Environmental Economics

"Dad life"

TBT: Therapeutic Satire

In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

via www.theonion.com

HT: DW via FB

"A Tale of Tradeoffs"

Economists criticize opinion polls because they don't recognize tradeoffs. In other words, it is easy to say that I'm concerned about the environment but more difficult to actually do something about it (such as vote for higher taxes to pay for an improvement). Here is some evidence that even environmental attitudes incorporate this sort of tradeoff. When survey respondents feel a budget pinch their demand for environmental quality goes down:

The financial crisis made Americans less worried about climate change. The Democrats’ attempt to pass sweeping climate legislation in 2009 and 2010 probably reduced Americans’ anxiety level as well, as paradoxical as that may sound. But now Americans are getting more worried again.

About 69 percent of adults say that global warming is either a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, according to a new Pew Research Center poll, up from 63 percent in 2010. The level of concern has still not returned to that of a decade ago; in 2006, 79 percent of adults called global warming serious.

It’s impossible to know exactly why concern about the climate fell — and why skepticism that global warming was real increased — starting around 2008. Both economics and politics probably play a role. The financial crisis and recession made Americans more worried about the immediate condition of the economy, rather than about the long-term condition of the planet.

via mobile.nytimes.com

Here is more systematic evidence from an abstract of a paper I handled as an associate editor at the Journal of Environmental Management:

Objective: We test whether macroeconomic conditions affect individuals' willingness to pay for environmental quality improvements.

Background: Improvements in environmental quality, like everything, come at a cost. Individuals facing difficult economic times may be less willing to make trade-offs required for improvements in environmental quality. Using somewhat different methodologies and shorter time frames, prior investigations have generally found a direct relationship between willingness to pay for environmental improvements and macroeconomic conditions.

Method: We use a nearly 40-year span (27 periods) of the General Social Survey (1974–2012) to estimate attitudes toward environmental spending while controlling for U.S. macroeconomic conditions and respondent-specific factors such as age, gender, marital status, number of children, residential location, educational attainment, personal financial condition, political party affiliation and ideology. Macroeconomic conditions include one-year lagged controls for the unemployment rate, the rate of economic growth (percentage change in real GDP), and an indicator for whether the U.S. economy was experiencing a recession.

Results: We find that, in general, when economic conditions are unfavorable (i.e., during a recession, or with higher unemployment, or lower GDP growth), respondents are more likely to believe the U.S. is spending too much on “improving and protecting the environment”. Interacting lagged macroeconomic controls with respondent's income, we find that these views are at least partially offset by the respondent's own economic condition (i.e., their own real income).

Conclusion: Our findings are consistent with the notion that environmental quality is a normal, or procyclical good, i.e., that environmental spending should rise when the economy is expanding and fall during economic contractions.

Source: Conroy, Stephen J., and Tisha LN Emerson. "A tale of trade-offs: The impact of macroeconomic factors on environmental concern." Journal of environmental management 145 (2014): 88-93.

Would someone let the Kentucky AG know that I was price gouged last week

This picture was taken in Tennessee but still ...

Picture of the Day: The cost of college recruiting

Official Second Oldest Daughter of Env-Econ is a rising high school senior.  Being a bit OCD, she has kept all of her college recruiting materials to date.  Today she decided to organize it.

 

Is more information welfare enhancing?

 Sharks are scary to many people.  New technologies, like drones, allow beach authorities to notify swimmers when sharks are nearby.  So when people are told that sharks are near shore, it changes behavior--even though the likelihood of a shark attack has not changed.  The only thing that has changed is the ability to see the sharks.  Are swimmers now better off?

 

The power of scarcity

Police are warning for businesses and residents to start locking up their taps. California’s drought has gotten so bad, people are stealing water.

Thieves busted the locks on the spigots at a popular Asian shopping center on Barber Lane in Milpitas, just to get their hands on what has become liquid gold.

Palo Alto resident Jason Zhur said he’s shocked it has come this far. “But water’s becoming more expensive than gas,” he said.

via sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com

 

Friday* Beer Post: What is wrong with today's utes??

Binge drinking among 12- to 20-year-olds has steadily declined since 2002 and is now at the lowest rate in more than a decade, a government study reported today.

via www.dispatch.com

*Yes, I know today is Thursday. But I'm out tomorrow and I don't feel like setting the delayed post.

It's a Marathon, not a Sprint

The title has absolutely no meaning whatsoever but the capitalization indicates that these are company names ... get it? Michael Giberson:

On May 12, 2015 Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway filed a lawsuit against Marathon Petroleum Company alleging Marathon has engaged in anti-competitive practices that cause higher gasoline prices for Kentucky consumers. In making the announcement Conway said he has tried over and over to get the Federal Trade Commission or U.S. Department of Justice interested in the case, but they have declined to join efforts.

This isn’t the first time a Kentucky Attorney General has gone after Marathon over gasoline prices in the state. On May 13, 2011, AG Conway charged Marathon violated Kentucky’s price-gouging law after floods struck Western Kentucky. On May 10, 2007, then-AG Greg Stumbo filed suit against Marathon alleging price gouging after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast in late 2005.

Notice a pattern? Every four years during the second week in May Kentucky Attorneys General take on Marathon over gasoline prices.

What else happens every four years in May in Kentucky? Primary elections for state offices. In 2007 Stumbo was a candidate for Lt. Governor in the Democratic Primary held on May 22nd. In 2011 Conway was a candidate for re-election as AG in the Democratic Primary held on May 17th. This year Conway was a candidate for the Governor’s office in the Democratic Primary held on May 19th.

Nobody in Kentucky pays attention to state elections until after the Kentucky Derby, and that gives candidates only two weeks or so before the primary to make a splash. What better way to show voters you are on their side than an opportunistic attack on an oil company?

I conclude that the primary reason for quadrennial gasoline price-gouging charges against Marathon in Kentucky is the state’s Democratic Primary.

via knowledgeproblem.com

I like this line "Conway said he has tried over and over to get the Federal Trade Commission or U.S. Department of Justice interested in the case, but they have declined to join efforts." I can only imagine the magnitude of the teasing and ribbing the Ky AG gets around the water cooler at the FTC. 

This issue is so important that I'm hopping in the car tomorrow for some field research. Here is what you see as you cross the river from West Virginia to Kentucky (or, about an hour before my first Ale8):

If I still drove that way, that is. These days I go through the Cumberland Gap, just like Daniel Boone, if I can talk my family into risking car sickness as the car goes up and down, up and down, the hills and around and around and around and around the hills.

 

"Politics, and the Ouster of a Popular President, Cloud UNC’s Search for a New Leader "

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on the search for a new UNC system president and how the UNC Board of Governors denies that they are trying to destroy the university system, but this is what is truly galling:

In fact, turnout was light at all four of the input sessions. John Steen, a visiting professor of English at Eastern Carolina University, said he did not attend a session held in late May on his campus because he was ill. But some of his colleagues, he said, may have avoided the meeting for a different reason: They didn’t feel that their opinions would really be considered by the board.

via chronicle.com

It's East Carolina University ... not Eastern! You would think that the higher education media would at least know the names of the schools.