Environmental Economics

Global Warming My Butt

"Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis Moves to Cambridge University Press"

From the inbox:

Beginning in 2015, Cambridge University Press will be publishing the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis on behalf of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.

In an announcement, Cambridge University Press noted that “[t]his new partnership marks a rebranding of the journal in terms of both appearance and reach, reinforcing the journal’s position as an authority on analytical practice of benefit-cost analysis. For the first time the journal will benefit from online before print publication on FirstView and improved article functionality in terms of enhanced HTML and mobile optimization.”

Editors Glenn Blomquist and William Hoyt agree that this opens an exciting new chapter in the Journal’s development. Prior to the move, JBCA will be publishing two issues that will include several articles on retrospective analysis and on benefit-cost analysis and climate policy.

This is very good news. Enough said? 

"Which Marvel Superhero Could Run a University?"

Three PhDs? What about the opportunity cost of time spent in school? Or did he get all three simultaneously?

Right off the bat, you can count out Robert B. Banner, otherwise known as the Hulk. While Mr. Banner has three Ph.D.’s from the California Institute of Technology, at some point he’s bound to go berserk and lay waste to half the Faculty Senate. That’s a PR disaster.

A PR disaster maybe, but definitely a tempting scenario. There's more here.

Zombie apocalypse

With that title we're trying to boost our traffic and maybe even get Typepad to crash:

In 2011 Steven Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, went on a late-night radio show and said he had recently discovered a paper about a mysterious disease, called Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency syndrome, written by a doctor from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who had died before having the chance to publish it.

According to the paper, "ANSD" destroyed the frontal lobe while leaving the amygdala intact, essentially transforming victims into lurching vessels of unchecked rage—or zombies, if you’d like.

The disease was made up, of course. Dr. Schlozman also writes fiction, and he had invented ANSD for a novel called The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks From the Apocalypse. ...

The radio host was in on the joke, he wrote, and they were just having fun discussing the zombie scourge in a faux-serious tone. (In his fake paper, Dr. Schlozman attributes zombies’ constant groaning to constipation.)

But some listeners didn’t get the joke. "Emails showed up in my in-box," wrote Dr. Schlozman, "and I got questions along the lines of: What’s the best medicine to stave off the zombie infection? How do I keep my house safe from the zombie onslaught?"

Later that year Ali S. Khan, director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, cited Dr. Schlozman in a blog post he wrote about how people should prepare for a zombie epidemic. The post was titled "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse." The blog post was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek way of getting readers to prepare for more-realistic threats, like hurricanes, by prodding the imagination. It was at least halfway successful: Traffic to the CDC blog increased sixtyfold, causing servers to crash.

It’s unclear how many of those visitors read the item with an appropriately large grain of salt, but many hailed the CDC’s experiment as a success.

via chronicle.com

This post mentions hurricanes so it is in the natural hazards category and definitely on-topic (we don't have an All Hallows' Eve category).

I'm not a scientist but Chile might implement a carbon tax

Thank goodness that "low cost electricity" is not the penultimate goal in some parts of the world:

These are rough times for carbon taxes, aimed at mitigating climate change. Australia recently repealed its carbon tax. South Korea delayed a carbon-based tax on vehicle emissions. South Africa put off a planned carbon tax until 2016.

And yet, for environmentalists, a sliver of hope exists in the shape of Chile, one of Latin America’s fastest-growing economies, which last month approved the first carbon tax in South America. The measure, due to take effect in 2018, was part of a broad overhaul of the tax system. ...

Chile’s tax, which targets large factories and the electricity sector, will cover about 55 percent of the nation’s carbon emissions, according to Juan-Pablo Montero, a professor of economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, who informally advised the government in favor of the tax. At $5 per metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted, Chile’s tax is lower than the $8-per-metric-ton carbon price in the European Union’s carbon-trading system, which has often been criticized as too lax. But it is higher than a carbon tax introduced in Mexico in January. ...

Chile’s approval of a carbon tax owes much to its positioning inside a broader tax package, experts said. At the same time that it passed the carbon tax, the Chilean government raised corporate taxes substantially, in a bid to increase revenues for education and other projects. As a result, the carbon tax raised less debate within Chile than it might have otherwise, though electricity companies have objected. ...

In addition to the tax on carbon, Chile is also adopting taxes on other air pollutants, including fine particles, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, as well as a tax on some light vehicles that generate diesel exhaust. Santiago, the Chilean capital, has long struggled with pollution, due partly to its location in a dry valley.

via www.nytimes.com

We're going to quibble with the magnitude of the tax? $5 is higher than the carbon tax in the U.S. and a large number of other countries. 

Is "dubious to hopeless" coming to Mark Trail?

http://comicskingdom.com/mark-trail/2014-10-28

I can't wait to see:

1. How they draw the high priced economic consultant hired by Riverway Chemical to criticize the contingent valuation method as junk science (something like this guy?)
2. Mark Trail punch the consultant in the face!

Note: When was the last time you saw Elizabeth City, NC in the funny papers? Monday, October 27, 2014 (if Cherry plans to work on her tan then she can also work on her skeeter bites ... "George Hamilton" put it this way "Nothing better than the Dismal Dank Dreary morbid hideous feted swamp for a good tan")?

"Keep env-econ.net unaffected from Google Updates"

From the inbox (emphasis added):

My name is [redacted] and I am the SEO expert of a leading SEO service provider company. As per my analysis, your website is not performing well in the Google organic search. Also your traffic is poor from last couple of months due to some of the reasons.

Some of the aspects given below:

1. Due to poor Back links
2. Keywords are not in the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing
3. Due to errors and issues present in website
4. Errors in the coding part of your website
5. Website content quality is not high standard.

Area of Improvement:

1. We will give you 1st page ranking on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
2. Improve your sales and brand value.
3. 100% satisfaction guarantee or your full money back.
4. Hummingbird recovers and secures your website from next Google updates.
5. Increase your traffic flow.
6. Target your local market to increase business.

Some comments on our areas of improvment:

1. When I google "environmental economics" it still comes up first. Is that still happening for others?
2. How could our sales be even better? And after the oil spill, our brand was so destroyed that not even a million dollar tourism campaign could improve it. 
3. Right on.
4. Huh?
5. Indeed
6. We have no local market (unless you count Pete Groothuis)

And would someone please help us with errors and content quality?

Quote of the Day: He should've just stopped after the word 'math'

"People are just not very good at math and they find it particularly hard to make estimates about very large numbers or very small numbers," said Bobby Duffy, global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute.

via news.yahoo.com

I think the number of [fill in the blank] is increasing

I've been noticing them all the time!

The number of tornadoes recorded by the National Climatic Data Center has increased in recent years, but that doesn’t mean there have been more twisters.

“The changes there are huge but almost certainly due to reporting changes,” said Harold Brooks, a scientist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory who studies tornadoes and other severe weather with hail or high winds.

When climatologists want to gauge global changes in weather, they rely on temperature and precipitation, which can be measured at regular intervals at thousands of fixed weather stations around the world.

Tornadoes are tougher.

Some areas are prone to the ferocious storms, but it’s impossible to know exactly when or where they will occur, making them difficult to count. If they pass quickly, do no damage, or occur in an area with few or no people, they may not be counted at all.

Even when they are spotted, the mechanism for reporting the storms is ad hoc.

Tornadoes recorded by the National Climatic Data Center are documented variously by trained spotters, newspaper accounts, utility workers, pilots, the general public, fire fighters, police and others.

Climatologists and meteorologists now benefit from tools such Doppler radar, but advances in technology may mean that weaker tornadoes are more likely to be reported.

Such circumstances make it difficult to say with any certainty whether the frequency of tornadoes has increased over time, or whether storm reporting has simply gotten better.

via blogs.wsj.com

I like this picture:

If people report tornados and population is increasing, then the number of tornadoes will increase just from population growth. I decided to try to estimate that relationship so I went to the NCDC, searched for tornado and clicked on Historical Records and Trends. Here is the first image I see:

Here is what the NCDC says about the lack of trend:

With increased National Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the variability and trend in tornado frequency in the United States, the total number of EF-1 and stronger, as well as strong to violent tornadoes (EF-3 to EF-5 category on the Enhanced Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These tornadoes would have likely been reported even during the decades before Doppler radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasing tornado reports. The bar charts below indicate there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.

What is the optimal number of time slots on a Doodle Poll?

I don't know the answer, but I do know that 64 is too many.