts broadly...I highly recommend the blog to economics students and anyone interested in general economic issues.

I hope to get back to this one day. In the meantime, I wish you all well.

We wish you well too!

More Pi Gamma Mu post-mortem

Here is the thank you letter from my congratulatory address:

On behalf of the officers and members of the North Carolina Epsilon chapter of Pi Gamma Mu, the International Social Science Honor Society, I wish to express our appreciation to you for participating in the April 2007 induction and delivering the congratulatory address.

Given the range of social sciences included in this organization (anthropology, criminal justice, economics, geography, history, political science, psychology, sociology, and social work), you had quite a challenge in making inclusive your remarks concerning the societal problems facing and opportunities awaiting those students who have an academic background in the study of these fields. By using your expertise in environmental economics as your frame of reference, then posing questions based upon reflection of contemporary scenarios, you were able to capture the imagination and make one think about the application of more than one social science to a particular problem.    —  and all with a sense of wonder and a dose of humor!!!

Hey, they used the word "humor." Maybe my jokes WERE interpreted as jokes!

I've read the abstract of a new climate change paper in the AER

From my March 2007, The American Economic Review CD (note: the AER is a top-3 economics journal):

The Economic Impacts of Climate Change: Evidence from Agricultural Output and Random Fluctuations in Weather

By OLIVIER DESCHENES AND MICHAEL GREENSTONE

This paper measures the economic impact of climate change on US agricultural land by estimating the effect of random year-to-year variation in temperature and precipitation on agricultural profits. The preferred estimates indicate that climate change will increase annual profits by $1.3 billion in 2002 dollars (2002$) or 4 percent. This estimate is robust to numerous specification checks and relatively precise, so large negative or positive effects are unlikely. We also find the hedonic approach—which is the standard in the previous literature—to be unreliable because it produces estimates that are extremely sensitive to seemingly minor choices about control variables, sample, and weighting.

Who said it?

Welcome to a new Env-Econ game: Who said it?  Submit your answer and reason in the comments.  Anyone with the correct answer will receive a laurel and hardy handshake and a complemetary ticket to Env-Econ: The Musical when it is released.  Here's the quote:

"This is a contemptible, weasel-worded attempt to gag scientific criticism, and it won't work...I don't believe they're interested in quality control when it comes to the reporting of science -- so long as it's on their side."

The possible answers:

1. Environmental Activist and Politician Al Gore in response to members of the Bush Administration criticism of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
2. Director Mark Durkin in response to members of the British Royal Society's criticism of his documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle."
3. Env-Econ co-founder John Whitehead in response to an anonymous referee's criticism of his recently published paper "Temporal reliability of willingness to pay from the national survey of fishing, hunting and wildlife-associated recreation."

Update:  Reader Nick wins the Env-Econ non-prize pack for correctly identifying Martin (Mark) Durkin as the correct answer.  Read below the jump for more from the language artiste who is Durkin...

WARNING: If you are offended by naughty words, don't read below the jump.

The grand canyon

Public remains split on response to warming:

Americans in large bipartisan numbers say the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is having serious effects on the environment now or will soon and think that it is necessary to take immediate steps to reduce its effects, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.
...

When it comes to specific steps to foster conservation or produce more energy, the public is deeply torn, the poll found. Respondents said they would support higher gasoline prices to reduce dependence on foreign oil but would oppose higher prices to combat global warming.

By large margins, respondents opposed an increase in pump prices of $2 a gallon, or even $1, to deal with environmental and energy-supply concerns. Three-quarters said they would be willing to pay more for electricity generated by renewable sources like solar or wind energy.

...
The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Friday to Tuesday with 1,052 adults. The margin-of-sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

A publication story

I presented the origins of a paper that came to be titled "Temporal reliability of willingness to pay from the national survey of fishing, hunting and wildlife-associated recreation" at the AFS meetings in Charlotte in 1999 (co-author Richard Aiken). We submitted it for publication and received a revise and resubmit from Human Dimensions of Wildlife. We did much work, resubmitted and were requested then to write a completely different paper (were the referees of different mind or of different people?). Time to try another journal ...

I got drunk again last night....must be global warming*

Anyone else worried that we're starting to see a trend of every natural phenomenon being blamed on climate change? 

Over the past two months, farmers in three parts of Taiwan have reported most of their bees gone, the Chinese-language United Daily News reported. Taiwan's TVBS television station said about 10 million bees had vanished in Taiwan.

[...]

"You can see climate change really clearly these days in Taiwan," said Yang Ping-shih, entomology professor at the National Taiwan University. He added that two kinds of pesticide can make bees turn "stupid" and lose their sense of direction.

Bees are disappearing...must be global warming--oh, or maybe it's the pesticides.

*I didn't really get drunk last night.  I've cut it back to just the weekends.

What is the value of open space, and does it justify a $1 billion bond?

Undeveloped Land Losses Rising:

If current development rates continue, at least 2 million acres of forest and farmland in North Carolina will disappear over the next 20 years, says a report released today by Environment North Carolina, a conservation advocacy group.

The report examines federal data about development rates in the past two decades and uses that to project loss of farmland and forests in the next 20 years.

Since 1987, the amount of developed land in North Carolina increased by 1.86 million acres, including 327,000 acres in the Triangle, the report says.