Here  is a photo of the 30,000 square foot mansion that he doesn't want to talk about in Florida.  As a role model, he should make public his annual electricity bill, and the number of miles he flies each year.   He could use the UC Berkeley Carbon Calculator  to precisely estimate his footprint.  Now, what would he do with this information?  Would he engage in voluntary restraint?  Would he install residential solar panels?  Or, would he shrug off this information and not sweat it?  My own research with Dora Costa suggests that this depends on whether Mr. Jeter is a liberal or a conservative.   Now, given that his electricity consumption is likely to be higher than his 100 closest neighbors --- my work with Dora and other studies such as this one  do suggest that he would cut back his consumption if he was notified about this "head to head" comparison.

So, to all the celebrities who read this blog, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can tells us about yourself.  Show us your carbon footprint and take a leadership role in setting an example.   If you refuse to take such steps, then at least read this paper.

Susan Jacoby's new book Never Say Die is reviewed in the NY Times today.   She does not believe in "wishful thinking".   For Baby Boomers who hope that their best days are yet to come, she offers some cold water. To quote the review; "At 85 or 90, Jacoby writes, 'only a fool' can imagine the best years are yet to come."  

Optimism versus rational expectations.  The actuarial charts do not lie.  Your life span is a random variable. Conditional on your age and your gender, you can look up the distribution of how many years of life you have left. Here is an example from calendar year 2006.  So, I just learned that the typical man of my age will live for  33.11 years.  This tells me nothing about the quality of these future years in terms of my health or the acuity of my "beautiful mind".   Recognizing this fact, a rational person thinks through a series of choices ranging from work effort, savings, time with friends, locational choice to best meet one's needs and goals.

The interesting part of the review focuses on Jacoby writing about NYC as a "senior friendly" city as it is armed with elevators and other pieces of capital that can substitute for a senior's effort.

The review focuses on the quality of life of the aging but how do the increased counts of aging people affect the "young"'s quality of life?  This crossed my mind as I flew to Washington DC last week.  It was hard to get on and off of the airplane because some seniors were moving slow and having trouble moving their own luggage around.  As there are more and more of such seniors, how much will society slow down?  How much longer will public buses take to get to destinations as they slowly load and unload passengers?   I am not trying to be politically incorrect. As an empiricist, I merely want to understand cross-demographic group effects.   Public finance experts have focused on the impact of the Boomers on our budget deficit. I'm asking a question about their impact on our day to day life.

Jacoby's book appears to tackle the fundamental issue in economics that "more is better than less".  She is pushing boomers to consider quality of life over quantity of life.   "Yes, the brute facts are the brute facts, but “Never Say Die” is ultimately — as Jacoby acknowledges in an aside late in the book — about her own fear of poverty, dementia and dependence. For all her doubts about the rest of the population’s grasp of reality, this fear is an increasingly common one."

So, how do you keep the brain young and fresh without embracing sci-fi solutions such as the one from Star Trek episodes where Kirk's mind is deposited into a basketball?  (remember that one?)   It appears that the aging population has created an imperative for the brain researchers to figure this out.

1.  Mike Tidwell has written a piece on how he is personally adapting to climate change.  I prefer the first part of the article where sketches his "small ball" investments he is making to protect himself against anticipated climate change. He then overreaches when he turns to the future of our food supply.    "If that happens, Iowa is done for. Corn and wheat will wither and die on a scale never before seen. That's because heat-triggered mega-droughts will intensify across much of America's "continental interior" regions, scientists say, as flooding increases elsewhere. Iowa and much of the Heartland will resemble a scrub desert. How will we feed ourselves adequately if our breadbasket is a desert? Answer: We won't, and there will be social unrest as a result. How much is anyone's guess, but people don't sit still when food gets scarce. Indeed, when the options are extreme hunger or pillaging the neighboring village, history tends to favor pillaging."

Mike needs to take a course in micro economics but his piece is still worth reading.  If he anticipates these challenges then so will farmers and corporations.  Agriculture can migrate to other areas.  Farmers can discover new heat resistant crops. GMO can play some role in offering us new strategies. He is ruling out migration, innovation and diffusion of best practices from other areas (such as India) that have practice with dealing with extreme climate.  He is certainly correct that if we continue with business as usual farming and IF worst case climate change plays out then we have a big problem but recognizing these points is the start of the solution. This is one of the big ideas in my Climatopolis.  Doom and Gloom sell newspapers but they also plant the seeds for our adaptation!

To see some creative adaptation responses by individuals read the comments posted here.


2.  The Hamilton Project at Brookings has now published my paper with David Levinson on reforming highway financing and investment.

3.   Ed Glaeser has an Opinion Piece in today's Los Angeles Times where he discusses two of our recent papers on cities and greenhouse gas emissions.

Yesterday, two different cab drivers started talking to me about how high gas prices are cutting into their slim profit margins and also mentioned that gas is $8 a gallon in Europe.   In the short run, the rising gas prices will cause pain as consumers will have few margins to adjust on but can there be a "silver lining" here?  Thomas Friedman has written the same OP-ED over and over again on the need for a gas tax to signal to consumers and producers that we need to make a smooth transition to non-fossil fuel vehicles.  This is why I believe that the expectation of "peak oil" helps us to adapt to peak oil. If we think it is arriving and our nerds have time to tinker and innovate, then we will be ready as it arrives and the transition will be smooth to whatever is the winning technology whether that is electric, hydrogen or the jetson's flying cars.

The issue arises when we are uncertain about future price dynamics. If gas is $3.50 a gallon now but we believe that it will be $2 in the near future, then this retards radical behavioral change on both the demand and supply side. The "patriot tax" or a crazy stuff in the Middle East both act to signal that gas prices could stay high for a very long time.  This is a good thing for accelerating the transition of the transportation sector. If electric cars are "the future", then we will need to figure out how to make power without GHG emissions and how to allow homes to have larger solar panels to  produce power for their home and "fuel" for their cars. The nerds will have plenty to do and maybe there will be some "green jobs" here.

Who knew that United Airlines' Hemispheres Magazine had so much wisdom?  But, here is the proof.  My loyal readers will see some Climatopolis optimism.   Now, the article doesn't discuss how much sea level rise would mean that this engineering fix wouldn't work.  I liked the use use of information technology to offer the people of Venice an "early warning" system of a coming flood.


"By 2014, however, if all goes according to plan, things will work differently when the sea rises up.
By then, a body called the Consorzio Venezia Nuova—the Consortium for a New Venice—will have predicted a major storm surge days earlier using its own forecasting technology and alerted the city government. As the surge approaches, ships headed for the industrial ports around Venice will be held or diverted, and the population will be notified by video screens placed throughout the city. As the waters begin to rise within the 212-square- mile lagoon in which Venice sits, 78 steel gates resting along the bottom of the inlets leading to the lagoon at depths ranging from about 60 feet to nearly 100, will fill with compressed air. They’ll rise about 45 degrees on their hinges and meet the sea. The surge will heave against the gates and then eventually lose its force and start rolling back. When equilibrium between the water level in the lagoon and the sea is reached, which should happen after a few hours, the gates will refill with water and sink back down to the giant concrete caissons to which they’re attached. Tourists, for their part, will have to content themselves with gondola photos."

Switching subjects, this David Leonhardt blog post will interest those of you who are interested in efficient public policy and the future of the nation's transport infrastructure system.

I will post a link of the Kahn and Levinson paper soon

Glaeser's Triumph of the City celebrates cities as a place where we can achieve our dreams but who are we to limit "we" to mere people?  Don't forget the goats.  Goats are migrating to the cities (or at least to Berkeley and Portland).  Want proof?  Read my blog post here.

Going "Cold Turkey" will help us to adapt to climate change.  That's Paul Gilding claim in his forthcoming book titled "The Great Disruption".  Do you remember John Lennon's version of cold turkey? I can't tell yet if I prefer Lennon's or Gilding's version.

From Publishers Weekly

Will our quality of life continue to improve?  Will life expectancy, literacy and overall well being increase for more and more people over the course of the 21st century?   My optimism for why I believe the answer is "yes" is due to urban capitalist growth.  As more and more people choose to live their lives in cities and their surrounding suburbs, the trading networks and interactions that people take for granted in New York City will become common place throughout the world.

I have been very happy to see that Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City  has soared on the Amazon Book ratings.  At its heart, this book is a celebration of how cities foster specialization, learning and achieving one's goals.  These achievements help us to adapt to climate change.

My optimism about our future in the face of climate change is that it will be an urban future.  As urbanites, we will be able to build our cities in ways (and in places) to protect ourselves from  anticipated, evolving risks posed by climate change.  Different cities, depending on their geography, will face different threats.  Cities will differ with respect to their institutions and leaders but those cities that fail to protect their populace will suffer out migration and this competition between cities will discipline the bad performers. In this sense, the exit option associated with "voting with your feet" helps to protect the urban populace.  While you don't have to move to Fargo, I have argued that such options exist for you.  Around the world, urbanites will have access to a host of adaptation possibilities.  Innovation will further flesh out this choice set.

Now what will future urbanites eat?  You can see an interesting discussion here.   While I am not an agriculture expert,  there are many adaptation margins that the world's farmers can move along.  We can grow crops in new places, we can change our input mix, and farmers can learn from farmers around the world who have been forced to deal with extreme temperature events.  A key point in my adaptation work is to argue that we can anticipate today that we will face this future challenge.  If you give capitalism a 30 year head start, are you going to bet against it?  The best ideas from the farming sector as it anticipates profit opportunities will all fail?

Suppose that all of these innovative efforts do fail.  As climate change unfolds and adaptation efforts do not deliver on their promise then world agricultural prices will rise, and the real purchasing power of the urban poor declines sharply.   So, then the discussion becomes a social justice "Rawlsian" issue of how to help the urban poor.   As I argue in my Climatopolis book,  urbanization will contribute to slowing the world's population growth.  If world population growth does slow, what implications does this have for the "food crisis"?   So, we have both supply side adaptation factors and perhaps a slowdown in aggregate demand growth.

This paper provides some slightly out-dated information on the budget shares for food differs across poor, middle income and rich nations.   Climate change creates an imperative for economic growth to be accelerated.  With more income, individuals and nations will have access to a greater set of adaptation strategies and armed with such choices I become more optimistic about our collective future quality of life.

This Amazon Link  is telling me that my Climatopolis book is now a "bargain book".  This is a bargain book and quantities are limited. Bargain books are new but could include a small mark from the publisher and an Amazon.com price sticker identifying them as such.  Why is a for profit firm such as Amazon offering a 60% discount?  When I was a student, we were taught that those with market power will raise the price for goods whose demand is inelastic and for which there are few good substitutes.  So, I guess this means that the opposite is true for my Climatopolis.   You can purchase a hardcover for $10.78 or the Kindle version for $12.99.

In contrast, Ed Glaeser's Triumph is priced at $14.99 on Kindle and $17.97 for a hardcover.  This says to me that there are readers out there willing to pay the big bucks for his wisdom.

Now what can I do to boost demand for my "classic"?   How did I get sent to the "bargain bin"?  

I am confident that like an old poet that my work will be recognized in the future for being "ahead of its time".  I hope that my publisher isn't trying to liquidate its inventories.  Similar to Hotelling's Rule, I am confident that the price of this exhaustible good (the first edition of my book) will rise at the rate of interest.   Perhaps the declining price of Climatopolis indicates that Krugman was right and that we are entering a period of steep deflation?

This long piece sketches the challenges that Florida's housing market faces with thousands of owners sitting on negative equity and playing a game of chicken with the banks who hold their mortgage.   We need a "magic bullet" here for propping up housing demand.  Don't look to Washington DC for "stimulus" here.  Fortunately, there is an alternative.  Increase immigration  into Florida and negative equity concerns will vanish.  I can imagine that there are many successful young people in South America who would want to relocate to Florida.  If we have an excess of homes there, then we should welcome them.  I say we auction off 1 million passports with the requirement that the auction winners must live in Florida for at least 5 years.   The 1 million passports would probably sell for $100,000 each so this would generate $100 billion dollars of revenue and these funds could spend down our deficit.