Environmental Economics

I received a response to my letter to Senator Vitter

It wasn't very responsive to my concerns.

Here is the whole thing (Download {Disarmed} Here to Help).

My Nexus died one week after the warranty ran out and Google Play still wants me to buy stuff

Appstate is ranked #15 in a national ranking of universities (the "University of Ohio State" is also ranked)

Nation’s Parents Release Annual Ranking Of Top 50 ‘Perfectly Good’ State Schools

And I wish I made as much as a finance professor...

Graduate teaching and research assistants on some campuses want the dialogue to focus on equity as they press for higher pay. Stipends often vary so much across disciplines within the same institution that some students’ pay hovers near the federal poverty threshold, while their peers across campus earn two or three times as much.

via chronicle.com

Hashtag Pink Floyd

Some awesome figure skating! It actually made me look up from my computer. Hashtag working too late at night. 

Ask and it will be given to you

Sometimes Zetland is more awesome than the beautiful NC sun!

I was offered a position on the editorial board of the Future of Food Journal (meaning I work for free, refereeing their papers). I was interested because the journal (1) publishes young researchers, (2) is interdisciplinary, and (3) is open access, but I wanted more than nothing for my contribution, so I made this offer:

I will serve on the board with one requirement: authors of future published articles will summarize their articles for the general public in a blog post. This requirement will take about 2-4 hours, at most, but it must be obligatory (editorial board policy), as academics -- even young scholars -- often pursue de minimus effort when it comes to non-research activities.

Please let me know if the journal will implement this policy, which will be beneficial to scholars as well as the public. Old-school scholars may be skeptical of the value of blog communications, but they are still thinking of paradigms dating from the 19th century.

After throwing down THAT gauntlet, I got this:

Our editorial board welcomed your suggestion. We will implement this policy in our blog site. All future authors will be asked to summarize their research papers into blog posts.

Victory!

via www.aguanomics.com

This isn't much different than the requirement by Elsevier journals that you write 3-4 readable bullet points about your article ... except that the readable bullet points are mostly gibberish too. The trick will be to require that the blog posts be written in English.

The "beautiful North Carolina sun" is the most awesome sun in the world

Ignoring the coal ash pond spill, two things struck me:

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory went on two national talk shows Sunday to talk about climate change and the winter storms that have iced over the state in the past two weeks. ...

Instead of focusing on global warming, McCrory said people should concentrate on keeping the air and water clean. ...

But environmental protection must also strike a delicate balance with economic development, McCrory told host Bob Schieffer. ...

Both shows also spoke to the governor about the two winter storms that battered North Carolina over the past two weeks. McCrory pointed out the beautiful North Carolina sun was out and the weather was going to warm this week. He also thanked public employees that worked hard to keep people safe.

"It about depleted our budget. It's also going to have an impact on our economy in North Carolina because people were stuck inside and not spending money," McCrory said of the storms on "Face the Nation."

via www.newsobserver.com

Govenor McCrory:

1. See post title (if you have a better sun than we do, prove it!)
2. Once people get back outside they end up spending that money. I doubt if there is anything but a small temporal effect on the economy (i.e., you can't use the weather as an excuse to say that tax collections are too low to give state employees small raises).

Update: I've read this again and am in serious distress. The "stuck inside" comment indicates a serious misunderstanding of how an economy works. One would think that the cash in one's pocket disintegrates unless it is refreshed by exposure to a market or two.  

Climate policy vs adaptation

Menzie Chen:

I wonder if any of those who argue better to adjust than to try to price carbon and were caught in those flight cancellations reconsidered there positions. That’s only partly facetious; I think climate change is going to impose substantial costs going forward, a lot more than just damage to sewer pipes and salt bills. [4]

These costs include power outages, estimated by CEA/DoE.

Figure from Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages (August 2013).

via econbrowser.com

Adaptation won't be all puppies and flowers.

Climate change policy on steroids

"Tough" and "muscular" ... I feel like pumping iron!

President Obama on Tuesday ordered the development of tough new fuel standards for the nation’s fleet of heavy-duty trucks as part of what aides say will be an increasingly muscular and unilateral campaign to tackle climate change through the use of the president’s executive power.

The new regulations, to be drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department by March 2015 and completed a year later so they are in place before Mr. Obama leaves office, are the latest in a series of actions intended to cut back on greenhouse gases without the sort of comprehensive legislation the president failed to push through Congress in his first term.

The limits on greenhouse gas pollution from trucks would combine with previous rules requiring passenger cars and light trucks to burn fuel more efficiently and pending rules to limit the carbon emissions of power plants. Cumulatively, experts said the à la carte approach should enable Mr. Obama to meet his target of cutting carbon pollution in the United States by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. But they said he would still be far short of his goal of an 80 percent reduction by 2050.

via www.nytimes.com

Something like this is becoming a standard refrain:

Incentive-based environmental policy can be superior to environmental standards. Greater fuel economy encourages driving more miles. With gas prices below some threshold, the payback period on high priced fuel efficient cars is too far in the future for even fully rational consumers to think they are a good deal. Implementation of a higher gas tax would provide an incentive for consumers to purchase fuel efficient cars and also reduce miles driven.

On the other hand, I'm learning that the EPA is designing fuel economy standards to be more flexible, increasing their efficiency. 

I just submitted my "ASSA Meeting Survey for Non-Attending AEA Members"