Environmental Economics

"New format for CitEc author and series profiles"

The RePEc blog:

In the past weeks, CitEc, RePEc’s citation analysis website, has released new authors and series citation profiles with improved features.

Series profiles:

• Data coverage: 1990 – 2013
• New indicators: Cumulative number of documents published until year y, Cumulative number of citations to papers published until year y, Cumulative impact factor.
• New graphs: Citations by publication year, cumulative citations and cumulative documents published.

Authors profiles:

• New profile layout
• New indicator: i10-index. Number of works with at least 10 citations.
• Included related authors: In addition to the co-author relationships, now we include links to researchers citing and cited by the author being analyzed
• Added a new section with recent citing documents. It is possible to identify who has cited the author in the last two years.
• New graphs: evolution of author’s h-index and citations received by publication year.
• Authors can upload a picture to complete their profiles

You can have a look at some examples of the new profiles:

• Authors
• Series

This is really neat. Here are the authors that I have cited the most:

• Cameron, Trudy (73)
• Haab, Tim (47)
• Carson, Richard (37)
• Loomis, John (35)
• Groothuis, Peter (26)
• Adamowicz, Wiktor (25)
• Smith, V. (25)
• mcconnell, kenneth (25)
• Blomquist, Glenn (22)
• Shogren, Jason (19)
• Herriges, Joseph (19)

No surprises there, except maybe that Ted McConnell insists that RePEc only uses lower case. 

You can also see a graph of your citations over time. Mine shows that my career peaked in 2011:

This is surprising. I would have thought my career peaked a long time ago.

Ohio a trendsetter?

Ohio is on the cusp of becoming the first state to significantly ease its renewable-energy standards, a milestone that would be noticed in statehouses across the country where similar debates are being waged.

Proposals have gained traction in Kansas and several other states and have at least been introduced in a dozen or so others.

But none has had as much success as Ohio’s Senate Bill 310, which has passed the Senate and appears poised to pass the House as soon as this week.

The Ohio bill would place a two-year freeze on annual increases in standards for renewable energy and energy efficiency. It also would repeal a rule that says utilities must buy half of their renewable energy from in-state sources and would make it easier for utilities to buy low-cost hydroelectric power and count it toward the standards.

Many of the same groups with an interest in the subject are active in multiple states. The American Wind Energy Association, Sierra Club and others are fighting to maintain rules that say utilities must obtain a certain amount of their energy from renewable sources. Meanwhile, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and Americans for Prosperity are helping to push for change in the rules.

via www.dispatch.com

Typepad was down again yesterday

I thought it was Chris vs Mal* that shut the blog down but no. From Typepad:

We’re truly sorry for today’s extended outage. If you didn’t see our status updates, we were under a large DDOS attack. This attack was large enough to have a significant impact on our upstream providers, leading to the outage. In situations like we dealt with today, we have intentionally left out technical details as to not give away anything that might open us up to new attacks. We continue to work to improve our defenses and will provide a more detailed update tomorrow.

Of course, everyone knows what a "large DDOS attack" is so I won't bother explaining it.

*And here are some new commenting rules. Every commenter must reveal their jobs and/or funding source (but not their real names).

Friday Beer Post: An Alcohol Equivalence Theorem

How to Order a Bottle of Wine in a Restaurant

1. Look at the wine list and tell the waiter which wine you want.
2. When the waiter brings it to you, take a sip.
3. If it’s OK, say it’s OK.
4. Then shut up about the wine.
5. Don’t talk about the wine anymore.
6. Nobody gives a damn how much you know about wine, OK?
7. And above all, don’t keep sloshing the wine around and looking at it as if it’s magical unicorn blood.
8. It’s wine, for God’s sake.
9. In an hour it will be urine, same as Bud Light.

via www.rd.com

I never order wine. I will drink a glass if offered at a gathering, but I almost always order beer.

Unless I'm in a bourbon mood.

Picture of the day

Photo Credit: Pearl

Those 4% must be REALLY dumb

Forget being smarter than a fifth-grader. Most Americans think they're smarter than everyone else in the country.

Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American.

A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people.

via www.nationaljournal.com

Quick stats lesson: It is possible for 96% of the population to be smarter than average--but only if those 4% are SOOOOOO below average that it drags the average below 96% of the rest of the population's intelligence.

Proof. Suppose 96% of the population has an intelligence score of 100 (however you want to measure it) and 4% has an intelligence score of 0. The average intelligence score will be 96. Which means that 96% of the population is above average.

Now if you want to talk about medians...that's a completely different story.

"Type I and II errors simplified"

"Type I" and "Type II" errors, names first given by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson to describe rejecting a null hypothesis when it's true and accepting one when it's not, are too vague for stat newcomers (and in general). This is better. [via]

via flowingdata.com

To this day I must think hard to figure out Type I and II errors. 

Hat tip: Jayjit Roy

Luddites

Alex Tabarrok:

Here is our colleague Bryan Caplan with a great video on the Luddite fallacy or make work bias:

via marginalrevolution.com

"Make work bias" is seen in any discussion of environmental policy where the number of jobs created or jobs lost is tallied up and presented as an argument in favor or against.

Jobs are a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective, obviously. But in environmental policy analysis, they are costs, not benefits. Anyone who presents the case for or against an environmental policy with jobs gained/lost as an argument is a Luddite.

Map of the day: Morehead City Harbor Federal Navigation Project

Source: http://www.protectthebeach.com/smp/bbrp/Pumpout/iop/2014/2014%20iop%20update.html

Climate Brothers (this would be a great show on HGTV ... sell your flood prone home at a bargain price or raise it and keep living there)

There is a neat profile in the NYTimes on the brothers Nordhaus:

Robert Nordhaus, a prominent Washington energy lawyer, and William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, who learned to love the outdoors while growing up on a New Mexico ranch, have taken leading roles in figuring out how to protect the environment. 

Here is the meat:

While Bob began his career in Washington, Bill received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began teaching at Yale. By the late 1970s, when an increasing number of scientists were raising the threat of global warming, Bill wrote a paper proposing a tax on industries and businesses based on the amount of carbon they emitted into the air. The idea was revolutionary at the time, but economists, scientists and many world leaders now say it will have a powerful market effect and is the best way to stave off the catastrophic impacts of a warming world. Already, more than 30 countries have passed carbon-pricing laws.

In the ensuing decades at Yale, Bill developed an economic model that put a price tag on the effects of climate change, like more droughts, flooding and crop failures and stronger hurricanes. He called it the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, or DICE. ...

DICE profoundly changed climate policy. Although the chief political argument against curbing carbon emissions from cars and coal plants has long been that doing so would harm the economy, the DICE models show that, depending on various scenarios, one ton of carbon pollution can inflict $20 to $30 in economic damage — a major cost, given that the global economy emits about 36 billion tons of carbon a year. ...

But it is, for the time being, politically untenable in the United States. The conservative Heritage Foundation has called the DICE model “flawed beyond use for policy making” and warned that it should not be used to justify “trillions of dollars of government policies and burdensome regulations.”

Here the work of Bob comes in: Mr. Obama tried but failed to push a carbon-pricing bill through Congress in his first term, which is why he has turned to Bob’s section of the Clean Air Act as the legal underpinning for the regulation due out in June.

Bob, who was an energy adviser to President Jimmy Carter and general counsel at the Department of Energy under President Bill Clinton, now says that because he was not writing the provision with climate change in mind, the new regulation is an imperfect and perhaps legally vulnerable solution to regulating carbon pollution. Environmental lawyers note that it has almost never been used. ...

But one way the E.P.A. will justify the new regulation is with an analysis showing that the economic benefits of the climate change rule would outweigh the costs.

A core component of that analysis? The DICE model.

via www.nytimes.com