Environmental and Urban Economics

This morning you could have seen me on the 903am San Bernardino Line train from Los Angeles Union Station to Claremont. If I missed that train, the next train was at 1103am and my seminar at CMC started at 1030am. Knowing that the supply of such reverse commute trains going from the city to the eastern suburbs was small, I arrived at Union Station at 730am. I also arrived this early because if I had taken a later taxi from Westwood, I would have gotten stuck in congestion.

So, it took me 2.5 hours to go from Westwood Los, Angeles to Claremont, Los Angeles by taxi and public transit. Can you travel 2.5 hours in St. Louis and still be in St. Louis? I would guess that you would be in Chicago. I did enjoy my trip to Claremont McKenna College.

UCLA teaching starts on thursday. There are plenty of students now here on campus.

I'm trying to start some research on the demand for solar paneled homes.

If you are a long time reader of this exciting blog, you may remember this classic;

greeneconomics.blogspot.com/2005/08/giving-hybrids-traction-veblen-status.html

where I discuss how the Prius signals your "greeness" to others and this increases demand for this vehicle among the greens.

Suppose you want to plant 1 million trees in your city and your name isn't Johnny Appleseed, how are you going to get this job done? The Los Angeles "solution" is to give them away for free and hope that the gift receivers actually plant the tree somewhere. This Los Angeles Times article questions whether this cheap strategy is working.

UC Berkeley is an ambitious university. I encourage you to take a look at this link http://alumni.berkeley.edu/California/main.asp

In the current issue, this Alumni Magazine makes the case that Berkeley is the epi-center of cleaner energy research (see

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california/200709/margonelli.asp)

such that we can maintain our standard of living with suffering from climate change's consequences.

Today, I won a "silver medal" in the contest for whose writing does yahoo news view as popular. The "Gold Medal" (see below) does look kind of interesting but in my biased opinion, the world quality of life rankings is the most interesting story.

This is an interesting case study related to the recent literature in urban economics on how zoning laws shape land use patterns. In Mexico City, a developer wants to build a huge skycraper near a major park. He has bought the land up cheaply and now wants to build a "Green" building. The land he bought up was zoned for commercial buildings under 5 stories tall. Since it was zoned for this activity, he was able to buy this land cheap.

The Internet is filled with great stuff. It amazes me that anyone gets any work done with all of this posted excitement. While Google Scholar is a productive tool for finding papers I should read before I write a paper, most of the Internet is just plain old fun.

I wonder what John, Paul, George and Ringo would think of this NYT editorial today? It is a little bit too deep for me. My son has a book about the field of astronomy. There is a section on a potential manned flight to another solar system. The author says that people would have to board the space craft knowing that they would never arrive at the final destination. Instead, the space travelers would pair off and have children and their children's children's children's ....

A sociologist at NYU wrote a whole book on the Chicago Heat Wave in the 1990s that killed dozens. As I recall, most of the victims were poor and black. Does the popular media devote more attention to shocks that affect middle class whites? Climate change will increase the number of heat waves --- so it is very interesting to explore how society copes and adapts to this expected trend. My colleague Ann Carlson has written a paper that I plan to read.

Today's Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece focused on the surprise that Southern California has "surplus" water despite the fact that the region keeps growing. While more people and jobs are now located in this paradise, water consumption per-capita has been falling faster than the scale of growth has increased. The net effect is that aggregate demand has declined.