Environmental Economics

Official Guest Kid

Hola, amigos. Whuddup? I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been knee-deep in the hoopla. First of all, my wife and I had a son in July. Second of all...no, that's really it. Here's a picture of him helping me on a remote meeting while I was teleworking.

 

I hope to get back to occasional blogging. And that someone gets the reference at the top.

 

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity.  The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

Where do the polls go from here?

The polls were wrong for the last two presidential elections. In 2012, poll aggregation (i.e., Nate Silver, AKA 538) got it right. Seeing a profit opportunity, a bunch of poll aggregators entered the market but this time they all got it wrong: 

It’s a question that will be asked over and over in the coming days, weeks, months: How could so many pollsters and analytics experts get the election so wrong?

Sam Wang, the Princeton University neuroscientist hailed by Wired this week as the “new king of the presidential-election data mountain,” has been using probabilistic analysis to forecast the elections since 2004. Four years ago he was one of a group of quants who, as The Chronicle’s Tom Bartlett put it, “won the election.” This year his Princeton Election Consortium had given Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, a 99-percent chance of winning in its final forecast, pegging her likely electoral votes at 323

The point isn’t to pick on Mr. Wang. An overwhelming majority of data-crunchers missed Mr. Trump’s ascension — including, it seems, those conducting internal polls for the Democratic and Republican parties. And college polling institutes like the one at Monmouth University — which earned a coveted A-plus rating from the data-reporting site FiveThirtyEight — will certainly be conducting lengthy post-mortems.

One scholar did expect a Trump victory: Allan J. Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, who, according to The Washington Post, has predicted three decades of presidential elections using a set of 13 true-or-false questions.

Does that mean that historical analysis outstrips quantitative work? Not necessarily. But this election campaign had already prompted political scientists and other scholars to rethink basic assumptions about political norms, strategies, and analytics. Now electoral forecasting will move to the top of that list, and scholars will have to play a major role in assessing the damage.

via www.chronicle.com

I can think of one technical reason the polls were wrong. The low response rate polls were subject to sample selection bias. Let's say that only 13% of the population is responds to the survey (13% is the response rate in the Elon University Poll). If the 80% that doesn't respond is similar except for observed characteristics (e.g., gender, age, race, political party) then you can weight the data to better reflect the population. But, if the 87% that doesn't respond is different on some unobservable characteristic (e.g., "lock her up") then weighting won't fix the problem. The researcher would need other information about nonrespondents to correct it (Whitehead, Groothuis and Blomquist, 1993). If you don't have the other information then the problem won't be understand until actual behavior is revealed.

Also, consider the headline from the Elon University Poll: 

The race for the White House is essentially tied in North Carolina, with Clinton holding a lead of less than 1 percentage point. Among likely voters, Clinton has 42 percent of the vote while Trump has 41.2 percent, with 8.7 percent saying they are still undecided in the race.

Here are the results from the methods report (the brackets indicate that the order of the candidates was randomly assigned):

Incorporating the follow-up question the results would have been:

• Clinton - 309
• Trump - 310 

I'm ignorant about the methods the poll aggregators use but, ignoring that this is a statistical tie, using the follow-up question would have made for a more accurate Elon University Poll headline for North Carolina. It could have read like this:

The race for the White House is essentially tied in North Carolina, with Clinton holding a lead of less than 1 percentage point. Among likely voters, Trump has 43.7 percent of the vote while Clinton has 43.5 percent, with 3.5 percent saying they are still undecided in the race.

Using either way of summarizing the votes, Elon got the North Carolina governor and senate races correct. 

Note to self: Me and my co-authors have been getting a lot of don't know referendum voting responses ... why haven't we asked the "if you had to choose" follow-up question. Has anyone done that?

Climate policy after Paris?

So this happened a week ago today:

Climate policy expert Billy Pizer will give a public lecture Thursday, November 3, at 5 p.m. in Room 114 Belk Library and Information Commons at Appalachian State University.

The lecture, "Climate Policy After Paris: How the U.S. and 190 other countries can save the world" is being organized by the Center for Economic Research and Policy Analysis (CERPA),  the Department of Economics, and the Research Institute for Environment, Energy and Economicsat Appalachian.

Pizer is a professor of environmental sciences and policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

Pizer is a professor of environmental sciences and policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

He served as the senior economist for the environmental at the White House's Council of Economic Advisors, and he was a Lead Author for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). Pizer was deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy at the U.S. Treasury Department and a member of the Climate Change Taskforce at the Council of Foreign Relations. He also served on the National Commission on Energy Policy.

Pizer's academic experience includes visiting professorships at The Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University. He holds a PhD and MA in economics from Harvard University and BS in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I suspect the talk (and mood) would have been different if it was delivered this week. 

"There’s no way around it ..."

Brad Plumer (subtitled "Donald Trump is going to be a disaster for the planet"):

Trump has been crystal clear about his environmental plans. Much of the media never wanted to bring it up, never wanted to ask about it in debates, never wanted to turn their addled attention away from Hillary Clinton’s email servers to discuss what a Trump presidency might mean for climate change. But all the indications were there:

• Trump called global warming a Chinese hoax. He couldn’t have been blunter about this.
• Trump has said, straight up, he wants to scrap all the major regulations that President Obama painstakingly put in place to reduce US carbon dioxide emissions, including the Clean Power Plan. With Republicans now controlling Congress, they could pass a bill preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating CO2.
• Trump has also hinted he wants to get rid of the EPA entirely. “What they do is a disgrace,” he has said. Again, if Congress agrees, he’d have the power to scrap other regulations on mercury pollution, on smog, on coal ash, and more.
• Trump has said he wants to repeal all federal spending on clean energy, including R&D for wind, solar, nuclear power, and electric vehicles. Doable with Congress.
• Trump has said he wants to pull the United States out of the Paris climate deal. There’s nothing stopping him. (Technically, the US can’t officially withdraw for four years, but for all practical purposes, the Trump administration could ignore it.)

via www.vox.com

...and we're off.

Well, that didn't take long:

It’s been reported that Trump had chosen Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, to lead his Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Ebell has called the Clean Power Plan “illegal” and has said joining the Paris agreement is “unconstitutional.”

And if you don't know much about Myron Ebell, here's the Wikipedia version:

Myron Ebell (born in Baker County, Oregon^[1]) is an American global warming skeptic. He is the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a non-profit public policy organization founded in 1984 by Fred L. Smith, Jr. Ebell directs and oversees all aspects of energy policy education and advocacy for CEI. He is also the Chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an informal, ad hoc policy group that works on the economics, science, and risk analysis associated with global warming. In September 2016 he was appointed by 2016 U.S. presidential candidateDonald Trump to lead to his U.S. EPA transition team, bring attention to his record as a climate denialist and "oil-industry mouthpiece".^[2][3]

His positions at various times are: (a) climate change isn't happening, (b) it is happening, but it's not because of human released CO₂, (c) it is happening, and may be human induced, but it will be much cheaper to adapt to the change than to ration the use of fossil fuels, (d) it is happening and the consequences will be good for the environment.

On diversity and the University post-election

The following is a message I sent to faculty and staff in my department.  I don't know why.  It just seemed appropriate.

After last night (or this morning), I thought I would share with you something I wrote last week when asked for my views on the role of diversity at the university:

"Excellence cannot be achieved without diversity of thought.  Diversity is not an objective; it is a culture. Diversity does not end with hiring.  Diversity must permeate student recruitment, teaching approaches and research topics.  With increasing social, political and economic gaps evident to the casual observer, the University provides a unique opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to use education to foster dialogue, develop solutions and begin to bridge the gaps."

Over the coming weeks, sensitivities may be high among students.  I encourage you to engage students in dialogue as you feel appropriate, referring students to University resources for help if they feel they need it, discouraging intolerance, and emphasizing the acceptance of diversity of thought and the role objective applied economic analysis can play in informed debate. 

Our role as educators is not to tell students who is right and who is wrong;  our job is to equip students with the education and tools necessary to engage in informed, tolerant, productive debate. 

"Washington State Does Not Pass Nation’s First Carbon Tax"

In case you haven't yet checked the webpage I pointed you to yesterday (wasn't that a long time ago?):

While Initiative 732 did not pass, voters in Washington State demonstrated that people around the country and the world are concerned about the threat of climate change and feel compelled to take action to protect our children, our grandchildren, and the world we love.

“Grassroots activism accomplished what many environmental leaders and media pundits said was impossible: we put a revenue-neutral carbon tax on the ballot,” said Yoram Bauman, founder and co-chair of Carbon Washington. “While we did not pass the nation’s first carbon tax, many states around the country are looking at I-732 as a model and we expect a nationwide movement to take root in the years ahead. We will look back at this as a lost opportunity to create history in Washington State, but also as a catalyst for much needed U.S. leadership on climate action.”

via yeson732.org

I'm not sure that I agree about I-732 being "a catalyst for much needed U.S. leadership on climate action."

Vote #Yeson732 @carbonwa

From the inbox:

Hello carbon tax friends, here's the truth about Tuesday:

Tomorrow polls will close at 8pm and initial results should be posted by 8:30pm [ed. note: 11:30pm EST]. We will post a statement at http://yeson732.org/news. If you're in Seattle please join our election night party from 6:30-9:30pm at Peddler Brewing Company (1514 NW Leary Way, Seattle WA, 98107). If you are on Facebook, you can find the event here and invite other supporters. 

Just so you know, Peddler is all ages, they serve beer, cider and soda, we have a food truck showing up on site and the overflow space is a heated outdoor tent, so you may want to bring a jacket. Win, lose, or draw we hope you will join us for this historic night.  If celebrating in Seattle is not an option, we are encouraging people to host local house parties around the state. Take photos and send them our way!

That sounds fun but celebrating in Seattle is not an option so I'll be having my own carbon tax party in Boone, NC tonight. I'll post the photo here tomorrow. 

Who was the greenest president? the votes are in ...

Yesterday I was motivated to pose that question after Max Auffhammer suggested that Barack Obama be named the greenest. My opinion is that President Obama tried his darnedest to be the greenest but didn't receive enough cooperation to achieve that title. My vote went to Richard Nixon for the EPA, CAA and CWA (command and control be damned). I also nominated George H. W. Bush for the CAAA of 1990 (and I was reminded today of no net loss of wetlands) and Teddy Roosevelt for the National Parks. The results are in ("dozens" of votes are reported below the jump) and Nixon wins with 46% of the 28 votes. Roosevelt was second with 21% followed by Obama (14%) and Bush (7%). Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt each received one write-in vote. 

Thanks for your votes!

The greenest president?* Cast your vote here!

Max Aufhammer (The Future is at Stake):

The past eight years of the Obama presidency have brought monumental change for the better in the environmental and energy arena. We have made significant progress on fuel economy standards, emissions standards for power plants, the introduction of a real social cost of carbon into federal rulemaking, the rapidly increasing penetration of renewables on people’s roofs and on the people’s plains and in their valleys. President Obama will go into the history books as the first African American president. I would argue that he will be remembered by many future generations as the Greenest president this country has ever had.

Many of the recent regulations are being passed in the form of command and control with significant flexibility built in. Still, these are not the economists’ preferred choice. Yet, team Obama got it done. He had great counsel during his eight years in office, helping design programs that built in flexibility where possible. Joe Aldy, Ann Wolverton,  Nat Keohane, Billy Pizer, Gib Metcalf, Michael Greenstone, Arik Levinson, Matt Kotchen, Glenn Sheriff, Sheila Olmstead, Gilbert Metcalf, and Kenny Gillingham are just a few of the brilliant environmental economists that spent time in the White House and at Treasury helping design and implement smarter and more efficient policies. I do note a curious absence of Berkeley environmental economists, but maybe Secretary Clinton will deck the halls with Berkeley folks if elected. We’re here for you Madam Secretary.

Maybe the most significant achievement and point of departure is the signing of the Paris accord. No previous administration has managed to credibly commit the US to meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Clinton (Bill, President) signed the Kyoto agreement, knowing full well that Congress would never ratify it. Under Obama, we signed an agreement that does not need to be ratified by Congress as the reductions can be achieved through agency actions. ...

And let us not forget that Candidate Obama ran for election with a cap-and-trade policy proposal. Other candidates for the title of greenest (with major accomplishments in parentheses) are Theodore Roosevelt (National Park System), Richard Nixon (Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act) George H. W. Bush (Clean Air Act Amendents of 1990 [aka, Acid Rain Program]). So now that we know the nominees, who do you think is the greenest President in U.S. history? 

You can follow the results here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-KWTDJP2N/. 

*Something that only I might be interested in ... I'm not sure why "Greenest" is capitalized in the text. In addition to an awesome color, is it a proper noun? I wrote it in lower case in the title but would be happy to stand corrected.