Great things are expected from great people and Great ideas are expected from great institutions. Harvard is raising the stakes here promising to deliver a new global climate treaty in return for a payment of $750,000 per year. The authors of this new treaty will need to have a subtle understanding of the political economy of interest group competition in each nation. In particular, how do you design an incentive program such that developed nations, developing nations, and poor nations are all willing to sign it? What international enforcement architecture are individual nations willing to expose themselves to?


Harvard To Help Develop New Global Climate Treaty

Aims to develop 'scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic' plan

Published On 7/27/2007 12:13:50 AM

By MARIE C. KODAMA

Crimson Staff Writer


The University announced a plan earlier this month to help develop a more effective and inclusive international treaty for reducing greenhouse gases following the expiration of the current treaty in 2012.

The plan, called the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, will initially be led by professors in the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Business School, and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. It is intended to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which began its agreed-upon 15-year existence in 1997.

The new plan will aim to reach a comprehensive and international alternative solution to the global warming problem by drawing on leaders and scholars from a “variety of venues” in science, academia, business, government, and non-governmental organizations, according to the plan’s co-director, Pratt Professor of Business and Government Robert N. Stavins.

“Although it is a Harvard-housed project, we will be working closely with the United Nations in New York, the European Union in Brussels, and the United Nations Foundation in Washington for the planning and execution,” Stavins said. “It is by no means Harvard preaching to the world.”

But the fact that it is a Harvard-based project does have its advantages, including the large resource pool that is the students, according to co-director Joseph E. Aldy, a fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. think tank.

“We do recognize that there is a lot of talent, energy and interest among students,” Aldy said. “We hope to engage the student community and have students help work and contribute to the project.”

Aldy is also a former staff member for the President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, specializing in environmental issues.

The Kyoto Protocol is the current international global climate agreement that sets a carbon limit for its 35 participating industrialized countries. It was signed in 1997 under President Bill Clinton and was later rejected in 2001 by President George W. Bush out of concern that it would damage the U.S. economy.

The recently launched Harvard project, if approved, will work to produce a resolution through 2016.

“The Kyoto Protocol can’t just be renewed,” Stavins said. “Our intention with this project is to come up with a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic plan, and the current protocol, most of us would maintain, is none of these.”

To develop a more effective plan, the flaws of the Kyoto Protocol must be addressed, according to Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth Jeffrey A. Frankel. But Frankel also stressed that many of the current protocol’s problems may not have easy remedies.

“There are shortcomings, such as enforceability, but for these there may exist no fully satisfactory solution,” Frankel wrote in an e-mail.

The two-year, $750,000 project grew out of a workshop held by the Harvard Environmental Economics Project last spring, which brought together 27 leading thinkers from around the world in the fields of economics, law, political science, business, international relations, and the natural sciences, according to a press release by the Kennedy School. Together, they developed six possible “alternative architectures” that would eventually help build the post-Kyoto Protocol international agreement.

According to Stavins, the crux of the agreement and its eventual approval lies in its ability to be credible to and include developing countries, namely China and India. Unfortunately, Stavins said, actually realizing this step remains difficult.

“The greatest challenge will be to bring all the countries in the world together, and eventually for them to agree on a particular policy architecture,” he said. “We can’t predict at all what the international deliberations will be like, but they will most certainly be a challenge because of the magnitude of the problem, the significant cost, and the long-term nature of the problem.”

While an international team to expand the project is still in the works, the project already has a solid steering committee composed of Harvard professors, including Frankel, Black Professor of Business Administration Forest L. Reinhardt ’79, and Daniel P. Schrag of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Former University President Lawrence H. Summers is also part of the steering committee.

—Staff writer Marie C. Kodama can be reached at mckodama@fas.harvard.edu.


http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=519380

Have you ever wondered whether your work is getting better over time? I'd like to believe that my research is getting better, but how do you test this optimistic claim? One method would be to look at where the work is appearing. I will have a paper in the next American Economic Review (joint with my favorite co-author).
Another empirical test is to go back and read your early work.

Last week as I cleaned out my Boston house, I found an old floppy disk. We have one last computer that takes 3 inch floppies and when I looked at the directories --- I found a Word Perfect version of my PHD thesis.

To amuse myself and to show my UCLA students that one's work can improve, I'm posting a copy of my
1993 University of Chicago Economics Thesis for you to skim.

In fairness to myself, each of these chapters were eventually published. One in the Rand Journal, one in Journal of Urban Economics and one in Economic Letters. The first two articles have each been cited over 10 times. But still, I can honestly say that 1993 was not my peak year!

I've always been interested in differential sentencing for the same crime. Here is an example of an academic study investigating this;

Sentencing in Homicide Cases and the Role of Vengeance
Author(s) Edward L. Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote
Identifiers The Journal of Legal Studies, volume 32 (2003), pages 363–382

Abstract Does the economic model of optimal punishment explain the variation in the sentencing of murderers? While there is strong support for several predictions of the model, we document that sentences respond to victim characteristics in a way that is hard to reconcile with optimal punishment. In particular, victim characteristics are important determinants of sentencing among vehicular homicides, in which victims are basically random and in which the optimal punishment model predicts that victim characteristics should be ignored. Among vehicular homicides, drivers who kill women get 59 percent longer sentences. Drivers who kill blacks get 60 percent shorter sentences.

NOW, here is a popular news item posted today on roughly the same subject.


Sentences vary when kids die in hot cars By ALLEN G. BREED, AP National Writer

Kevin Kelly is a law-abiding citizen who, much distracted, left his beloved 21-month-old daughter in a sweltering van for seven hours. Frances Kelly had probably been dead for more than four hours by the time a neighbor noticed her strapped in her car seat; when rescue personnel removed the girl from the vehicle, her skin was red and blistered, her fine, carrot-colored hair matted with sweat. Two hours later, her body temperature was still nearly 106 degrees.

What is the appropriate punishment for a doting parent responsible for his child's death? A judge eventually spared Kelly a lengthy term in prison. Still, it is a question that is asked dozens of times each year.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of children who died of heat exhaustion while trapped inside vehicles has risen dramatically, totaling around 340 in the past 10 years. Ironically, one reason was a change parent-drivers made to protect their kids after juvenile air-bag deaths peaked in 1995 — they put them in the back seat, where they are more easily forgotten.

An Associated Press analysis of more than 310 fatal incidents in the past 10 years found that prosecutions and penalties vary widely, depending in many cases on where the death occurred and who left the child to die — parent or caregiver, mother or father:

_Mothers are treated much more harshly than fathers. While mothers and fathers are charged and convicted at about the same rates, moms are 26 percent more likely to do time. And their median sentence is two years longer than the terms received by dads.

_Day care workers and other paid baby sitters are more likely than parents to be charged and convicted. But they are jailed less frequently than parents, and for less than half the time.

_Charges are filed in half of all cases — even when a child was left unintentionally.

In all, the AP analyzed 339 fatalities involving more than 350 responsible parties. July is by far the deadliest month, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total.

A relatively small number of cases — about 7 percent — involved drugs or alcohol. In a few instances, the responsible parties had a history of abusing or neglecting children. Still others were single parents unable to find or afford day care.

Many cases involved what might be called community pillars: dentists and nurses; ministers and college professors; a concert violinist; a member of a county social services board; a NASA engineer. And it is undisputed that none — or almost none — intended to harm these children.

"When you look at overall who this is happening to, it's some very, very, very good parents — might I say, doting parents," says Janette Fennell, founder and president of Kids and Cars, a nonprofit group that tracks child deaths and injuries in and around automobiles.

"But no one thinks it's going to happen to them. I think people are lying if they say that there wasn't one situation in raising their child that, `There but for the grace of God go I.'"

The AP's analysis was based largely on a database of fatal hyperthermia cases compiled by Fennell's organization. The AP contacted medical examiner's offices in several states where this most often occurs, and the group's numbers coincided almost exactly with recorded hyperthermia deaths.

Some of these children crawled into cars or trunks on their own, but most were left to die by a caregiver. Most often, it was a parent who simply forgot the child was inside.

Texas leads the nation with at least 41 deaths, followed by Florida with 37, California with 32, North Carolina and Arizona with 14 apiece, and Tennessee with 13. There were deaths recorded in 44 states — most in the Sun Belt, but many in places not known for hot weather.

The correlation between the rise in these deaths and the 1990s move to put children in the back seat is striking.

"Up to that time, the average number of children dying of hyperthermia in the United States was about 11 a year," says Jan Null, an adjunct professor of meteorology at San Francisco State University who has studied this trend. "Then we put them in the back, turned the car seats around. And from '98 to 2006, that number is 36 a year."

Few understand just how quickly a car can heat up, even on a moderate day.

According to one study, the temperature inside a vehicle can rise more than 40 degrees in the span of an hour, with 80 percent of that increase occurring during the first half hour. And researchers found that cracking the windows did little to help.

Children, often too young to escape, are particularly vulnerable because their immature respiratory and circulatory systems do not manage heat as efficiently as adults'. After a short time, the skin grows red and dry, the body becomes unable to produce sweat, and heat stroke kills the child.

Already this year, at least 16 children have died in hot vehicles from Hawaii to Virginia — including a 4-year-old New Orleans boy who died on Father's Day.

Since 1998, charges were filed in 49 percent of cases. In those that have been decided, 81 percent resulted in convictions or guilty pleas, and half of those brought jail sentences — the median sentence being two years. Parents were only slightly less likely to be charged and convicted than others, but the median sentence was much higher — 54 months.

In cases involving paid caregivers, 84 percent were charged, with 96 percent of those convicted. But while they are jailed at about the same rate as parents, the median sentence in those cases was just 12 months.

Women were jailed more often and for longer periods than men. But when the AP compared mothers and fathers, the sentencing gap was even wider.

Mothers were jailed 59 percent of the time, compared to 47 percent for fathers. And the median sentence was three years for dads, but five for moms.

"I think we generally hold mothers to a higher standard in the criminal justice context than in just family life generally," says Jennifer M. Collins, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law who has studied negligence involving parents and such hyperthermia cases. A large segment of society, she says, thinks "fathers are baby-sitting, and mothers are doing God's work."

In 27 percent of the cases the AP studied, the children got into the vehicles on their own. Those cases are much less likely to be prosecuted, though sometimes parents are punished for negligence — particularly where substance abuse is involved.

The AP identified more than 220 cases in which the caregiver admitted leaving the child behind. More than three-quarters of those people claim they simply forgot.

It's easy to forget your keys or that cup of coffee on the roof. But a child? How is that possible?

The awful truth, experts say, is that the stressed-out brain can bury a thought — something as trite as a coffee cup or crucial as a baby — and go on autopilot. While researchers once thought the different parts of the brain worked in conjunction with each other, they now realize that different portions dominate at different times.

"The value of the item is not only not relevant in these competing memory systems," says memory expert David Diamond, an associate psychology professor at the University of South Florida who also works at a Veterans Affairs hospital. "But, in fact, we can be more complacent because we tell ourselves, 'There's no way I would forget my child.'"

Harvard University professor Daniel Shachter, a leading brain researcher, says memory is very "cue dependent."

"And in these cases, the cue is often missing," he says. "When we go on automatic, it's very possible for us to ignore or forget about seemingly important things."

Like a baby.

Nationwide, about 60 percent of cases where the child was left unintentionally result in charges. But policies vary wildly from one jurisdiction to the next.

At least nine children in Las Vegas have died in hot vehicles since 1998, but charges were filed in only two of those cases. For several years, it has been the policy of the Clark County prosecutor's office not to file charges unless there is proof of "some general criminal intent ... to put the child in harm's way," says chief deputy DA Tom Carroll.

But in Memphis, Tenn., District Attorney General William L. Gibbons scoffs at the notion that he wouldn't charge someone — especially a parent — who claims to have simply forgotten a child.

"It frankly boggles my mind that a parent can forget that a child is in a vehicle for two hours," says Gibbons, whose office has prosecuted five cases involving nine parents and day-care workers since 1998.

Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court ordered Gibbons to grant pretrial diversion to youth minister Stephen McKim. McKim was late for a church meeting and forgot his 7-month-old daughter Mia in the back seat — even though the day care center was at the church.

Under diversion, the charge would be dismissed after two years if McKim successfully fulfills certain court requirements. Gibbons thinks that's getting off too easy.

"We're not talking in most cases about sending anyone to prison," he says. "We are talking about placing someone on probation, maybe requiring them to go to some parenting classes or something like that, and giving them a felony record as a result of what happened. And I think that's reasonable."

Not surprisingly, the harshest treatment is reserved for those who intentionally left their children. According to the AP's analysis, those people are nearly twice as likely to serve time than people who simply forgot the child. And on average, they received sentences that were 5 1/2 years longer.

In 2004, Tara Maynor was sentenced to 12 1/2 to 60 years in prison on two counts of second-degree murder after leaving her two children in a car for four hours outside a suburban Detroit beauty parlor while she got a massage and hairdo. She told police she was "too stupid to know they would die."

Just last month, Karla Edwards pleaded guilty in Aiken, S.C., to homicide by child abuse for leaving her 15-month-old son, Zachary Frison, in a car for nine hours in April 2006 while she worked at a home-improvement store. When Edwards was unable — or unwilling — to explain her actions, the judge sentenced her to 20 years.

But in many cases, police, prosecutors and judges must wrestle with whether to charge, try and punish an already grieving parent.

In Lexington, Ky., Fayette Circuit Judge James Ishmael said the question of what to do with Leon Jewell was perhaps the toughest of his career.

According to police, Jewell admitted buying beer and vodka at a liquor store on Aug. 1, 2005, and drinking in his SUV on the way home. When his wife returned home from work later that day, she found 9-month-old Daniel, the couple's only child, still strapped in his car seat.

Jewell pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter. Despite the prosecutor's recommendation of seven years, Ishmael placed the clearly remorseful and devastated Jewell on probation and ordered alcohol treatment.

But six months later, on what would have been Daniel's second birthday, Jewell got drunk and was kicked out of his treatment program. Ishmael sent him to prison for seven years; Jewel expressed his torment in a letter to the judge.

"When I was last before you (you) told me there are worse places than jail," he wrote. "And you are correct. Where ever I am is the worst place in the world. ... I have violated man's laws. I have violated God's laws."

Judges often attempt to craft creative penalties: An Idaho mother was ordered to make a video about her case to be used in birthing classes. In addition to spending eight months in prison, a Louisiana baby sitter was ordered to pay the dead girl's funeral expenses and to make a $500 annual donation to the hospital that treated her. Some day-care workers have been prohibited from supervising young children during their probation.

So what of Kevin Kelly? What did he deserve?

Would it influence your opinion to know that the day Frances died, May 29, 2002, the Manassas engineer was watching 12 children alone while his wife and oldest daughter were abroad visiting a cancer-stricken relative?

Does it matter that when he returned home that day, he'd asked two teenage children — both of baby-sitting age — to attend to their younger siblings while he went back to school for another daughter who was late getting out of an exam?

Or that during the next seven hours, he was accosted by an air conditioning repairman with news that he was going to have to spend several thousand dollars on a new unit? That he fixed lunch, did laundry, mended a gap in the fence that the little ones were using to escape the yard, drove to the store for parts to fix his air conditioner, took a son to soccer practice and fixed a leaking drain pipe in the basement?

Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul L. Ebert concluded that Kelly's failure to ask after Frances for seven hours rose to the level of a crime. Kelly was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment. The jury recommended a year in prison.

But Circuit Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. had what he thought was a more humane solution. He ordered Kelly to spend one day a year in jail for seven years and to hold an annual blood drive around the anniversary of his daughter's death.

Kelly is still a convicted felon. He cannot vote, and his job was affected because he is barred from certain government properties.

But waiting in line recently at the All Saints Catholic Church to donate blood, he said he is happy for the chance to honor his daughter by helping to save lives.

"The judge was very, very merciful," he said as his red-haired children scurried around giving snacks and stickers to donors. "And I'm very grateful for what he did in allowing me to stay with my family and support my family."

___

EDITOR'S NOTE: AP researcher Monika Mathur performed data analysis for this report; National Writer Martha Mendoza also contributed.

At the NBER Summer Institute meetings, one has the opportunity to talk and talk and talk some more. Now that I'm back in Los Angeles, I'm resting my voice after a lot of talking. I talked to people at the Environmental meetings, the labor meetings, the innovation meetings, and the real estate meetings. That's a lot of meetings.

I had an interesting talk with a leading education economist. I told her that Dora and I were frustrated by the Los Angeles Unified School District's inability to produce excellent public schools once kids reach 5th grade. There are a few excellent elementary schools. Given that many residential districts feature average home prices of 1.3 million dollars, you would think that property tax paid on such homes would yield enough tax revenue to build something good.

I wondered why New York City has several excellent public high schools but Los Angeles may actually have none. She argued that the explanation is historical. New York City's schools are older and were created in a less politically correct climate where it was okay to IQ test children and only admit them if they met some cutoff. She pointed out what would happen today if a public school in a Los Angeles where to say "to be admitted to this school, you must score X on this test." She pointed out that other older cities such as San Francisco also have some excellent public schools.

This "new city/old city" distinction is interesting. Ed Glaeser and I have argued that public transit ridership is higher in cities built before the car because of how this affected the city's urban form. I hadn't thought about how the city's local public goods are affected by the social norms at the time when it was growing.

If you reject this hypothesis, what would be your explanation? Ethnic mix of the city? Emphasis on the importance of education differing by city? It is true that many people in LA may value beauty over brains but I haven't figure out how to formally
test this claim!

Renewable Energy will require some land for wind turbines, solar panels and the like. Where is this land? What is the next best use of such land? Are these "input ratios" and land requirements fixed or could they decline as technological progress takes place?


Study: Renewable Energy Not Green
Sara Goudarzi
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Thu Jul 26, 8:35 AM ET


Renewable energy could wreck the environment, according to a study that examined how much land it would take to generate the renewable resources that would make a difference in the global energy system.


Building enough wind farms, damming adequate number of rivers and growing sufficient biomass to produce ample kilowatts to make a difference in meeting global energy demands would involve a huge invasion of nature, according to Jesse Ausubel, a researcher at the Rockefeller University in New York.


Ausubel came to this conclusion by calculating the amount of energy that each renewable source can produce in terms of area of land disturbed.


“We looked at the different major alternatives for renewable energies and we measured [the power output] for each of them and how much land it will rape,” Ausubel told LiveScience.


Land grab for energy


The results, published in the current issue of International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology, paint a grim picture for the environment. For example, according to the study, in order to meet the 2005 electricity demand for the United States, an area the size of Texas would need to be covered with wind structures running round the clock to extract, store and transport the energy.


New York City would require the entire area of Connecticut to become a wind farm to fully power all its electrical equipment and gadgets.


You can convert every kilowatt generated directly into land area disturbed, Ausubel said. “The biomass or wind will produce one or two watts per square meter. So every watt or kilowatt you want for light bulbs in your house can be translated into your hand reaching out into nature taking land.”


Small dent in landmass


Other scientists are not on board with Ausubel’s analysis and say that his use of energy density—the amount of energy produced per each area of land—as the only metric may not be the correct way to calculate the impact of energy from renewable resources on the environment.


“In general, I would say his use of energy density just does not capture the entire scope of issues and capabilities for all the different resources,” said John A. Turner, a principal scientist at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who was not involved in the study.


Turner explains that if the entire United States were to be powered by solar cells with 10 percent efficiency, an area about 10,000 square miles would have to be covered by solar panels in a sunny place such as Arizona or Nevada.


“Now there’s 3.7 million square miles of area for the continental U.S.” Turner told LiveScience. “This represents a very, very tiny area. And that’s just one technology.”


“If you look at how much land area we’ve covered with roads, it’s more than double that. So yeah, it’s a large area, 100 miles by 100 miles, if you pack it into one thing, but if you scatter it across the country and compare it to all the other things we’ve already covered, it’s not an egregious area.”


Double use of land


Ausubel’s analysis concludes that other renewable sources such as solar power and biomass are “un-green”. According to his findings, to obtain power for a large proportion of the country from biomass would require 965 square miles of prime Iowa land. A photovoltaic solar cell plant would require painting black about 58 square miles, plus land for storage and retrieval to equal a 1,000-megawatt electric nuclear plant, a more environmentally friendly choice, Ausubel wrote.


However, new land doesn’t have to be put into use just for a solar plant. Some scientists say already existing infrastructures could be doubled up for use to cover such an area.


“We could do with just rooftops of buildings and homes, land area we’ve already covered,” Turner said. “We could meet 25 percent of our annual electrical demand by just putting solar panels on already existing rooftops of homes and businesses.”

“Similarly, wind farms use up a lot of land area but they only really take up 5 percent of the land they cover,” he explained. “The rest of it can be used for farming so it doesn’t really impact the land area that much.”

Going nuclear

Ausubel thinks that a better alternative to renewable energy resources would be nuclear power, which would leave behind far less waste than other alternatives

“There are three legs to the stool of environmentally sound energy policy—one is improved efficiency, second is increased reliance on natural gas with carbon capture and sequestration and the third is nuclear power,” he explained.

“Nuclear power has the proliferation issues, which are serious but the environmental issues are small. With nuclear energy the issue is to contain radioactivity, which has been successfully done.”

Turner agrees that nuclear power leaves a smaller carbon footprint, but he thinks that the waste issue associated with this technology is very serious.

“It’s unconscionable to dismiss the issue of nuclear waste," Turner said, “because you have to store that waste for hundreds of thousands of years and nuclear wastes are particularly damaging to the environment and have social impacts also.”

Similarly, Gregory A. Keoleian, co-Director for the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, thinks more in-depth analyses are needed before dismissing renewables and considering nuclear power as a viable option.

“I think the characterizations made that ‘renewables are not green’ and ‘nuclear is green’ sound provocative, but they do not accurately represent these technologies with respect to a comprehensive set of sustainability criteria and analysis,” Keoleian told LiveScience. “The treatment of renewable technologies [in this study] is shallow and the coverage of the nuclear fuel cycle is incomplete."

To capture the entire scope of issues and capabilities for all the different resources, scientists believe there need to be more studies and discussions.

“We have a finite amount of time, a finite amount of money and a finite amount of energy, and we need to be very careful about the choices we make as we build this new energy infrastructure,” Turner said. “I’d like to see something that will last for millennia and certainly solar, wind and biomass will last as long as the sun shines. “

Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies Power of the Future: 10 Ways to Run the 21st Century Quiz: What's Your Environmental Footprint?


Original Story: Study: Renewable Energy Not Green

At the NBER Summer Institute today, one researcher presented a nice figure using Google Trends to highlight mentions of the hybrid vehicle tax credit. Looking at this interesting time series graph, I wondered what funny insights this "google trends" tool could provide for trends in fame among economics. Below, I search for Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and Freakonomics.

The Red Line = Freakonomics
The Blue Line = Paul Krugman
The Mustard Line = Jeffrey Sachs

I must admit that I don't know what are the units on the vertical axis (I'm guessing it represents web searches) but still this is mildly interesting.

A Forbes editor was kind enough to tell me that it's "old news" that the greeness of older U.S center cities such as Boston, New York and Chicago is on the rise after decades of offering an environmental gross out. My point didn't merit publication in their "On My Mind" section. Maybe I should have suggested that they consider it for their "Out of their Mind" section? While my writing may stink, I take some consolation that the New York Times recognizes that this general point is newsworthy (see below).

I am now in Boston cleaning out my old house. It looks good and I am flashing back thinking through all of the good times we had here. We have found some very funny old pieces of our past. For example, I found a letter that my mother in-law wrote us the day before we married (ten years ago) outlining her recipe for having a happy marriage.

Tomorrow, I will attend the first day of the NBER Summer Institute meetings on environmental economics. Some of the papers actually look interesting and then I have to make a 10 min. discussion comment on a new paper investigation economic growth in regions and clusters as a function of agglomeration and convergence effects.

New York Times
July 22, 2007
A Boston River Now (Mostly) Fit for Swimming
By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON, July 21 — There were a few things swimmers needed to know before slipping into the Charles River for the big race on Saturday.

No diving start to this race, lest that stir up the toxic sediment at the bottom of the river.

Do not expect to see the river bottom. The water is too murky.

Be prepared to encounter bits of flotsam and jetsam.

And, as Ulla Hester, director of the first official Charles River Swim Race, announced shortly before the event: Because the water is dotted with a kind of bacterium known as blue-green algae, “there is a possibility of skin irritation.”

Ms. Hester assured swimmers there would be “showers to wash off” afterward.

After all, the Charles River, the brownish, brackish body of water between Boston and Cambridge, has been officially off-limits to swimmers for more than 50 years.

Small wonder, after a couple of centuries of being a de facto sewage dump and a cesspool for slaughterhouses, mills and other factories.

“The river was always a very dirty river, since the Industrial Revolution,” said Ben Martens, whose title of “Swimmable Charles Coordinator” for the Charles River Conservancy, a nonprofit organization, “gets a lot of laughs from my friends,” he said.

Beaches and floating bathhouses that were popular on the river in the early 1900s, especially with poor immigrant families who could not afford running water, were closed around 1955 when officials realized how polluted the water was.

And in 1995, when federal officials started grading the river’s cleanliness, the Charles was given a D.

But after a multimillion-dollar cleanup, officials pronounced the river — whose most recent grade was a B-plus — fit to swim most of the time.

Not that it is yet legal to do so. The polluted sediment has so far made it impossible to create a swimming beach.

But when two avid swimmers, Ms. Hester and Frans Lawaetz, asked for permission to organize a swim race, officials eventually agreed.

“I think it’s like the canary in the coal mine,” said Karl Haglund, a project manager for the Department of Conservation and Recreation. “If we can get the river clean enough to swim in then we know we’ve made significant progress.”

The swim was originally scheduled in September, but bacteria canceled it.

“I grew up a block from the river in Cambridge, and as a kid we always wanted to swim in it,” said Rick Ackerman, 59, of Portland, Me., the oldest swimmer on Saturday. “I built a raft once and sank in the water. It felt dirty and gritty and the rocks were slimy. This, today, it’s a leap of faith.”

Kiko Bracker, 38, a Boston veterinarian, fashioned a shark’s fin from foam insulation, a sign of his enthusiasm that “the Charles is looking better,” he said. “It’s not catching on fire this year.”

The swimmers warmed up to sun-themed songs — “Walking on Sunshine,” “Here Comes the Sun.” Not included in the soundtrack was the song “Dirty Water,” a 1960s hit by the Standells, that was written about the “River Charles” and is played at Red Sox games as a victory anthem.

All told, 69 experienced swimmers showed up Saturday for the mile-long race near the Longfellow Bridge.

“A lot of my friends thought I was crazy for doing this,” said Katie O’Dair, 40, an associate dean at Boston College. “But I feel confident that the water is clean. I hope it’s the first of many swims here.”

Mike Welsch, 48, whose back is tattooed with phrases and icons of the city — the Citgo sign near Fenway Park, the Boston Lighthouse, the Boston Marathon — said swimming the race “proves I’m a true Bostonian. I’ll tell you, I’ve swum races in the Hudson, the East River and the Harlem River, and this is just as clean as them.”

And Sebastian Neumayer, 24, who won the race with a time of 21 minutes and 37 seconds, pronounced the mid-70-degree water just fine.

“I didn’t see any mattresses,” he said, “so it’s all good.”

Paris is providing 10,000 bikes to help ease traffic congestion. Are you optimistic that this "treatment" will work? Will it scale up if the government then provides 1 million bikes? I'd like to know how many nasty, cold rainy days does Paris typically experience?

This German case study sketches another problem that sometimes arises on public transit. Now, when I lived in Boston and commuted by the #96 bus and the #73 bus --- this never happened.


"Too sexy for my bus," woman told

Mon Jul 16, 8:14 AM ET

A German bus driver threatened to throw a 20-year-old sales clerk off his bus in the southern town of Lindau because he said she was too sexy, a newspaper reported Monday.

"Suddenly he stopped the bus," the woman named Debora C. told Bild newspaper. "He opened the door and shouted at me 'Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can't concentrate on the traffic. If you don't sit somewhere else, I'm going to have to throw you off the bus.'"

The woman, pictured in Bild wearing her snug-fitting summer clothes with the plunging neckline, said she moved to another seat but was humiliated by the bus driver.

A spokesman for the bus company defended the driver.

"The bus driver is allowed to do that and he did the right thing," the spokesman said. "A bus driver cannot be distracted because it's a danger to the safety of all the passengers."

Tomorrow, my wife and I fly back to Boston for the first time in 8 months. We will be cleaning up our house to prepare to move out of it and attending some NBER Summer Institute conferences. I will not be blogging for the next 10 days. Since this activity is not addictive, I'm not worried about going "cold turkey".

Do I miss the humid Boston summer? I will soon find out. We never did bother to get central air conditioning built into our home because we were never in Boston in the summers.

I will miss all of the economics conferences that go on in Boston. Many academic economists went to school at Harvard or MIT and you can tell that returning to Cambridge gives them a special thrill. Being at Tufts and working at the NBER, it was easy to walk 45 feet and say hello to these folks as they cycled through town. While Los Angeles has many advantages, its location (relative to other U.S cities) is not really conducive to conferencing on the east coast.

People on the east coast will be seeing less of me but at least they'll have this blog!

I am slightly curious about going through all of our old files we have accumulated over the last 6 years. We will be working the shredder disposing of large amounts of our past life.

We liked living in Belmont, MA and our son was happy there. On my own, I would switch jobs and Universities every 5 years just to meet new people and to see new things. I'm a big believer in diminishing returns! My wife disagrees with me because she knows that moves = transaction costs and I tend to forget about the transition costs.

What share of consumers really think about the "global consequences" of their purchases? Do consumers want to feel a "warm glow" about doing the right thing regardless of the true impacts caused by the product they choose?

The New York Times offers a review of the new Lexus. Ulrich does not seem to be convinced that this is a "green car". He points out that this hybrid Lexus has a worse fuel economy rating than many conventional Mercedes. Will consumers notice? What is the "hybrid" label worth?


July 15, 2007
Behind the Wheel | 2008 Lexus LS 600h L
Conspicuous Consumption With Green Illusions
By LAWRENCE ULRICH

IN “North Dallas Forty,” the shaggy 1979 gridiron film starring Nick Nolte, a lineman played by John Matuszak ranted memorably to a coach about the hypocrisy of pro football: “Every time I call it a game, you call it a business. And every time I call it a business, you call it a game.”

Toyota and Lexus would disagree, but their recent hybrid models, including the Toyota Highlander and Lexus RX 400h utility wagons, the Lexus GS 450h sedan and now the Lexus LS 600h L, similarly seem to be trying to have it both ways.

In recent advertisements, including one in the “green issue” of Vanity Fair, Lexus uses one hand to present the 400-plus horsepower of the LS 600h L and the other to pat its own back for saving fuel and planet alike.

The ads and the cars have convinced many, including some credulous journalists, of Lexus’s pitch: that a hybrid car or S.U.V. can drive like a Porsche and sip fuel like a Prius. But a closer examination proves once again that there’s no free lunch, even at the drive-through.

For more than a year, Lexus has suggested that the LS 600h L — as tested, a $121,000 hybrid version of its LS 460 L flagship sedan — would set a new standard for four-door luxury automobiles. Its pitch was that the car would perform like a V-12 supersedan while whipping V-8 rivals on fuel economy. Instead, the hybrid may have set a new standard for automotive hyperbole.

Behind its green Teflon shield, the Lexus proved to be just another overstuffed sedan that can barely top 20 miles a gallon — less, if you actually tap into all that power. If that’s saving the planet, Jor-El had better prepare the escape pod before it’s too late.

Before the enviro-brigade readies the guillotine, I hasten to add that this isn’t about hating hybrids. Electric propulsion is looking more and more like a winning technology. Companies from Toyota to General Motors are working to develop affordable lithium-ion batteries, which could deliver clean, efficient, renewable power in plug-in hybrids or purely electric vehicles.

I can’t believe that adding a cupful of electric juice to a fat barrel of V-8 muscle is what environmentalists have in mind.

On the performance front, forget about the Lexus hanging with V-12 sedans like the Mercedes S600. Turns out that the Lexus can’t even outrun its own nonhybrid version, the LS 460 L. Nor is it appreciably quicker than V-8 competitors that cost $20,000 to $30,000 less, like the Mercedes S550, the Audi A8 and the BMW 7 Series, or the similarly priced Maserati Quattroporte.

It must be noted that such decadent sedans are about more than straight-line speed. Park those high-wattage rivals beside the Lexus, and the modestly styled LS virtually disappears; challenge them on a twisty road and they all disappear from the Lexus by virtue of their sportier handling.

Spurred from a stop to 60 miles an hour, the LS 600h L clocks a swift 5.5 seconds, according to Lexus’s own testing. Yet the gas-only LS 460 L, with a mere 380 horsepower from a smaller V-8, reaches 60 in 5.4 seconds, nosing out the more powerful hybrid.

How is that possible? Check the scales, where the Lexus hybrid weighs in like Jared before his Subway diet.

The hybrid does add all-wheel drive, not available on the LS 460 L. But together, the heavy batteries and all-wheel-drive system burden the hybrid with more than 700 additional pounds, for a total of 5,049. Forced to motivate the added weight, the hybrid’s larger 5-liter V-8 — another environmental oxymoron — and dual electric motors makes acceleration a wash. (One motor drives the four wheels. The other starts the gas engine and recharges the batteries.)

Excess weight takes its toll on mileage as well. The hybrid got 21 m.p.g. — amazingly, 1 m.p.g. less than the nonhybrid version that I tested on the same urban roads and highways in and around New York City. That perfectly wonderful LS 460 L is blessed with one of the most fuel-efficient V-8s I’ve driven, a 4.6-liter smoothie.

But the Lexus hybrid’s biggest jolt comes from sticker shock: the LS 600h L starts at $104,715, about $32,000 above the LS 460 L. Laden with options for $121,000, the hybrid costs about $30,000 more than the comparable gas-only version.

Driven gently, the Lexus will indeed beat the mileage of its apples-to-apples V-8 rivals, but only by 1 m.p.g. to 3 m.p.g. A Mercedes S550 isn’t an egregious guzzler at an E.P.A.-rated 16/24 m.p.g., and I managed 19 m.p.g. during a recent test. And when I drove the Lexus in mildly spirited fashion, its mileage dropped to 19 m.p.g. It’s hard to see why such minuscule mileage gains would dazzle the type of person who’s ready to drop $100,000 on a car.

The E.P.A. rates the hybrid’s mileage at 20 m.p.g. in town and 22 on the highway. The nonhybrid is rated 16/24 under the same revised formula, which takes effect for 2008 and is intended to present lower, more realistic mileage estimates for most cars.

In its defense, the hybrid should save you a few bucks if you do a lot of city driving. But on the highway, the gas-only model was decidedly more efficient, and thus ended up doing 1 m.p.g. better over all. And in bumper-to-bumper traffic, where you expect a hybrid to excel, the LS 600h L mustered only 14 m.p.g., certainly nothing to marvel at.

The uneasy comparisons don’t end there. The gas-only version handled better and drove more smoothly.

The nonhybrid benefits from the world’s first eight-speed automatic transmission, which lifts mileage and operates with hushed aplomb. The hybrid’s continuously variable transmission, in contrast, has to busily calculate and divvy power from the gas and electric sources. It’s among the most seamless of its kind, but not as smooth or transparent as the Lexus eight-speed. And its manual-shift function is nearly useless. In trying to mimic the feel of sporty downshifts, it ladles on ever-higher levels of regenerative hybrid braking. To the driver, the sludgy effect feels like throwing anchors of various sizes out the window.

Lexus’s hybrid double-talk extends to emissions arguments. When the company says the Lexus hybrid is cleaner than average cars, people will assume that has something to do with global warming. But in this instance, that is not the case.

To its credit, the car’s super-ultra-low emissions vehicle rating (SULEV, if you will) is indeed cleaner than other V-8 models, but only if you are measuring the pollutants that form smog. (Even on the smog index, many gasoline models also achieve SULEV ratings or better).

But the critical earth issue today is conserving fuel and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Those greenhouse gas levels are almost entirely a function of fuel economy: if you use more gas, you spew more carbon dioxide. So on that score, the 21 m.p.g. hybrid actually emits far more carbon dioxide than, say, a Mercedes-Benz diesel E-Class that can attain 30 m.p.g.

The LS 600h L also emits more greenhouse gases than the average new car that currently achieves 27.5 m.p.g. So a common Toyota Camry, among dozens of models, leaves a smaller carbon footprint than this hybrid land yacht.

One final ignominy: given the hybrid batteries and a separate air-conditioner for the back seat, the hybrid’s trunk measures a meager 11.7 cubic feet, smaller than that of a Kia Rio or other compact sedan. (Skip the rear air-conditioning in a Lexus LS 460 L, and you’ll enjoy a 50 percent larger trunk, at 18 cubic feet).

Jim Farley, general manager of Lexus, defended the car’s performance and green credentials. “If Lexus had to have a flagship, this is how it should be,” he said. “It’s the progressive person’s alternative. Hybrids are a huge platform for us at Lexus, and they’re only going to get bigger.”

Certainly, this hybrid Lexus is one of the quietest, most comfortable, best-built sedans around. It has every imaginable safety system and creature comfort. The navigation system is first-rate. The Mark Levinson audio system is amazing. And the optional ($12,675) Executive Package is the hands-down — or feet-up? — coolest feature. It includes rear seats that recline, heat and cool, along with a right-hand chair with a steeper recline, massage functions and a powered ottoman for the full mini-Maybach effect.

Yet every compliment you can lavish on this impressive ride, minus the all-wheel drive, applies equally to the nonhybrid version.

So why would anyone spend an extra $30,000 for this car? Certainly, the performance gains of 12-cylinder sedans aren’t always justified by their enormous premiums. Many people buy them for that V-12 badge on the fender, the exclusive message it sends. Ditto for the Lexus, but the roughly 2,000 people who’ll line up for the hybrid won’t be broadcasting their superior power, but their superior morals, however illusory.

If that’s not you, stick with the Lexus LS 460 L. Enjoy a back-seat massage and relax. You’ll know that you’ve got the better car — one that’s equally fast and frugal, but also weighs less and handles better.

You can actually park that terrific gas-only Lexus in the garage and have $30,000 to buy a Prius hybrid, with cash left over. Save the LS for special occasions and run errands in the Toyota at more than double the mileage. While Lexus plays the hybrid game, it’s the Prius that takes care of business.