Jonathan Adler:
I’ve certainly come across the occasional environmental economics paper that improperly characterizes a relevant law or regulation, but Atlas’ attack suggests there is a more widespread problem within the literature, despite the use of peer review. If so, this would suggest that environmental economists need to understand more about environmental law, just as environmental law professors need to understand a bit about environmental economics — and both need to understand something about environmental science.
via volokh.com
One of my jokes with scientists is that on the applied welfare economics (i.e., valuation) side of environmental economics we don't know any environmental science; all we need to know is the Q (the environmental good) and how much it increases or decreases[*]. I exaggerate but it is partly true. You don't need to know much environmental science to do a decent valuation job, especially if you have a scientist or two helping out at the survey design stage.
Ecological economists argue, among other things (that I better not get into today :) that environmental science and the economics should be more thoroughly integrated, and this is true for many problems (e.g., any sort of species modeling and fisheries economists do it well). But I still think most valuation problems can be handled with very little environmental science.
At least I hope.
*Here is our model for the willingness to pay (WTP) for an environmental quality improvement: v(p,Q,y) = v(p,Q',y-WTP), where v(.) is happiness, p is prices, y is income and everything else is defined above.
