Environmental Economics

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife

They couldn't have waited a day? A single day?

Acknowledging the timing was ironic, a trio of Republican state senators this morning held a news conference to announce they had filed a bill to open up the North Carolina coast to energy drilling.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf Coast.

Sen. Bob Rucho of Mecklenburg County dealt head-on in his opening remarks with what he acknowledged was “a little irony.”

“But what we did learn from this disaster is we learned from our mistakes,” Rucho said. “The industry has already found ways to make sure that oil exploration and production can be done in a very safe manner.”

Sen. Harry Brown of Onslow County pointed out that the bill is about natural gas and not oil, which he said was environmentally safer. The bill also encourages exploration of a variety of alternative energy sources.

But the focus on the bill is on natural gas. It would direct Gov. Bev Perdue to enter into a pact with the governors of Virginia and South Carolina to urge the president to open the East Coast to explore for natural gas 40 miles offshore.

If there is a sufficient deposit of natural gas out there, entering into a revenue-sharing agreement would bring North Carolina 6,700 jobs and generate half a billion dollars in revenue every year for decades, according to the sponsors. Sen. Tommy Tucker of Union County is the third sponsor.

via projects.newsobserver.com

BP Ready To Resume Oil Spilling | The Onion

A year after the tragic explosion and oil spill that caused petroleum giant BP to cease operations in the Gulf of Mexico, the company announced Wednesday that it was once again ready to begin oil spilling. "People said this company might never rebound from last year, but we're here and ready to do what we do best," said BP chief executive Robert Dudley, who confirmed that the company had already successfully conducted small test spills and that full-scale spilling operations could resume as early as July. "We've reorganized and regrouped, and now we're ready to put the faulty blowout preventers on the wellheads and watch them pump raw crude petroleum right into the environment." BP stock jumped $14 a share following the announcement.

via www.theonion.com

Liveblogging the 3rd grade field trip

Daily demand and supply--Why are corn prices rising so fast?

Farmers and ethanol producers have braced for what they expect could be widespread criticism as corn prices are rising rapidly and other food costs are following.

A similar increase five years ago generated a storm of criticism, with many in the food industry blaming the ethanol industry for buying up corn that could be used for food and faulting farmers for capitalizing on the higher prices. Many farmers and ethanol producers worried then that the complaints would force a change in agriculture and energy policies and fewer subsidies for their industries, but prices came down and that didn’t happen.

Now, they’re concerned again as corn prices rose even higher last week following an announcement that U.S. farmers are planting the second largest corn crop since 1944, but it won’t be enough to meet growing worldwide demand. Corn has traded at more than $7 a bushel this month, more than double last summer’s $3.50, and many traders say it could pass the record $7.65 set in 2008.

via www.omaha.com

1. Farmers are concerned that they will lose their inefficient subsidies?  I'm withholding sarcastic comment (but welcome them in the comment section).
2. Worldwide demand for corn has been increasing for years (population growth, ethanol subsidies,...).  Why, then, is the increasing demand causing higher prices now?  The answer is: supply is much less elastic now than it has been in recent years.  As demand increased, stored corn was used to meet shortages.  As storage stocks dwindle, the ability to adjust quantities supplied to demand increases is hampered.  The only possible reaction is higher prices to effectively ration the stocks.  That is, a demand increase will result in higher price increases when supply is less elastic.  Here's the picture:   

 

Young and restless and bored*

I've heard from two commenters that the EPA ban on this blog has been lifted.

Bans never work anyway. All this means is that EPA employees will be able to read this blog in the open and not resort to reading it in the backroom, the alley, or the trusty woods.

*With apologies to Bob Seger.

What are you willing to pay to provide your article as open access?

From the inbox:

In the course of this quarter authors of JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT will have the option to pay a fee to make their article freely available to non-subscribers. In other words, authors are given the choice of making their own article Open Access, the charge for article sponsorship is $3,000. This charge is necessary to offset publishing costs – from managing article submission and peer review, to typesetting, tagging and indexing of articles, hosting articles on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs to ensure global dissemination via ScienceDirect, and permanently preserving the published journal article. The fee excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges which are additional. Authors can only select this option after their article has been accepted for publication.

 

 

 

A guess is that the marginal cost of making an article open access is much lower than $3000 (publishing costs includes peer review? huh?); therefore, it seems, journal publishers have some market power (insert smiley face here). It will be interesting to see how many authors are willing to pay the $3000 to supply their work to folks who can't get to a library that has an Elsevier subscription. Another guess is that it will be few.

Picture of the day*

This was taken 7 seconds after the driver tossed his cigarette butt out the window as if no one gave a rat's @$$:

*For some reason I've taken to outing what I consider to be bad car behavior (e.g., here and here). Hopefully, this impulse will pass soon; but, my #1 rule of blogging is post what you feel like posting ... so it may continue.

Time for a hypermiling review

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that aggressive driving uses as much as 33 percent more gasoline. At last week's local average, that translates to a cost of as much as $1.24 more per gallon.

Driving faster burns more gasoline as well. For every 5mph you drive above 60, you use as much as 23percent more gas. That costs as much as 87cents more per gallon, based on last week's price.

via www.dispatch.com

Fire up the flux capacitor and dial up Env-Econ on May 30, 2007:

The hypermilers' philosophy: squeeze every mile they can out of each drop of gas.

Some of their tips are a matter of common sense and could help any driver, especially now, with gas reaching $3.50 a gallon: avoid jackrabbit starts, use alternate routes to avoid stop-and-go traffic, anticipate lights and drive a bit slower.

But those are just a start. Hypermilers slightly overinflate their tires to cut rolling resistance, seize every chance to coast with their gasoline engines off and sometimes "draft" like race cars behind larger vehicles.

There's more...

• Park at the highest point of a lot, facing the exit, so gravity can help get the car moving.
• Draft off the right rear corner of a tractor-trailer to reduce wind resistance yet allow the rig's driver to see you. Gerdes recommends following the truck at a gap of about 1 second; drafting any closer yields eye-popping gas mileage but is too dangerous, he says.
• Use "pulse and glide": Accelerate to above the speed limit, then shut the gasoline engine down and glide to a speed below the limit. It is fairly easy to do in a hybrid, but in a gas-only vehicle it can be dangerous because power brakes might not work and some automatic transmissions won't re-engage at highway speeds. In a gas-only vehicle, without a lot of practice, "you can wind up killing somebody," Gerdes says. (It's also illegal in many places.)

Did you get that?  They actually advocate shutting your engine off while driving at highway speeds...  tailgating tractor trailers..voluntarily passing up a close parking space.  All to save what?  Less than $.02 per mile driven. 

For my 17 mile commute I would save $.68 per day.  What would it cost me?  I'm guessing hypermiling would add about 5 minutes to my commute.  So it would cost me 10 minutes a day.  But it would also cost untold amounts in public humiliation (does anyone really like to be THAT person in the slow lane), uncertainty over whether my car will restart each time I shut the engine off, the risk of rear ending a tractor trailer and sheesh I might sweat having to walk uphill to my car everytime I leave someplace.  All to save 68 cents a day.  I can't even get a cup of coffeee for that.

Undergraduate research

Awhile back readers helped out with a pretest of a survey. We revised the survey accordingly and collected the data. We found that travel cost demand slopes downward and willingness to pay is negatively related to the bid price. No surprises there, but the magnitudes are interesting.

We also tested whether a cost uncertainty warning helps avoid starting point bias with repeated WTP questions. Nada.

Here is Aaron Wallace presenting his poster at the undergraduate research fair:

Picture of the day