Environmental Economics

Digging deeper in the NYTimes/Stanford/RFF global warming poll

25% support higher electricity taxes and 36% support higher gas taxes "to try to reduce future global warming." Here are the questions and results from the poll:

Someone should run the crosstabs on these questions and the one where "more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change."

Zero: 3rd class

Sent from my iPhone

NAREA & CAES Call for papers (deadline 2/1)

Submitted by Martin Heintzelman:

The 2015 Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA) & the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society (CAES) Annual Meeting and Workshop will be held June 27-30 at Hotel Viking in the historic seaside town of Newport, Rhode Island.

The 2015 conference features many opportunities to interact and learn including: Selected Paper sessions, Symposia, Plenary Talks, and Workshop Sessions. The Annual Meeting will begin with an opening evening reception at Hotel Viking on Sunday, June 28; the academic program will follow on Monday and Tuesday. We encourage participation from academic, public, and private sector agricultural and resource economists as well as graduate students. A two-day pre-conference workshop on “Economics of Water Quality”, led by Todd Guilfoos (URI), will start at noon on Saturday, June 27 concluding in the afternoon on Sunday, June 28.

Abstracts: Abstracts for the Annual Meeting Selected Papers and Symposia are due February 1, 2015. Abstracts for the Workshop (Economics of Water Quality) are due February 13, 2015.  Please submit your abstracts through http://www.narea.org/2015/proposal/submit.asp.

Keynote speakers: We are delighted to announce the two keynote speakers for the Annual Meeting. 

Dan Dudek, Environmental Defense Fund: Dr. Dan Dudek is one of the world's leading experts in developing cap-and-trade programs to reduce pollution at the lowest possible cost. He is widely credited with developing the cap-and-trade model that led to dramatic reductions in sulfur dioxide, the leading cause of acid rain, in the United States.  Dan now leads EDF’s China office, where he designs carbon demonstration projects and develops market mechanisms to address large-scale environmental problems. Dan focuses on market-based instruments for environmental protection, emissions cap-and-trade programs, environmental governance, and environmental commodities markets. http://www.edf.org/people/dan-j-dudek

Christian Vossler, University of Tennessee: an applied microeconomist and applied econometrician whose research primarily focuses on environmental and public economics issues. Much of his research has centered on non-market valuation methods used to estimate the benefits of environmental and other public goods, with special attention on mechanism design and validity issues related to survey-based valuation methods. Other research areas include environmental pollution control instruments, regulatory compliance, and public goods provision. https://sites.google.com/site/christianvossler/research

Accommodation:

Blocked rooms are available at the government per diem rate from June 26^th through July 1^st. Hotel Viking is nestled in the Historic Hill district, a stroll away from the seaside heart of Newport, Harbor, the beaches, historic mansions, award-winning restaurants, and more! Bring your family and enjoy Newport at its best.

If you have any questions related to the Annual Meeting paper and symposium submission, please contact Martin Heintzelman ([email protected]). Questions related to the workshop can be directed to Todd Guilfoos ([email protected]), while those related to local arrangements can be directed to Emi Uchida ([email protected]).

www.narea.org/2015

 

 

"Most Americans Support Government Action on Climate Change, Poll Finds"

From the inbox:

An overwhelming majority of the American public, including nearly half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future.

In a finding that could have implications for the 2016 presidential campaign, the poll also found that two-thirds of Americans say they are more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change. They are less likely to vote for candidates who question or deny the science of human-caused global warming. ...

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Jan. 7-22 with 1,006 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Over all, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is caused by human activity is growing. In a 2011 Stanford University poll, 72 percent of people thought climate change was caused at least in part by human activities. That grew to 81 percent in the latest poll. By party, 88 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans said that climate change was caused at least in part by human activities.

via www.nytimes.com

Update: here is the question:

Teaching and research are complements, not substitutes

It could have been anyone's governor:

Just what do university professors do all day?

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has been hearing plenty on that topic since he remarked this week, during a discussion of his proposal to cut state appropriations for the University of Wisconsin system by $300-million over two years, that the universities “might be able to make savings just by asking faculty and staff to consider teaching one more class a semester.” ...

The question is part of a larger public debate that goes back to at least 1967, when another Republican governor, Ronald Reagan of California, asserted that taxpayers should not be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.”

via chronicle.com

Gov. Walker is correct. Universities could save in labor costs by having professors teach one more course. That would certainly be a benefit to the taxpayers. But then there is an opportunity cost -- the value of what has been given up by the reallocation of professors' time. This is more difficult to quantify but let me try to describe it. Most professors at most universities conduct research in their field. Some of this research advances knowledge in important ways (and is the stuff that fills up textbooks, by the way) and some  ... not so much.

For most professors, the act of engaging in research makes them better teachers. It gives them a deeper understanding of the topic, keeps them current in their field, and adds excitement to the classroom. For example, I'm sure I could teach micro principles and do a halfway decent job without conducting any research on the side (or teach "out of the book" in macro principles). But, my teaching in upper level courses, the courses taken by economics majors that they hope helps get them jobs, would certainly suffer as I lose the important insights about what is currently being done in the field.

Professors who don't do research ultimately become less effective teachers. Having all professors teach one more course would have this as a long term opportunity cost to taxpayers. Of course, I'm a professor and I think the long term cost of less effective teaching outweighs the short term benefit of cost savings. I'm also a parent with kids who'll be thinking about college in less than five years. One thing I'll want to know is how intellectually curious their future professors might be. If taxpayers don't subsidize intellectual curiosity there will be less intellectual curiosity amongst the people who are teaching young adults to be intellectually curious.

One of the underlying themes is that state politicians think that professors are lazy. I know research active professors who seem to work a lot and I know research active professors who seem to work a little (but who can really tell?). I also know professors who don't do research (say, as soon as right after getting tenure ... I'm not so worried about those who shelve their research agenda a few years before retirement). Some of these non-research active professors work a lot of hours on teaching and others don't work a lot of hours (but who can tell, really?). In my college and department we rightly give these professors an extra course to teach.

But I don't think effort should be the issue when it comes to state university funding. When state politicians cut budgets with the intent of getting professors to work more that is simply micro-management borne out of ignorance. At the university we are very interested in labor productivity. We have annual reviews, third year reviews, tenure and promotion reviews and post-tenure reviews (every five years in the UNC system). We measure outputs (i.e., publications) and not inputs (i.e., hours worked) because we value the output and not the input. Honestly, I really don't care if a talented professor goes home early, gets a publication in a reputable journal each year and teaches effectively. But, if there are no outputs professors are routinely penalized. No one claims on their annual review that they put in 50 hour weeks to write a crappy paper that will never get published (i.e., I punched the clock). The game is different than in more traditional jobs. The state politicians that are currently in charge in a lot of places don't seem to care to understand that.

And they don't seem to care to understand about the long term costs of reducing subsidies for intellectual curiosity.*

*Curiosity: the desire to learn or know about anything.

 

I'm cutting your allowance, and to compensate for that I want you to clean the bathrooms two more times per week*

Gov. Scott Walker said Wednesday that University of Wisconsin System faculty and staff could increase their workload to reduce the impact of his proposed $300 million budget cut.

Walker announced this week that the proposed cuts, along with a two-year tuition freeze, would be part of his two-year budget proposal to be delivered to the Legislature on Tuesday. In return, the UW System would be converted into a public authority with more autonomy, though it’s unclear how much money that would save.

University officials have said they might have to lay off employees in the short term, and then raise tuition starting in 2017.

via host.madison.com

*And no, I am NOT comparing teaching to cleaning toilets. I am just making a point about the incentives involved.

A triumph of the notion of passive use values (and jobs in the Atlantic?)

Why else would the government try to stop mining in Alaska?

The Obama administration moved Tuesday to open up a vast stretch of East Coast waters to oil and gas drilling, a decision that could have a profound impact on the economic and environmental future of states from Virginia to Georgia. The move also adds a new dimension to the legacy of President Obama.

In an announcement that outraged environmentalists and brought grudging cheers from the oil and gas industry, the Interior Department unveiled the latest part of its five-year plan for the government to sell leases for oil and gas development in federal waters from 2017 to 2022.

The plan would open up one lease sale area off the southeast stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard, an area the oil industry has long hungered to exploit. It would also open new portions of the Gulf of Mexico, which is already open to drilling. And in a move that appeased environmentalists but angered Alaskan Republicans, it will ban drilling in portions of the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. ...

Environmentalists said opening the Atlantic waters would put the coasts of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia at risk for an environmental disaster like the BP spill that struck the Gulf Coast in 2010, when millions of barrels of oil washed ashore after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Advocacy groups in those states said that the drilling could harm tourism, fishing and other coastal industries that are already major drivers of the Southeastern economy. ...

... Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina, a Republican who is a fiercely conservative opponent of Mr. Obama’s energy and climate change policies, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Obama was “taking a step in the right direction to help North Carolina become a significant energy-producing state.”

Mr. McCrory added that oil and gas drilling would “create thousands of good paying jobs, spur activity in a host of associated industries, generate billions of dollars in tax revenue and move America closer to energy independence.”

Mr. McCrory and other Southeastern governors envision a future in which new offshore drilling stimulates job growth and new onshore industries that support it, aligning Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia with states like Texas and Louisiana as major offshore oil producers.

via www.nytimes.com

According to the executive summary of a report from the American Petroleum Institute (PDF):

By 2035, offshore oil and natural gas development could produce an incremental 1.3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (MMboe/d), generate nearly 280,000 jobs, contribute up to $23.5 billion per year to the U.S. economy, and generate $51 billion in cumulative government revenue ..

The estimated effect in North Carolina is 55,000 jobs and $4 billion increase in state GDP by 2035. Using data from FRED, here is a simple forecast of state GDP:

The $4 billion increase sounds large but it is just a 0.5% increase in a simple forecast of state GDP. Doing the same sort of simple forecast for North Carolina over the same time period, the 55,000 jobs is a 1.2% increase. 

Once again, it is most likely that the net effect of this proposal on jobs and income, which is determined in the macroeconomy, is small to nil. The issue should be a matter of benefit-cost analysis, where jobs don't much matter.  

"The Early History of Environmental Economics"

Agnar Sandmo (Rev Environ Econ Policy 2015 9: 43-63):

Abstract

This article traces the history of economists’ treatment of environmental problems prior to the establishment of environmental economics as a separate field in the 1960s. I examine the economics literature from the late eighteenth century onward, searching for an awareness among early economists of both the effects of economic activity on the natural and social environment and the feedback from the environment to the economy. I argue that the way in which economic theory developed made it increasingly relevant for the study of environmental issues and the design of appropriate economic policies. (JEL: B00, Q30, Q50)

via reep.oxfordjournals.org

I can't wait to read it ... 

xkcd: P-values

http://xkcd.com/1478/

Daily demand and supply: Barbie turns 56

Sad:

Barbie and other traditional toys are having a much tougher time supporting their elderly parent Mattel, a toymaker significantly weakened by stiff competition from small upstarts and by digital distractions aimed at children.

On Monday, the company reported that toy sales during last month’s crucial holiday shopping season plummeted, apparently one of the reasons the company also announced a management shake-up. Bryan G. Stockton, who worked for Mattel for more than 14 years and was chief executive for the last three, resigned over the weekend. ...

For decades, American consumers associated the names Mattel and Hasbro with play time. But in recent years, those companies have largely failed to stay on top of evolving trends and tastes. In the face of an onslaught of digital products, traditional manufacturers have lost ground to smaller, more nimble competitors that adapt quickly to the latest trend. Toy sales

via www.nytimes.com

A few comments:

• Who/what are little girls going to rip the heads and arms off now?
• What's up with Ken? Mid-life crisis and chasing Ever After High dolls? Gross.
• Will Barbie sue little girls for age discrimination?
• If she had only studied math ...