The group started with impeccable conservative credentials, bringing on cabinet members from the last three Republican presidential administrations (Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and George W Bush): two former Secretaries of State, two former Secretaries of Treasury, and two former chairmen of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. It was founded by Ted Halstead, who explained the group’s proposed policy in a TED talk:
Some of the world’s brightest scientific and economic minds have since become founding members, including Stephen Hawking, Steven Chu, Martin Feldstein, and Lawrence Summers. So have ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell. But it’s not just the oil industry joining the call for a carbon tax; GM, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsico, and Johnson & Johnson are among the major companies signing on. As have environmental groups like the Nature Conservancy.
...
However, the most conservative voters (i.e. the Republican base) have the lowest support for this (or any) proposed climate policy. And the Koch brothers and their vast network of allies – who have essentially bought many Republican policymakers through political donations – squarely oppose all climate policies. Those two factors likely explain why 22 oil-funded Republican senators encouraged Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty, while very few of the party’s politicians objected to that stupid, historically irresponsible move. Instead of looking for solutions to the existential climate threat we face, they’re stuck in denial.
1/ Looooong tweetstorm on use of contingent valuation method in Exxon Valdez case & what it says on how economics science & expertise work pic.twitter.com/SohMYTwnh7
These 48 tweets cover the article that Tim posted earlier and also this one by Spencer Banzhaf (who alerted us to the Maas and Svorcencik article):
Banzhaf , H. Spencer, Constructing Markets: Environmental Economics and the Contingent Valuation Controversy (October 21, 2016). History of Political Economy, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2959427.
Having lived through it [see below], I thought I knew everything about the CVM debate but still learned something new. For example: Diamond, Hausman and McFadden did not collect any of the Exxon-funded data (i.e., write the surveys, focus group, pretest and field the surveys). It seems that it was collected by others [*.pdf] and then, given their prominence in the profession, Diamond, Hausman and McFadden did the econometrics.
Tweets 4 and 5 say:
4/Rather than countering w/ alternative estimates, Maas&Svorencik explain, Exxon casted doubt on method itself: contingent valuation (CV)
5/Unlike tobacco/climate cases, Exxon did NOT manufacture doubt, but tapped into EXISTING debates on scientific character of CV among econs
Being economic history, neither of these articles mention the brand new BP funded critique of CVM. It is clear that BP is following the same game plan as Exxon. Here is my recommended readings on the CVM Debate - Part Deux:
Carson, Richard T. "Contingent valuation: A practical alternative when prices aren't available." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 26, no. 4 (2012): 27-42.
Hausman, Jerry. "Contingent valuation: from dubious to hopeless." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 26, no. 4 (2012): 43-56.
Kling, Catherine L., Daniel J. Phaneuf, and Jinhua Zhao. "From Exxon to BP: Has some number become better than no number?." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 26, no. 4 (2012): 3-26.
[*] Desvousges, William, Kristy Mathews, and Kenneth Train. "Adequate responsiveness to scope in contingent valuation." Ecological Economics 84 (2012): 121-128.
Haab, Timothy C., Matthew G. Interis, Daniel R. Petrolia, and John C. Whitehead. "From hopeless to curious? Thoughts on Hausman's “dubious to hopeless” critique of contingent valuation." Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 35, no. 4 (2013): 593-612.
[*] Desvousges, William, Kristy Mathews, and Kenneth Train. "An adding-up test on contingent valuations of river and lake quality." Land Economics 91, no. 3 (2015): 556-571.
Dickinson, David L., and John C. Whitehead. "Dubious and dubiouser: Contingent valuation and the time of day." Economic Inquiry 53, no. 2 (2015): 1396-1400. [note: published in the Miscellany section]
[*] Desvousges, William, Kristy Mathews, and Kenneth Train. "From Curious to Pragmatically Curious: Comment on “From Hopeless to Curious? Thoughts on Hausman's ‘Dubious to Hopeless’ Critique of Contingent Valuation†”." Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 38, no. 1 (2016): 174-182.
Haab, Timothy C., Matthew G. Interis, Daniel R. Petrolia, and John C. Whitehead. "Interesting Questions Worthy of Further Study: Our Reply to Desvousges, Mathews, and Train's (2015) Comment on Our Thoughts (2013) on Hausman's (2012) Update of Diamond and Hausman's (1994) Critique of Contingent Valuation." Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 38, no. 1 (2016): 183-189.
Whitehead, John C. "Plausible responsiveness to scope in contingent valuation." Ecological Economics 128 (2016): 17-22. [note: this is a comment on DMT (2012) that grew into a full length paper with original content]
Chapman, David J., Richard C. Bishop, W. Michael Hanemann, Barbara J. Kanninen, Jon A. Krosnick, Edward R. Morey, and Roger Tourangeau. "On the adequacy of scope test results: Comments on Desvousges, Mathews, and Train." Ecological Economics 130 (2016): 356-360.
[*] Desvousges, William. "Reply to ‘On the adequacy of scope test results: Comments on Desvousges, Mathews, and Train’." Ecological Economics 130 (2016): 361-362.
Poe, Gregory L. "Behavioral Anomalies in Contingent Values and Actual Choices." Agricultural and Resource Economics Review 45, no. 2 (2016): 246-269.
Whitehead, John C. "A Comment on 'An Adding Up Test on Contingent Valuations of River and Lake Quality'”. Appalachian State University Department of Economics Working Paper No. 17-01. 2017.
Bishop, Richard C., Kevin J. Boyle, Richard T. Carson, David Chapman, W. Michael Hanemann, Barbara Kanninen, Raymond J. Kopp et al. "Putting a value on injuries to natural assets: The BP oil spill." Science 356, no. 6335 (2017): 253-254.
[*] McFadden, Daniel, and Kenneth Train, eds. Contingent Valuation of Environmental Goods: A Comprehensive Critique. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017.
Whitehead, John C. "A Replication of Willingness-to-pay Estimates in ‘An Adding Up Test on Contingent Valuations of River and Lake Quality’ (Land Economics, 2015)." unpublished manuscript, June 2017.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt continues to clean house at a key advisory committee, signaling plans to drop several dozen current members of the Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), according to an email yesterday from a senior agency official.
All board members whose three-year appointments expire in August will not get renewals, Robert Kavlock, acting head of EPA's Office of Research and Development, said in the email, which was obtained by E&E News.
Because of the need to reconstitute the board, EPA is also canceling all subcommittee meetings planned for late summer and fall, Kavlock said.
"We are hopeful that an updated BOSC Executive Committee and the five subcommittees can resume their work in 2018 and continue providing ORD with thoughtful recommendations and comments," he wrote in urging departing members to reapply.
The board, whose members are chosen by Pruitt, advises EPA on technical and management issues related to its research programs. First-term board members typically receive a second three-year reappointment. Last month, however, Pruitt broke with that tradition in opting not to renew the appointments of nine BOSC members. The new round of non-renewals will bite much deeper, BOSC Executive Committee Chairwoman Deborah Swackhamer, a University of Minnesota science professor, indicated in an email today to E&E News.
Of 49 remaining subcommittee members, 38 will not be renewed at the end of August, leaving a total of 11, she said. None of the subcommittees will have a chair or vice chair, Swackhamer said, while the executive committee will have three members. While EPA is already seeking nominations to fill out the board, the deadline is the end of next week, she noted.
I don't know the names of all of those cut, but I know of one colleague from my department who has been cut (and is less than pleased).
When the first round of non-renewals became public last month, an EPA spokesman noted that reappointments were not guaranteed and that the agency wanted to ensure fair consideration of all nominees for advisory board posts.
In a statement today, spokeswoman Amy Graham said the agency is grateful for the service of BOSC members and is encouraging those with expiring terms to reapply.
"We are taking an inclusive approach to filling future BOSC appointments and welcome all applicants from all relevant scientific and technical fields," Graham said.
But the first round sparked backlash from congressional Democrats and accusations that Pruitt is seeking to make room for industry representatives who will undercut the integrity of the board's work.
"This says to me that they do not want objective science," Peter Meyer, an economist who resigned in protest last month, said in an interview this morning.
This appears to be just the start of advisory committee changes at the EPA. The agency’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) also likely will be changed in the future.
One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing conversations, said that a segment of the Scientific Advisory Board rotates off each year and the agency will issue a Federal Register notice in the next couple of weeks that will invite applicants to replace those members whose terms are expiring.
“EPA is currently deliberating next steps for the SAB and CASAC,” said one senior agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because no final decision has been made.
I am most happy to inform you that the following sessions have been accepted for presentation at the 87th annual conference of the Southern Economic Association®.
Agriculture
Air Pollution
Climate Change I
Climate Change II
Coastal Management
Energy
Fisheries
Forests and Wildlife
Natural Disasters
Panel: Tips for Students and Young Economists: Dissertations, Jobs, Publishing, and Success
Political Economy
Pollution Control
Property Values
Recreation
Renewable Energy
Stated Preferences I
Stated Preferences II
Student Session on Energy and Efficiency
Student Session on Environmental Topics
Student Session on Natural and Food Resources
Voluntary Mechanisms
Water
The conference will be held November 17-19, 2017 at the Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel and Marina in Tampa, FL. This year, the Distinguished Guest Lecture will feature Janet Currie of Princeton University on Friday, November 17th, at 5:00 p.m. An opening reception and cash bar will follow. The conference will conclude on Sunday, November 19, 2017.
One semi-interesting fact: The 2017 AERE/SEA meetings, with fewer overall sessions, has twice as many sessions devoted to stated preferences than the 2017 AERE Summer Meeting.
"Some years after the [Cambridge symposium on Contingent Valuation], [Contingent Valuation critic and all around good guy*, Jerry Hausman] was profiled by Bloomberg as “corporate America’s favorite economist” and quoted to consider environmental economists relative to the economics profession as no better than 'military music compared to music.'"
*I don't know know if he is a good guy or not. It just sounded good.
In hopes of establishing greater dialogue with past and future authors, reviewers and readers of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), we write to give you an update on recent journal activities.
We are happy to report that JEEM continues to thrive. So far in 2016*, JEEM has received over 555 submissions, a roughly 32% increase over last year and a 44% increase since 2014. The quality of accepted papers remains high as evidenced by the journal’s low acceptance rate and high Impact Factor.
Listed below are a representative set of recently published articles in JEEM. For a limited time, these articles are available free for download at the links provided. ...
JEEM has sponsored a number of academic conferences and workshops in 2016. This support was made possible by the submission fees that you, the research community, paid over the years. As a gesture of good will and gratitude, we wanted to use these resources to support worthwhile activities that you value. In particular,JEEM submission fees have sponsored these events in 2016. In the future, we intend to allocate a portion of JEEM submission fees to support more conferences and workshops.
If you follow the "these events" link you'll see this:
The list does not include the AERE summer meetings. AERE broke with JEEM because Elsevier wouldn't share the wealth and now Elsevier is happy to buy me dinner in Blowing Rock, NC. I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me (literally) but that seems a little weird.
I'm just now taking a look at the program [*.pdf] and noticed the Elsevier badge under Gold sponsors. But don't follow the "these events" link. When I click it goes to "news" and not events:
We are delighted to announce that Roger H. von Haefen of North Carolina State University has agreed to serve as Co-Editor-in-Chief at JEEM starting immediately.
If anyone doesn't know, I think we can thank Roger for bringing these two (JEEM and AERE) back together ("I still love you but I'm not in love with you." Do college girls still use that line to break up with their boyfriends?).
Each year, AERE selects an outstanding research paper published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists during the previous calendar year.
"The Clean Air Act Watch List: An Enforcement and Compliance Natural Experiment" by Mary F. Evans Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, volume 3, number 3, pp. 627-65, 2016.
This research asks the question: can traditional regulation of the environment be improved or replaced by public release of information about polluting facilities? The 2016 JAERE paper by Mary Evans makes two major contributions in this literature. First, it is a model of academic innovation in identification. It uses an accidental public release of facilities’ identities on an EPA Clean Air Act “watch list” to identify the impacts of both traditional and informational policies in what is essentially a national quasi-experiment. Second, it measures the complementarity of government oversight and civil action: government oversight is effective but can be substantially more effective when information regarding that oversight enters the public realm. The paper includes an extensive series of robustness checks that rule out potential confounding factors, and it provides a benchmark of best practice in quasi-experimental evaluation. For regulators, her paper provides potential new management tools that are easy to implement and likely to make real world impacts. For researchers, her paper provides a robust, well executed, and highly policy relevant blueprint for examining non-traditional forms of regulatory impacts.
This paper examines consulting and expert work performed by (experimental) economists for the Exxon Valdez litigation case. One of the issues at stake was the use of a specific method, contingent valuation, to estimate the so-called passive use value part of the damage resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 24, 1989. Our interest is less in the possibilities of using contingent valuation to estimate passive use values as such, and more in the dynamics of consulting and expert work itself, which in litigation cases mostly remains hidden behind the veil of contracts. Because Exxon went explicitly public in the Exxon Valdez case, this veil can be partially lifted. In contrast with Public Trustees, who submitted a monetary damage estimate to the Court, Exxon decided to follow a radically different strategy: it organized an all-out assault on the method by which such a monetary estimate was most likely to be produced. That strategy cut across social and epistemic commitments of different segments of the economics discipline, raising questions about the different meanings of expertise, and the role of economists in the legal, business, and public domain. This paper aims to address these questions.
