At the Fletcher School at Tufts, my students argued that the transportation of goods such as roses from one continent to final consumers in the USA helped to exacerbate greenhouse gas externalities. They were arguing that "local produce" and goods may impose fewer negative externalities.

Here is a funny example of what my students were trying to say. I'd like to know how liability works here. Is the truck company libel?


November 28, 2007
Chicken Fat Leaks Over 20 Miles
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ACCOMAC, Va., Nov. 27 (AP) — A truck leaked poultry fat along 20 miles of Route 13 on Tuesday, causing at least four crashes and making a stinky mess.

The state police said that a truck hauling waste poultry grease from a Perdue Farms plant left open a valve and that the fat had leaked from the plant, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, to the Maryland state line.

At least four crashes were reported, said Sgt. Joe Bunting. One person was taken to a hospital.

Sergeant Bunting described the grease as a “glassy film” and said crews sanded the road. He added that the gunk stuck to tires and spread to secondary roads, causing a “really funky” odor.

I was born in Chicago on day that my mom claims that the temperature was minus 15. I've lived in 3 cold places (Boston, Chicago and New York City) for 39 of my 41 years on this planet. But, after 11 months in Los Angeles --- I'm worried that I can't take the cold anymore.

This weekend I make my first trip back to the Northeast and the weather report says that there will be snow on sunday and I'm worried that I may freeze. My wife is demanding that I take all sorts of cold weather gear to protect myself. I'm wondering when I became such a wimp.

My journey will start on redeye flight from LA to Raleigh Durham. I fly out on wednesday night and arrive thursday morning to see my friends at NCSU, Duke and RTI;

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/agecon/cenrep/tree.html

The next day I take a flight to Boston to particpate at this NBER conference.

http://nber15.nber.org/~confer/2007/EAf07/EAf07prg.html

That saturday I fly to NYC to see my parents and that sunday I go to New Jersey
to meet my niece who was born on Thanksgiving. Kahns are not born everyday. There
are very few "new kids" in this small family so I'm very excited to meet this new person.

Monday, I wake up at 4am to fly at 645am from Kennedy Airport back to Los Angeles and I have meetings at UCLA that day and I teach twice the next day.

So, if your life hinges on reading this blog --- expect nothing for several days --- If I survive the cold, I'll have plenty to say.

Purifying sewer water will increase Orange County's available water supply. Will the public be grossed out? Or does the median voter trust local government and modern technology to do its job? As this article highlights, the "gray water" will not directly go to your tap --- it will be used as a "moat" to protect the water supply and to drip slowly into aquifers.

The article does highlight how engineering feats can cope with growth. Rather than a "crisis" brewing, this investment will help the growing west to enjoy a "win-win" of showering and continued growth.

Is there a risk or a public backlash against this technology? So that Fast Food restautrant got in big public relations trouble when a finger was found it its Chile. Is there some equivalent gross-out episode that will happen here? Will Hollywood (if the Strike ends) be able to make a good movie --- sort of a modern "Chinatown" based on this plot? Will Jack star in the remake with some 25 year old ladies?



New York Times
November 27, 2007
From Sewage, Added Water for Drinking
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. — It used to be so final: flush the toilet, and waste be gone.

But on Nov. 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water — after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.

On that Friday, the Orange County Water District will turn on what industry experts say is the world’s largest plant devoted to purifying sewer water to increase drinking water supplies. They and others hope it serves as a model for authorities worldwide facing persistent drought, predicted water shortages and projected growth.

The process, called by proponents “indirect potable water reuse” and “toilet to tap” by the wary, is getting a close look in several cities.

The San Diego City Council approved a pilot plan in October to bolster a drinking water reservoir with recycled sewer water. The mayor vetoed the proposal as costly and unlikely to win public acceptance, but the Council will consider overriding it in early December.

Water officials in the San Jose area announced a study of the issue in September, water managers in South Florida approved a plan in November calling for abundant use of recycled wastewater in the coming years in part to help restock drinking water supplies, and planners in Texas are giving it serious consideration.

“These types of projects you will see springing up all over the place where there are severe water shortages,” said Michael R. Markus, the general manager of the Orange County district, whose plant, which will process 70 million gallons a day, has already been visited by water managers from across the globe.

The finished product, which district managers say exceeds drinking water standards, will not flow directly into kitchen and bathroom taps; state regulations forbid that.

Instead it will be injected underground, with half of it helping to form a barrier against seawater intruding on groundwater sources and the other half gradually filtering into aquifers that supply 2.3 million people, about three-quarters of the county. The recycling project will produce much more potable water and at a higher quality than did the mid-1970s-era plant it replaces.

The Groundwater Replenishment System, as the $481 million plant here is known, is a labyrinth of tubing and tanks that sucks in treated sewer water the color of dark beer from a sanitation plant next door, and first runs it through microfilters to remove solids. The water then undergoes reverse osmosis, forcing it through thin, porous membranes at high pressure, before it is further cleansed with peroxide and ultraviolet light to break down any remaining pharmaceuticals and carcinogens.

The result, Mr. Markus said, “is as pure as distilled water” and about the same cost as buying water from wholesalers.

Recycled water, also called reclaimed or gray water, has been used for decades in agriculture, landscaping and by industrial plants.

And for years, treated sewage, known as effluent, has been discharged into oceans and rivers, including the Mississippi and the Colorado, which supply drinking water for millions.

But only about a dozen water agencies in the United States, and several more abroad, recycle treated sewage to replenish drinking water supplies, though none here steer the water directly into household taps. They typically spray or inject the water into the ground and allow it to percolate down to aquifers.

Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, among the most arid places in Africa, is believed to be the only place in the world that practices “direct potable reuse” on a large-scale, with recycled water going directly into the tap water distribution system, said James Crook, a water industry consultant who has studied the issue.

The projects are costly and often face health concerns from opponents.

Such was the case on Nov. 6 in Tucson, where a wide-ranging ballot measure that would have barred the city from using purified water in drinking water supplies failed overwhelmingly. The water department there said it had no such plans but the idea has been discussed in the past.

John Kromko, a former Arizona state legislator who advocated for the prohibition, said he was skeptical about claims that the recycling process cleanses all contaminants from the water and he suggested that Tucson limit growth rather than find new ways to feed it.

“We really don’t know how safe it is,” he said. “And if we controlled growth we would never have to worry about drinking it.”

Mayor Jerry Sanders of San Diego, in vetoing the City Council plan there, said it “is not a silver bullet for the region’s water needs” and the public has never taken to the idea in the 15 years it has been discussed off and on.

Although originally estimated at $10 million for the pilot study in San Diego, water department officials said the figure would be refined, and the total cost of the project might be hundreds of millions of dollars. Although the Council wants to offset the cost with government grants and other sources, Mr. Sanders predicted it would add to already escalating water bills.

“It is one of the most expensive kinds of water you can create,” said Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the mayor. “It is a large investment for a very small return.”

San Diego, which imports about 85 percent of its water because of a lack of aquifers, asked residents this year to curtail water use.

Here in Orange County, the project, a collaboration between the water and sanitation districts, has not faced serious opposition, in part because of a public awareness and marketing campaign.

Early on, officials secured the backing of environmental groups, elected leaders and civic groups, helped in part by the fact the project eliminated the need for the sanitation district to build a new pipe spewing effluent into the ocean.

Orange County began purifying sewer water in 1976 with its Water Factory 21, which dispensed the cleansed water into the ground to protect groundwater from encroaching seawater.

That plant has been replaced by the new one, with more advanced technology, and is intended to cope with not only current water needs but also expectations that the county’s population will grow by 500,000 by 2020.

Still, said Stephen Coonan, a water industry consultant in Texas, such projects proceed slowly.

“Nobody is jumping out to do it,” he said. “They want to make sure the science is where it should be. I think the public is accepting we are investigating it.”

This article has several interesting pieces to it. It is almost like a Simpsons episode as it wanders from subject to subject. In the middle, it laments that the City of Chicago has several simultaneous "green initiatives" going and wonders whether these various projects are cost-effective and offering synergies.

I am getting more interested in how and when local government has the right incentives to evaluate its "value added" in achieving its stated goals. A cynic might wonder if the real goal is to create local public employment jobs at high wages and to come up with a popular justification (such as increasing urban "sustainability") that helps to convince the sleepy median voter and tax payer that such programs are "good". Still, I must admit that I like the general idea that this article pursues.


NY Times
November 26, 2007
In Miles of Alleys, Chicago Finds Its Next Environmental Frontier
By SUSAN SAULNY

CHICAGO, Nov. 25 — If this were any other city, perhaps it would not matter what kind of roadway was underfoot in the back alleys around town. But with nearly 2,000 miles of small service streets bisecting blocks from the North Side to the South Side, Chicago is the alley capital of America. In its alleys, city officials say, it has the paved equivalent of five midsize airports.

Part of the landscape since the city began, the alleys, mostly home to garbage bins and garages, make for cleaner and less congested main streets. But Chicago’s distinction is not without disadvantages: Imagine having a duplicate set of streets, in miniature, to maintain that are prone to flooding and to dumping runoff into a strained sewer system.

What is an old, alley-laden city to do?

Chicago has decided to retrofit its alleys with environmentally sustainable road-building materials under its Green Alley initiative, something experts say is among the most ambitious public street makeover plans in the country. In a larger sense, the city is rethinking the way it paves things.

In a green alley, water is allowed to penetrate the soil through the pavement itself, which consists of the relatively new but little-used technology of permeable concrete or porous asphalt. Then the water, filtered through stone beds under the permeable surface layer, recharges the underground water table instead of ending up as polluted runoff in rivers and streams.

Some of that water may even end up back in Lake Michigan, from which Chicago takes a billion gallons a year.

“The question is, if you’ve got to resurface an alley anyway, can you make it do more for you?” said Janet Attarian, the project’s director.

The new pavements are also designed to reflect heat from the sun instead of absorbing it, helping the city stay cool on hot days. They also stay warmer on cold days. The green alleys are given new kinds of lighting that conserve energy and reduce glare, city officials said, and are made with recycled materials.

The city will have completed 46 green alleys by the end of the year, and it has deemed the models so attractive that now every alley it refurbishes will be a green alley.

“It is now business as usual,” Ms. Attarian said.

But all these improvements come with a cost, and some people around Chicago have begun to wonder if a city that hardly recycles its trash and has a hard time keeping its trains and buses running should be spending money on fancy alleys.

Judy King, putting all her household refuse into one bag on Tuesday and tossing it into a bin in a green alley, said: “How do you decide where your priorities are? It’s a hard one. I’m bothered that there isn’t more recycling.”

The city has lately begun having serious talks about a comprehensive recycling program to replace the uneven guidelines now in place. But beyond recycling, it has a vast array of “green initiatives” that put it at the forefront of environmentally conscious cities.

This month, the city has begun two programs with financing from the Clinton Foundation intended to help owners of homes and businesses to modernize old, leaky buildings to reduce energy consumption.

The city also has an expedited permitting process for builders who use green techniques. Its garbage trucks and street sweepers have emission-control devices. In recent years, it has installed rooftop gardens to collect rainwater, planted a half-million new trees and created more than 200 acres of parks and open spaces intended to clean the air and add bits of beauty.

As for the alleys, the city says the cost of construction is offset by what it would have paid for maintenance and sewer improvements for the old ones.

The new alleys will require maintenance, too, so their pores do not get clogged, but, Ms. Attarian said, “I think they’re pretty price competitive.”

The city pays about $45 a cubic yard for permeable concrete, about $100 less than it did a year ago when concrete plants were just revving up production of the new material, but beyond that is the added expense of the stone filtration layer beneath the concrete. Ms. Attarian said ordinary concrete costs $50 or more a cubic yard. The products look pretty much the same.

With its history of heavy industry and bare-knuckled reputation, Chicago may not seem like the most likely city to exhibit environmental friendliness.

But Mayor Richard M. Daley has said that he wants to make Chicago a green model for the country. A few years ago, he was derided as a tree-hugger; now, other mayors are copying him. “Global warming is not a question,” Mr. Daley said in a recent press release. “How we deal with it is.”

Martin C. Pedersen, the executive editor of Metropolis, a magazine about urban living, said, “Recycling programs are all well and good, but the things that really move public policy and the industry are things like taxes and the building code.”

Mr. Pedersen said Mr. Daley had “made adjustments to both to encourage green building, and that’s a big deal.”

In the past several years, Chicago has also has built 90 miles of landscaped medians and refurbished more than 100 miles of streetscapes.

Michael David Martin, an associate professor and associate chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University, specializes in the study of alleys and neighborhoods. Mr. Martin praised what he called “more thoughtful alley design.”

“The alley is not only functional,” he said, “but an educational green landscape that is helping a city experiment with design and different ways to handle water.”

The Coase Theorem will not go away. Today's New York Times has a nice case study of the rising costs of air and noise pollution generated by a local airport in West Los Angeles. For those of you who only think about Kobe Bryant and Paris Hilton when you do think about LA, permit me to provide some details.

Santa Monica Airport is located in Santa Monica. This pretty town is located adjacent to the Pacific Ocean 5 miles west of UCLA. This is a densely populated area where single detached homes sit on lots that average around 5,000 square feet. As this article describes, the problem is that over time more and more planes are landing at the Santa Monica Airport and they are larger, noiser planes. We noticed this when we visited friends in Rancho Park/Cheviot Hills --- these should be nice UCLA residential communities but instead you are bombarded by airplane noise. It reminded me of my youth when I would be at Shea Stadium watching Mets baseball games and planes would fly over every 10 minutes.

What I don't see here in this article is a discussion of the basic issue of who has the property rights here? Do property owners have the right to quiet? Clearly there is going to be a fight when this flight law expires in 2015.

November 24, 2007
Santa Monica Journal
Enemy Aircraft Sighted and, Above All Else, Heard

By REBECCA CATHCART

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Nov. 23 — Virginia Ernst sat on her living room couch, her face turned toward the ceiling. The high-pitch grind of a jet engine split the air about 100 feet above her home.

“That’s a Challenger,” said Margaret Williamson. “No,” Ms. Ernst replied, “it’s a Citation. It reminds me of a dentist’s drill.”

The Challenger and the Citation are popular lines of corporate jets. The Citation is louder, explained Ms. Ernst, in her mid-60s, but the Challenger is bigger, and shakes her house’s windows and walls. Either way, the jets, and others like them, are a source of frustration to residents, who complain of not only their roaring engines but also their noxious fumes.

Since the 1960s, both Ms. Ernst and Ms. Williamson have resided beneath the flight path of planes arriving at Santa Monica Airport, one of the oldest general aviation airports in the country and among those closest to residential neighborhoods. Ms. Ernst’s house is 300 feet from the only runway, Ms. Williamson’s is 50 feet closer, and the noise in recent years has only worsened. Jet traffic there has almost doubled since 1999, to 19,000 takeoffs and landings so far this year, says the airport’s manager, Bob Trimborn, even as traffic of small piston-driven planes has declined.

The rise in private-jet travel is being driven in part by long check-in and security lines at major airports. Those waits make private flying attractive to wealthy travelers, while at the same time fractional-jet-ownership companies are making it possible for more corporations to send their executives off in style. The developments have stoked the anger of residents here, who say jet fumes endanger their health and jet noise threatens their sanity.

“You’ve got the celebrities, you’ve got the power players here,” said Bill Rosendahl, a city councilman in neighboring Los Angeles. “Frankly, I say to the super-rich, go to another airport,” because “this is an environmental issue that affects real people.”

The 227-acre airport was built in 1919, when the land for miles around was largely open fields. But with the 1921 opening of the Douglas Aircraft Company here and then the end of World War II and the Korean War, a residential building boom swept the area, spurred by demand from Douglas employees and returning military pilots.

In 1984, after a series of lawsuits, the City of Santa Monica, which owns the airport, signed an agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration not to limit jet traffic there. The agreement (which also imposed some regulations on engine noise) does not expire until 2015, but a number of public officials, among them Mr. Rosendahl, Assemblyman Ted W. Lieu and Representative Jane Harman, are working for an early change to what they describe as a pact that has outlived its time. They are pushing for both state and federal legislation that would limit the size and number of jets at the airport.

Opponents of that effort say Santa Monica, one of 249 “reliever” airports across the country that help unclog congestion at major airports nearby, must remain open to all types of jets using Los Angeles International, five miles to the south. Indeed, any bill limiting jet operations would have to supersede both the 1984 accord and existing law.

“Under federal law, the airport cannot restrict the type of aircraft that can land,” said Bill Dunn, vice president for airports at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. “The problem is that people live right next to the airport because of poor local planning decisions.”

The flight paths extending from the runways of Santa Monica and Los Angeles International Airports converge over the Pacific. That means the airports have to coordinate inbound and outbound flights in an elaborately choreographed dance. “We shuffle our cards into their deck,” Mr. Trimborn said.

That can lead to idling engines at Santa Monica that send exhaust out across Bundy Drive, the four-lane thoroughfare that separates the airport from the homes of Ms. Ernst and her neighbors, including the founder and director of Concerned Residents Against Airport Pollution, Martin Rubin. Mr. Rubin stood on the sidewalk the other day, pointing to nearby homes and speaking of cancer cases there that he says are tied to airport pollution.

But it is hard to link pollution to specific sources, said Philip M. Fine, manager of atmospheric measurements for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the air pollution control agency for all or parts of four Southern California counties. Dr. Fine ran a recent study of air quality around Santa Monica Airport that was financed by a federal grant to measure toxins in the air around general aviation airports. The study, he said, found levels of lead and other toxins in the community around the airport here “well below” federal and state limits.

That is little comfort to the Rubin family and others who fault the study for not noting levels of acrolein, a harmful byproduct of jet fuel known to cause respiratory irritation.

“We’ve always had a nice westerly breeze here,” said Mr. Rubin’s wife, Joan. “But now the breeze brings the jet fumes in. They smell like kerosene and burn your throat.”

Marc Carrel, deputy chief of staff for Representative Harman, is also skeptical, saying too little time passed between the boom in private-jet traffic and the study.

“It’s sick to say, but you need a long-term impact to see long-term effects,” Mr. Carrel said.

Mr. Trimborn, the airport’s manager, says he is not the bad guy. Citing the binding nature of the 1984 agreement, he said: “I try to be as open and honest as possible all the time with residents. If I tell someone this plane’s not going to fly over your house and then it does, they’ll be angry with me. But I don’t tell them that. They know I can’t control it.”

He pointed to a photograph, dated 1924, on his office wall. It showed a row of five Douglas World Cruisers, biplanes with exposed seats. Back then, neither local land-use planners nor anyone else “saw a Gulfstream IV flying out of Santa Monica and going to the East Coast,” he said.

“We’re dealing with development over many years,” Mr. Trimborn added. “So the dynamic between the airport and the community, that’s inescapable.”

Now that I've become an Uncle for the first time, I feel a responsibility to blog about important topics rather than trivia. So, I'd like to talk about ambient particulate levels at Cigar Bars. As discussed below, one brave Canadian went deep undercover to measure the ambient pollution at a hotel filled with puffers. The article doesn't mention if Ed Glaeser was there or not.

From a "Green Cities" perspective it has crossed my mind that the decline in smoking in U.S center cities hasn't hurt ambient carbon monoxide and particulate levels. I haven't seen a study trying to measure this trend's contribution to helping to mitigate ambient pollution.

New York Times
November 22, 2007
At a Cigar Show, an Air-Quality Scientist Under Deep, Smoky Cover

By SARAH KERSHAW
The agitators met a few blocks from the target at a secret location, so as not to call attention to the devices in their bags.

They synchronized their watches. They reviewed the well-rehearsed game plan: If their bags were searched, the first operative, known as “Researcher 1 (female),” would say the device was for an asthma condition. If she was not allowed into the event with the device, she would activate Plan B: go to the ladies’ room and strap it to her body.

The man behind the subterfuge (Researcher 2, male) was Ryan David Kennedy, 34, a scrappy Canadian graduate student with crooked glasses who is studying the impact of tobacco on air quality.

He crossed the border at Buffalo on Monday morning and on Tuesday crashed the giant cigar party and trade show sponsored by the publisher of Cigar Aficionado magazine at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

A nonsmoking vegetarian posing as a cigar lover, Mr. Kennedy was nervous. Canadians are, for the most part, known to be earnest, demure and very law-abiding.

“I think I’m being watched,” he said before the event, known as the Big Smoke, which drew hundreds of cigar lovers and peddlers into a ballroom on the hotel’s sixth floor. He said he strongly believed his room at the Marriott had been searched.

Mr. Kennedy, who holds a master’s degree in environmental science from the University of Waterloo in Ontario and is working on a doctorate in psychology there, soon found himself in the belly of decadence. The ballroom was swarming with stogies — Bolivar, Ashton, Don Tomas and a dozen other brands — whiskey, tequila and exotic dancers.

Mr. Kennedy, who has also researched the level of particulate matter produced by smoking tobacco on outdoor patios, and Kerri Ryan (Researcher 1), a friend from college who lives in New York, sneaked their devices in the door. (Mr. Kennedy’s professor used a discretionary fund to cover the costs of the event tickets — $400 each — and other expenses.)

A tiny white plastic tube protruding from each of their bags like a hidden microphone took in the air, which was then measured for particles by the device, known as a Sidepak. The device can log 516 minutes of air sampling before the battery runs out, and is a well-established method for detecting dust and smoke.

Mr. Kennedy measured the particles in the air on Monday to obtain a baseline before the cigar smokers descended. Then on Tuesday he tested the air inside the ballroom and in various places outside the cigar party — at the elevators, in guest rooms and in the lobby. To log enough data on the air, he would need to stand in one place for 5 or 10 minutes and look busy.

If Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Ryan were lurking in one place for too long, perhaps seeming suspicious to security guards, they would say loudly, “We’re waiting for Sally.”

It was easy for Mr. Kennedy to prove his thesis: that plumes of cigar smoke lead to high levels of particulate matter in the air.

Marriott Hotels announced in July that it was making all of its hotels 100 percent smoke-free, but it has made an exception for the Big Smoke.

Opponents of smoking working with Mr. Kennedy said the exception was a glaring violation of the hotel’s own policy.

“The event is really a flagrant contradiction to their commitment to their guests and employees,” said Louise Vetter, president of the American Lung Association of the City of New York and a spokeswoman for the New York City Coalition for a Smoke-Free City. “The dangers of secondhand smoke are indisputable, and in New York City it is law to protect workers from secondhand smoke. We applauded Marriott, but to have this event in New York City and to create an exception — there’s no exception for public health.”

Under the state law, smoking is banned in most indoor places, including the Marriott ballroom (though there is no legal ban on smoking in guest rooms). But the law allows an exception for tobacco promotional events “where the public is invited for the primary purpose of promoting and sampling tobacco products.”

Cigar bars that were open in the city before Dec. 31, 2002, and can prove that they generated at least 10 percent of their gross income from the sale of tobacco products are also exempt; they can extend their registration each year if they continue to meet those criteria and do not expand or change location.

Kathleen Duffy, a spokeswoman for Marriott Hotels, said the company was honoring a longstanding contract with the publisher of Cigar Aficionado, Marvin R. Shanken, and had been the host of the Big Smoke at the Marriott Marquis for at least 10 years.

“We are not going out and booking smoking events at any of our hotels,” she said. “We did announce we would be smoke-free, but with this client we had an obligation.”

She said “we tripled our efforts” to keep the smoke contained, banning smoking outside the ballroom and increasing the filtration in the room, so that the smoke was funneled outside the hotel through air vents.

Under Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, air with fewer than 15 micrograms per cubic meter is considered good quality; air with more than 251 micrograms per cubic meter is hazardous.

Mr. Kennedy’s preliminary findings showed that the average level of particulate matter in the hotel the day before the event was 8 micrograms per cubic meter, 40 micrograms where he was waiting to get in line for the event and 1,193 micrograms inside the ballroom.

About 10 p.m., after one last measurement — “Elevators, 9:44!” Mr. Kennedy said to his assistant — he was bloodshot and stinky, but he declared the experiment a success.

Simon Board was kind enough to email me this picture of myself that was taken in October 1988. I see that I had more hair there and I look fairly enthusiastic about being a new PHD student at the University of Chicago. Do things change?

I went to a new dentist today in Westwood. We should all read Alan Blinder's Journal of Political Economy paper on the economics of tooth brushing (Volume 82, issue 4, 1974). Near the dentist's office in the hallway there was a box, the sign on the box said "This box does not contain drugs or money. It does contain blood and urine samples." This information convinced me not to open the box.

If you need some excitement in your life, take a look at this urban economics conference. I will see you there.
http://nber15.nber.org/~confer/2007/EAf07/EAf07prg.html

Have you ever wanted to know more about suburban New Jersey? The New York Times celebrates a small town there called Hopewell Borough. The commute to New York City looks a little bit too long for my taste. You couldn't walk to Columbia or NYU from there.

In these real estate articles, The Times does do a pretty good job sketching how "other people live". It would interest me how the morning Manhattan New York Times readers respond to this information. Are they tempted to cash out and move to this bucolic life? Or does Hopewell Borough sound like Mars to them?


November 18, 2007
Living In Hopewell Borough, N.J.
It’s in New Jersey, but It Screams Vermont

By JILL P. CAPUZZO

MAYBE the people who live in Hopewell Borough have Jersey fatigue. Or maybe they just yearn for a simpler place and time, before traffic jams and planned communities. Whatever the reason, they are quick to describe this small village in central New Jersey as the most un-Jersey-like town in the state.

“It’s not typical New Jersey, which is what we really like about it,” said Beth Judge, who grew up in East Brunswick and moved here with her husband, Will Mooney, 12 years ago to raise a family and open a restaurant.

Despite being surrounded by wealthy enclaves like Princeton, Pennington and Lawrenceville, Hopewell Borough has managed to hold on to more reasonable prices. The quaintness of its downtown draws visitors like Pete Taft, who lives in neighboring East Amwell but does much shopping and dining out in Hopewell Borough. He calls it “the most Vermont-like town in New Jersey.”

A stroll through the area backs up Mr. Taft’s assertion. First, there is the painted brick library, housed in a century-old former bank building. A few doors down is the Baptist Church, with its tall white steeple and bells that chime hourly from early morning to late evening (they used to ring through the night, until residents complained of chime-induced insomnia). Across the street is the Revolutionary War-era graveyard, and around the corner is the neighborhood playhouse, which has just ended a run of — what else? — “The Fantasticks.”

Situated at the base of the Sourland Mountains, Hopewell is not without its wealthy benefactors. Two heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, who own swaths of land on either side of Hopewell for their private estates, have helped the borough buy much of the remaining adjacent land for open space. Also, the borough recently raised $3 million toward the acquisition of a 340-acre tract that once housed St. Michael’s Orphanage.

With its concentrated residential and commercial districts, surrounded by a greenbelt of preserved land, Hopewell Borough became the first municipality in New Jersey to earn the “Village Center” designation under the state’s revised master plan in 1993.

“I tell my kids they’re going to be able to come back here in 50 years and the trees may be bigger, but it’s going to basically look the same,” said Ray Disch, the owner of Disch Real Estate in Hopewell Borough. He lived in town for 12 years before moving a few miles away, to a farm in the greenbelt area.

What You’ll Find

The several blocks contiguous to Hopewell’s downtown are mostly filled with historic homes, some modest, some less so. Most are included in the town’s designated historic district, which encompasses about two-thirds of this mile-square borough. The designation means that homeowners hoping to make changes to their houses’ exteriors must seek approval from the borough’s historic preservation committee.

One of the oldest houses in town is the 1757 brick-and-stone farmhouse that was once home to the borough’s most famous son, John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. (He is buried in the graveyard on West Broad Street.) But it is more typical to see a two- or three-story colonial or Victorian, dating to the late 1800s or early 1900s. Northeast of Broad Street is a small section of newer housing, mostly single-family homes built in the last 20 years.

Hopewell Borough, which is in the northeast corner of Hopewell Township, has colleges on all sides: Princeton, the College of New Jersey and Rider University. Many professionals in town are connected to these institutions, each about seven miles away.

Similarly, the nearby offices of companies like Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch and Bristol-Myers Squibb employ some of the newer residents, who have discovered this neighborly, more affordable town. But whatever their work situation, a sizable portion of the town’s 2,035 residents are second- and third-generation Hopewellians.

Betty Gantz has lived all of her 94 years in Hopewell Borough, in the house her uncle bought in 1896. Today, she shares the large multicolored Victorian on Blackwell Avenue with her son and his family.

“Like any other small town,” Mrs. Gantz said, “there are people who are nice and people who are nasty, but generally speaking, people are so very helpful here.”

Sandy Brown, a real estate agent who has lived here for 21 years, describes Hopewell as the kind of place where your neighbors look out for your kids. “That’s a huge weight off your shoulders, knowing there’s a community to take care of you,” she said.

What You’ll Pay

With just over 800 homes in the entire borough, typically there may be only a dozen houses on the market at a time. Prices have come down significantly in recent months, according to Ms. Brown of Gloria Nilson GMAC Real Estate in Pennington, who said she was having her best fall ever — “now that we have a lot of realistic sellers coming to terms with the market.”

At the high end are a few large Victorian homes, with three stories and four or five bedrooms, listed in the high $500,000s or low $600,000s. One of these, an 1860 five-bedroom, three-bath home on East Broad Street, is said to be the first professionally built house in Hopewell Borough. It is listed at $575,000.

At the opposite end of Broad Street is an 80-year-old expanded bungalow that was one of the original Sears model houses. Sitting on three-quarters of an acre, with a backyard that faces a 70-acre sheep farm, the house is listed at $459,000.

At the low end of the market is an 80-year-old two bedroom, one-bath bungalow on Hamilton Street, with an updated eat-in kitchen, listed at $347,000.

In the newer section, two of the homes in Hopewell Woods, an 18-year-old development on Elm Street, have sold in recent months in the high $400,000s, brokers say. A 20-year-old four-bedroom, two-bath expanded Cape on Hamilton Avenue is currently listed at $539,000.

Multifamily housing is limited, but the newer part of the borough has some duplexes and town houses that sell in the mid-$200,000s when they come on the market, according to Mr. Disch.

What to Do

What started as a destination for antique hunters has become a bustling commercial district that serves not only Hopewell Borough but also the more rural areas surrounding the town. The Brothers Moon, the restaurant opened in 2001 by Ms. Judge and Mr. Mooney, helped redefine the downtown, according to Mr. Taft and others. Since then, several restaurants, cafes, galleries and shops have opened.

At Christmastime, the borough’s five churches join forces in creating a nativity scene on the grounds of the Calvary Baptist Church on West Broad Street, on the site of the borough’s original Baptist Meeting House. The Hopewell Museum on East Broad Street has a holiday tea and open house in December. At other times of the year, the museum’s focus is village life in America from colonial times to the present.

The open space that surrounds the borough includes walking trails, and picnic and playground areas. In Hopewell Park at the end of South Greenwood Avenue, a fanciful gazebo — largely paid for from the Johnson fortune — is the site of summer concerts and parties.

The Schools

Borough schools are part of the Hopewell Valley Regional District. Kindergarten through Grade 5 are taught at Hopewell Elementary School, which also has students from Hopewell Township; enrollment is 520.

Those in Grades 6 through 8 attend Timberlane Middle School, and older students go to Hopewell Valley Central High School. Both schools are in Pennington Borough. Average SAT scores in 2006 at the high school, which has an enrollment of 1,150, were 556 on the verbal, 591 on the math and 557 on the reading section. Those compared favorably with state averages of 494, 591 and 493, respectively.

Being in the heart of an academically rich area, Hopewell Borough children also have many private schools nearby from which to choose, including Princeton Day School, the Hun School, the Peddie School, Lawrenceville School, Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart and the Pennington School.

The Commute

The closest train station offering service to New York City is in Princeton Borough, seven miles away. From there, New Jersey Transit trains travel regularly to Pennsylvania Station, in about an hour and 20 minutes. The drive to Midtown is about 55 miles, and takes 75 to 90 minutes, depending on traffic.

The History

Founded in the early 1700s by a group of Baptist farmers, the area was first called Hopewell Meeting House, then Columbia and, later, Hopewell. In 1756, the country’s first Baptist secondary school, Hopewell Baptist Academy, was started here. Its graduates went on to found what became Brown University in Rhode Island.

With the arrival of rail service in 1874, Hopewell saw a burst in industrial development, with a lumberyard, a creamery, canneries and a shirt factory.

Today, several of those buildings, along Railroad Place, house antique sellers and artisans. The rail line now carries freight only, while the restored railroad station is used for community events.

Hopewell is also known for its proximity to the site of a notorious 20th-century crime: the 1932 kidnapping of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s baby from his home in nearby East Amwell. Deep in the woods a few miles outside the borough, the Lindbergh Mansion, now a home for troubled youth, is still a curiosity for sightseers.

Is Free Trade good for your environmental exposure? This is an interesting case study. It claims that U.S electronic waste is heading to China because it is cheaper to dispose of it over there. It also claims that this would be less of an issue if nations ratified the Basel Convention. Will the next President ratify this treaty?


According to Wikipedia;

"The Basel Convention (verbose: Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal) is an international treaty that was designed to reduce the movements of hazardous waste between nations, and specifically to prevent transfer of hazardous waste from developed to less developed countries (LDCs). It does not, however, address the movement of radioactive waste. The Convention is also intended to minimize the amount and toxicity of wastes generated, to ensure their environmentally sound management as closely as possible to the source of generation, and to assist LDCs in environmentally sound management of the hazardous and other wastes they generate.

The Convention was opened for signature on March 22, 1989, and entered into force on May 5, 1992. A list of parties to the Convention, and their ratification status, can be found on the Basel Secretariat's web page. Of the 170 parties to the Convention, Afghanistan, Haiti, and the United States have signed the Convention but have not yet ratified it."


What is the enforcement mechanism for this convention? For nations that violates its laws, does the United Nations' invade?

Enforcement is central to the effective implementation of the Basel Convention. Although it may seem a straightforward activity, it happens to be rather complex because of its multidimensional requirements. There is a need for a proper infrastructure, adequate staffing of trained personnel, appropriate logistical support and knowledge of hazardous wastes. From an operational point of view, a properly integrated national enforcement programme would include: tracking of hazardous waste shipments; visits to company sites (and other sites); transport control/checks/inspections; sampling and testing; information exchange. A number of basic criteria are required to fulfill the aims of the Basel Convention. These are:The existence of a regulatory infrastructure and enforcement that ensures compliance with applicable regulations;•Sites or facilities (including storage) are authorized and of an adequate standard of technology and pollution control to dispose of the hazardous waste in the way proposed, in particular taking into account the level of technology and pollution control in the exporting country;•Operators of sites or facilities at which hazardous wastes are disposed are required, as appropriate, to monitor the effects of those activities;•Action is taken at the site or facility in the case of accidental spillage, and in cases where monitoring gives indication that the disposal of hazardous wastes have resulted in unacceptable emissions;•Persons involved in the disposal of hazardous wastes are capable and adequately trained;•Any residues from the recovery of hazardous wastes and portions of unrecovered materials should be managed in an environmentally sound manner, including final disposal;•Evidence of an action plan for emergencies or accidents covering the disposal operations.To be operational, enforcement personnel (competent authorities; police; customs officers; port or airport authorities, coast guards) need to be trained in the following technical areas:•identification of hazardous wastes;•knowledge of companies' operations;•knowledge of the United Nations Recommendations on the Transport of Dangerous Goods (all modes of transport);•understanding of laboratory results on sampling and testing;
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•familiarities with Notification and Movement Document, tracking documents, permits, contracts, financial guarantees;•statistical information and processing of data provided by the World Customs Organization;•identification of cases of illegal traffic. Because of lack of manpower or lack of trained enforcement personnel or equipment, a number of activities may be the source of difficulties, such as:•tracking down of illegal shipments;•development of practical guidelines for sampling liquid and solid hazardous wastes that could be harmonized at regional level;•agreement on which hazardous wastes to be monitored as a matter of priority;•thorough company visits;•way of getting up-to-date information on active movements of hazardous wastes;•time necessary for analysing samples, interpretation of laboratory results. As part of its functions, the Secretariat of the Basel Convention is providing, upon request, assistance to countries in the field of enforcement. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT THE SECRETARIAT OF THE BASEL CONVENTION: 15, chemin des Anemones CH-1219 Chatelaine, SwitzerlandTel: (41 22) 979 92 18 Fax: (41 22) 797 34 54 E-mail: sbc@unep.ch

www.basel.int/pub/enforcementreqs.pdf


China's e-waste nightmare worsening By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 49 minutes ago

The air smells acrid from the squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold. Migrant workers in filthy clothes smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust.

For five years, environmentalists and the media have highlighted the danger to Chinese workers who dismantle much of the world's junked electronics. Yet a visit to this southeastern Chinese town regarded as the heartland of "e-waste" disposal shows little has improved. In fact, the problem is growing worse because of China's own contribution.

China now produces more than 1 million tons of e-waste each year, said Jamie Choi, a toxics campaigner with Greenpeace China in Beijing. That adds up to roughly 5 million television sets, 4 million fridges, 5 million washing machines, 10 million mobile phones and 5 million personal computers, according to Choi.

"Most e-waste in China comes from overseas, but the amount of domestic e-waste is on the rise," he said.

This ugly business is driven by pure economics. For the West, where safety rules drive up the cost of disposal, it's as much as 10 times cheaper to export the waste to developing countries. In China, poor migrants from the countryside willingly endure the health risks to earn a few yuan, exploited by profit-hungry entrepreneurs.

International agreements and European regulations have made a dent in the export of old electronics to China, but loopholes — and sometimes bribes — allow many to skirt the requirements. And only a sliver of the electronics sold get returned to manufacturers such as Dell and Hewlett Packard for safe recycling.

Upwards of 90 percent ends up in dumps that observe no environmental standards, where shredders, open fires, acid baths and broilers are used to recover gold, silver, copper and other valuable metals while spewing toxic fumes and runoff into the nation's skies and rivers.

Accurate figures about the shady and unregulated trade are hard to come by. However, experts agree that it is overwhelmingly a problem of the developing world. They estimate about 70 percent of the 20-50 million tons of electronic waste produced globally each year is dumped in China, with most of the rest going to India and poor African nations.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it is ten times cheaper to export e-waste than to dispose of it at home.

Imports slip into China despite a Chinese ban and Beijing's ratification of the Basel Convention, an international agreement that outlaws the trade. Industry monitor Ted Smith said one U.S. exporter told him all that was needed to get shipments past Chinese customs officials was a crisp $100 bill taped to the inside of each container.

"The central government is well aware of the problems but has been unable or unwilling to really address it," said Smith, senior strategist with the California-based Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which focuses on the electronics industry.

The European Union bans such exports, but Smith and others say smuggling is rife, largely due to the lack of measures to punish rule breakers. China, meanwhile, allows the import of plastic waste and scrap metal, which many recyclers use as an excuse to send old electronics there.

And though U.S. states increasingly require that electronics be sent to collection and recycling centers, even from those centers, American firms can send the e-waste abroad legally because Congress hasn't ratified the Basel Convention.

The results are visible on the streets of Guiyu, where the e-waste industry employs an estimated 150,000 people. Shipping containers of computer parts, old video games, computer screens, cell phones and electronics of all kinds, from ancient to nearly new, are dumped onto the streets and sorted for dismantling and melting.

Valuable metals such as copper, gold, and silver are removed through melting and acid baths, while steel is torn out for scrap and plastic is ground into pellets for other use.

This is big business for those who control the trade. Luxury sedans are parked in front of elaborate mansions in downtown Guiyu, adorned with fancy names such as "Hall of Southernly Peace."

Many of those who do the dirty work are migrants from poorer parts of China, too desperate or uninformed to care about the health risks.

In the town of Nanyang, a few minutes drive from Guiyu, a middle-aged couple from the inland province of Hunan sorts wiring in a mud-floored shack. Such work, including melting down motherboards, earns them about $100 per month, said the husband, who answered reluctantly and wouldn't give his name.

Many houses double as smelter and home. Gas burners shaped like blacksmith's forges squat beside the front doors, their flues rising several stories to try to dissipate the toxic smoke.

Nonetheless, a visitor soon develops a throbbing headache and metallic taste in the mouth. The groundwater has long been too polluted for human consumption. The amount of lead in the river sediment is double European safety levels, according to the Basel Action Network, an environmental group.

Yet, aside from trucking in drinking water, the health risks seem largely ignored. Fish are still raised in local ponds, and piles of ash and plastic waste sit beside rice paddies and dikes holding in the area's main Lianjiang river.

Chemicals, including mercury, fluorine, barium, chromium, and cobalt, that either leach from the waste or are used in processing, are blamed for skin rashes and respiratory problems. Contamination can take decades to dissipate, experts say, and long-term health effects can include kidney and nervous system damage, weakening of the immune system and cancer.

"Of course, recycling is more environmentally sound," said Wu Song, a former local university student who has studied the area. "But I wouldn't really call what's happening here recycling."

Those who control the business in Guiyu are hostile to outside scrutiny. Reporters visiting the area with a Greenpeace volunteer were trailed by tough-looking youths who notified local police, leading to a six-hour detention for questioning.

Government departments from the provincial to township levels refused to answer questions. The central government's Environmental Protection Agency did not reply to faxed questions.

Guiyu faces growing competition from other cities, notably Taizhou, about 450 miles up the coast in Zhejiang province. Meanwhile, collection yards have sprung up on the fringes of most major cities. The owners sell what they can to recyclers — most of them unregulated — and simply dump the rest.

Efforts to recycle e-waste safely in China have struggled. Few people bring in waste, because the illegal operators pay more.

"We're not even breaking even," said Gao Jian, marketing director of New World Solid Waste in the northeastern city of Qingdao. "These guys pay more because they don't need expensive equipment, but their methods are really dangerous."

The city of Shanghai opened a dedicated e-waste handling center last year, but most residents and companies prefer the "guerrilla" junkers who ride through neighborhoods on flatbed tricycles ringing bells to attract customers, said Yu Jinbiao of the Shanghai Electronic Products Repair Service Association, a government-backed industry federation.

"Those guerrillas are convenient and offer a good price," Yu said, "so there is a big market for them."