Ezra Klein’s nominally talking to economists, but you guys sitting in the back might get something out of this as well: Listen to political scientists, sociologists, etc. They have perspectives, evidence and training worthy of consideration.
Chris Corbin argues that flood irrigation isn’t the bogeyman it’s frequently made out to be. Some footnotes Chris and I came up in a twitter conversation: Ward and Pulido-Velazquez, PNAS, Water conservation in irrigation can increase water use Huffaker, WRR, Conservation potential of agricultural water conservation subsidies Pfeiffer and Lin, The Effect of Irrigation Technology on Groundwater Use This …
I just finished and very much enjoyed Tyler’s Cowen’s The Great Stagnation (my first ebook too!). Cowen’s argument, for those not familiar with it, is that the stagnation of the U.S. economy is not the result of anything we’ve done wrong, but rather the fact that we managed the impressive rate of growth over the …
From Buttonwood: Were Chinese oil consumption to reach US per capita levels, its demand would rise ninefold, while Indian consumption would have to go up 23-fold. That would push global oil demand up to 260 million barrels per day, compared with just under 90m barrels a day at present. Clearly, that’s not going to happen. …
Barro and McCleary get to the bottom of one of the central questions in 21st-century economics – beatification: We classify these blessed persons regionally in accordance with residence at death. These data are combined with time-series estimates of regional populations of Catholics, broadly-defined Protestants, Orthodox, and Evangelicals (mostly a sub-set of Protestants). Regression estimates indicate …
Over at Columbia University’s “Water Matters”, Debbie Cook has been making the case against desalination as a water supply solution. She has a number of lines of argument, but it all boils down (pardon the pun) to cost, and to a series of societal tradeoffs that flow from that. Consider Saudi Arabia’s decision to use …
I don’t know Florida water issues at all, so maybe someone can help me here. Tampa Bay Water spent $160 million to build a desal plant. But they don’t use it all that much: Tampa Bay Water says it costs four times as much to turn water from Tampa Bay into drinking water as it …
A couple of (possibly connected?) things that crossed my desk this morning – According to the latest data from the San Francisco Fed, Las Vegas (Nev.) has huge foreclosure numbers. And then this good news, from Henry Brean at the Las Vegas Review Journal: [W]ater use continues to decline in the valley, where the water authority …
I noticed yesterday evening a significant number of homes with outdoor Christmas lights still up and shining, far more than I remember in past years by mid-January. (No data here, just a hunch.) They looked like the new high-efficiency LED lights, which seems to be the Jevons paradox in action. The core of the paradox …
Continue reading ‘The Jevons Paradox and Christmas Lights’ »
Investors need to take long term water supply risks into account as they think about municipal bonds, according to a new analysis by the environmental-investor group Ceres published this week: The report shows that some of the nation’s largest public utilities may face moderate to severe water supply shortfalls in the coming years, yet these …