Michael Tobis models the lawnmower problem: If you have a typical American house, you have a typical lawn in front of it, a lawn that is in need of occasional trimming. Unless you contract out for lawn services, you almost certainly own a lawnmower too. Most likely it has a cheesy, loud, polluting little engine. You only …
Ryan Avent: I have become increasingly pessimistic about our ability to address the climate change crisis. The dynamics are simply deadly — the most dangerous effects begin arriving after it’s too late to do anything about them — which leaves as our great hope the chance that a strong enough intellectual argument can be made …
Continue reading ‘On the Possibility of Climate Change Action’ »
Discussing federal stimulus spending yesterday, a colleague and I were pondering how the New Mexico economy might go about absorbing the money the feds want to pump into it. One key question is the availability of a work force with the skills to build stuff. Some numbers, courtesy St. Louis Fed. The drop from the …
Nothin’ like a good economic collapse to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. From Bloomberg: Oil demand will fall for a second year, the first back-to-back contractions since 1983, as a deepening recession erodes consumer spending, the International Energy Agency said.
Tim Haab on the question of which is better, a fuel consumption-based or mileage-based motoring tax: The answer comes down to one simple question: What is the goal? If the goal is revenue generation then a mileage tax makes sense. If the goal is fuel efficiency then a gas tax makes sense. If the goal …
I see John Whitehead hunched over his keyboard preparing his riposte to this, from the Romer-Bernstein analysis of the job creation prospects in the Obama stimulus package: Recent research by Robert Pollin and Jeannette Wicks-Lim (available at http://www.peri.umass.edu/green_jobs) suggests that investments in green energy will create jobs that generally pay well above the typical wage. …
I know Joe Romm is a smart guy. I’ve read lots of his work, and interviewed him for newspaper stories. I am sure he must have useful things to add to the climate change-energy policy discussion. He’s aparently an important guy in this arena, because he gets quoted on Andy Revkin’s blog and stuff. But …
Worked some Yergin and Hartwick into a piece for this morning’s paper on the regulatory framework (or lack thereof) surrounding deep brackish groundwater in New Mexico: Water is not oil, but there are similarities in the politics and policies that accompany our consumption of the two precious liquids. Using groundwater, which is almost never replaced …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brackish Water and “Sustainability”’ »
Writing in this week’s Science (who knew economics was a science?), economists Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Rudiger von Arnim argue that the trade liberalization deck is stacked against the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa (sub. req.): Whatever the right assumptions are, all the different models come to essentially the same conclusion: Global gains of a …