Shelley DuBois at Retraction Watch:
A controversy surrounding a 2014 Journal of Environmental Management paper has tapped into a larger scientific and economic issue — how to tally up the damage after an oil spill.
The original paper, called “A revealed preference approach to valuing non-market recreational fishing losses from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,” estimates the 2010 explosion of the BP-owned drilling rig cost the Gulf-Coast recreational saltwater angler fishing industry alone nearly $600 million. But Kenneth Train, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley who was hired by BP to review the study, has questioned the methods used — both publicly, in a comment that was published in the Journal of Environmental Management, and privately through personal calls with the authors. The first author says Train asked them to retract the paper; he denies ever making that request. While Train, in his comment, says he doubts the accuracy of the $600 million estimate, he does not provide an alternative number.
I'm going to leave a comment in response to the last paragraph:
Indeed, this debate about the proper methodology to calculate oil spill damages has been boiling in the literature before this paper. For example, the authors of the Journal of Environmental Management paper used a technique called contingent valuation to estimate the economic worth of non-market resources. But the method is controversial in some circles. In 2012, an economics professor at MIT named Jerry Hausman decries it in a Journal of Economic Perspectives paper titled, “Contingent Valuation: From Dubious to Hopeless.” Hausman, like Train, previously worked as an oil company consultant. He was hired by Exxon after the 1989 Valdez spill.
Just to be clear, the JEM paper that is the subject of this story used the travel cost method. We also conducted a contingent valuation study for the state of Florida but those results have not been published since they were tied up in the litigation process until late in 2015.
