Proponents of a market-oriented plan to fight climate change by taxing greenhouse gas emissions and giving the revenue to American taxpayers are starting a campaign to run advertisements as early as this fall and introduce legislation in Congress as early as next year.
The plan’s supporters have formed a group called Americans for Carbon Dividends that will lobby for the proposal. The group plans its first event on Wednesday and includes a number of well-known members, including Trent Lott, the former Senate Republican leader from Mississippi, and Janet L. Yellen, who led the Federal Reserve under President Barack Obama.
The initiative has already won endorsements from some environmental groups, like the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International; fossil fuel giants like Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP; and major companies in renewable and nuclear energy and consumer goods.
“It’s something that may command bipartisan consensus,” Ms. Yellen said in an interview, calling the proposal “a very exciting prospect.” Taxing carbon dioxide emissions to reduce energy use, she added, is “absolutely standard textbook economics.”
The proposal would set an initial tax of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide produced and would increase the price over time. That would raise the cost of a gallon of gas by approximately 38 cents, the group says, with similar effects on household heating and other energy use. That could, in turn, encourage people and businesses to become more energy efficient and curb their use of fossil fuels.
To offset the higher prices, the tax revenue would be returned to consumers as a “carbon dividend.” The group estimates that the dividend would give a family of four about $2,000 in the first year.
The group says the plan could reduce United States emissions even further than the Obama administration pledged under the Paris climate accord.
But the leaders of the group are not holding their breath. The notion that the current fractious Congress could pass a bill based on the proposal is not within their fondest expectations. Instead, their strategy is to build public support for the plan while working toward a legislative proposal that could be introduced after the midterm elections, when a new Congress might be more friendly to environmental legislation. ...
Since the Reagan administration, federal agencies have been required to produce cost-benefit analyses of their major regulations. These assessments are designed to ensure that regulators are pursuing actions that make society better off.
In my experience working on the White House economic team in the Clinton and Obama administrations, I found cost-benefit analysis provides a solid foundation for understanding the impacts of regulatory proposals. It also generates thoughtful discussion of ways to design rules to maximize net benefits to the public.
On June 7, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt proposed changing the agency’s approach to this process in ways that sound sensible, but in fact are a radical departure from how government agencies have operated for decades.
In 2016, cremation overtook entombment as the most common method of “body disposal” in the U.S. And death is environmentally costly: Millions of gallons of toxic fluids and tens of millions of feet of wood are put in the ground each year. One cremation emits as much carbon dioxide as a 1,000-mile car trip.
It's a good read for those who estimate the value of a statistical life of the willingness to pay for improvements in air quality. I've read some other critiques of cost-benefit analysis and of non-market valuation that aren't nearly as compelling as this one is. (Disclosure: Anderson was my professor for an ethics course back in the late 90s when I was an undergraduate philosophy major at Michigan.)
I will argue that these goods [safety and environmental quality] are not properly regarded as mere commodities. By regarding them only as commodity values, cost-benefit analysis fails to consider the proper roles they occupy in public life.
Her critique of the VSL is basically that, even if you believe that the estimated VSL represents a consistent value of what people would pay for mortality risk reductions, it does not have the normative representation as it is commonly used in policy analysis.
Market norms and social relations do not supply an adequate context for people to autonomously express how they value their lives.
She similarly critiques the use of non-market valuation of environmental goods like clean air. While some of her criticisms are unfair I think (she seems to overlook the fact that economists doing non-market valuation do in fact allow for valuations other than use value), there are many compelling issues to think about. She argues that attitudes towards nature can be "intrinsic evaluative attitudes," which are not subject to monetization or trade-offs. People can value environmental goods "in higher ways" than they value commodities, and using standard welfare economics to measure environmental (non-market) valuation will not capture this.
Her proposed alternative to using CBA to assess policies in these domains is to use "democratic institutions of voice," in which individuals are given autonomy through the democratic process rather than only insofar as they are willing to pay for improvements in safety or the environment.
This chapter is well worth reading for any of us who do CBA or non-market valuation. Even if the conclusions are wrong, we should all think more clearly about the justifications behind our analysis.
When Daniel W. Bromley assumed the editorship of Land Economics in 1974, the journal had just celebrated fifty years of continuous publication. Bromley is the Anderson-Bascom Professor (Emeritus) of Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and recipient of the 2011 Reimar Lüst Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Under Bromley’s leadership, the journal has flourished as a forum for scholarship on the economic aspects of natural and environmental resources. Now, forty-four years later, as Land Economics approaches its centennial, Bromley will pass the baton to Daniel J. Phaneuf.
Phaneuf is the Henry C. Taylor Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He boasts an impressive editorial resume, having served as the inaugural editor in chief of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE) and the managing editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. He is the president-elect of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
In his first “From the Editor” feature, which will appear in Land Economics volume 94 number 3 this July, Phaneuf expresses the ambition “to maintain the journal’s emphasis on empirical and policy-relevant research in the field, while continuing to expand its readership and author community to include broader swaths of researchers in the profession.” He continues, “My early emphasis will be on increasing the journal’s visibility, circulation, and overall impact—tasks for which I will call on current authors, readers, and reviewers for assistance and suggestions.” Phaneuf notes that he does not anticipate making any changes in the journal’s scholarly focus or the way it is managed. ...
I'm going to miss Professor Bromley's endorsement in the revise and resubmit letter: "This paper is mildly interesting." Actually, I've been missing it a lot lately.
The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out*.
*I disagree with this analogy. Car alarms are ignored because they tend to be false alarms. Climate warnings are ignored because there is no obvious sign of trouble in the immediate future, and the damages are likely to be too far in the future for the current generation of observers to care.
I was talking to my parents last night and they were bemoaning the amount of rain they have had the past month. These are the same parents who can best be described as climate change skeptics.
Really they pay little attention to things like climate change other than my father making an off-hand remark on a bad weather day, like a warm day in January, or snowy in May, 'Must be that climate change thing you're always talking about.'
I never talk about climate change around my dad.
Anyways, I decided to take a look at the precipitation totals at BWI airport for a few reasons:
To see if there's a noticeable trend.
To see if I could use data to make a case to my parents that climate change might just be something worth talking about. It's always good to try to change a 75 year old's mind, right?
Why BWI to ask? Well, I grew up, and my parents still live, two miles from BWI as the planes fly (if you draw a straight line from one of the runways, south eastward, you go right through my parents backyard). Here's proof:
OK, that's not really proof, but you'll just have to trust me, planes fly over that house all day, and all night...all year...nonstop. I blocked out the address to prevent the paparazzi from hounding my parents when the brilliance of this post leaks out.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, definitive proof of climate change so I can stick it to my parents.
Here's a graph of official annual precipitation readings at BWI from 1951-2017. Here's a link to the data. The blue dots are rainfall in inches. The black line is a simple linear regression line to show the trend (we all like simple linear regressions, right)?
There you have it. Definitive proof that...well..proof of something. Take that mom and dad!
I'm not an expert at statistics or anything (ok, maybe I am), but that looks like rainfall totals have been trending upward at BWI since 1951.
"But wait!," you say, "it looks like 1999 was screwy and couldn't that be pulling the slope of that fake regression line upward?"
That's mighty astute of you. Yes it could. And not only that, this graph doesn't control for month-to-month variations that may affect annual totals. I'll bet you didn't think of that, oh-astute-reader, did you?
So let's look at the year-over-year monthly trend in rainfall at BWI from 1951-2017:
A couple of observations:
The screwy 1999 number seems to be driven by a weird observation in October of 1999--Did BWI really get over 40 inches of rain in October of 1999? I'll look into that for you.
75% of the months (9 out of 12) show an upward trend in rainfall totals from 1951-2017. Three do not (February, March and November). February isn't a real month so we can throw that out (how do you count an extra day once every 4 years?). The trends in March and November look pretty flat.
So there you have it.
Conclusive proof that my parents need to stop telling their friends that I "Still believe in that climate change hoax."
A former Harvard economist and co-founder of a massive repository of free papers in social sciences has been accused of reusing similar material over multiple papers.
The three papers share the same title. According to an investigation by one of the journals, two papers by Michael Jensen, now an emeritus faculty member at Harvard, are “close-to-identical,” while another includes a “substantial amount of overlapping content.” None of the three papers cite the others.
The journal, Business Ethics Quarterly, has added an editorial notice to a 2002 paper by Jensen, noting its similarity to a 2001 paper and another 2001 paper. The notice states an earlier version of the paper was published by Harvard Business School Press. The editor surmises that all three journals were “more or less simultaneously vetting versions of the Jensen article.”
I was asked to review the paper mid-April and got a reminder in mid-May that the review was due in a week. This is not good:
Dear [journal editor],
I have just now completed the review of this paper and went to manuscript central to submit it and got the message:
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Review Complete You have either completed this review or this review is no longer necessary. Please contact the site Administrator if you have any further questions.
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I'm resisting the urge to use profanity in this email since I hope this message is a mistake since (1) I have not completed the review and (2) I did not receive an email notice that my review was no longer needed.
I sincerely hope that your journal did not cause me to waste my Friday.
Sincerely,
John Whitehead
This is a different journal than the one that caused me to waste my time earlier this year. I'm receiving incentives to just chuck the paper if I'm not able to complete it within the bull$h1t timeline that the journal thinks is appropriate.
Update: The editor emailed and apologized for the mistake. I emailed my review which will be ignored because the "mistake" the editor made was to not notify the reviewer who had not submitted a review that his review was no longer needed. It is a radio button in the editorial management systems.
