Environmental and Urban Economics

I agree with others that bloggers such as myself have nothing new to say.  So, rather than talking about Greece or Paul Krugman, I want to talk about my father's recent publications. Here are some titles of his work that you are unlikely to see in the QJE.

Influence of the hepatic eukaryotic initiation factor 2alpha(eIF2alpha) endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response pathway on insulin-mediated ER stress and hepatic and peripheral glucose metabolism

Is it open or is it closed? Thrombosis of a St. Jude's tricuspid valve prosthesis

Doppler echocardiography and computed tomography in diagnosis of left coronary arteriovenous fistula

If anybody knows what any of these words means, please get in touch with me.

Economists like to compete and Google Scholar has given us a new way to compete with a ranking system that is merely one mouse click away.  Is this metric better than the REPEC metric?  We don't care.  We just want to compete.  We will soon see how many well cited economists register so that they can stand out in the pecking order.

Somebody should write a paper on this!  Such a researcher would face a riddle.

Neo-classical environmental economists have a strange relationship with our ecological economics brethren.   The ecological economists seem to believe that natural capital is the ultimate limit to sustainable growth while neo-classical economists posit that new ideas and innovation can continuously allow us to avoid "limits to growth".

This is a scary piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Academics want fame and we know what makes the headlines.  Demand creates supply.

A NY Times opinion piece today argues that suburban buildings are major electricity consumers and that this is bad.  The piece presents no facts about what a Microsoft Campus' per-worker energy consumption is and what it would have been had the campus been assembled in downtown Seattle.  In this blog post, I'd like to talk through the issues.

I have some street credibility on this topic.

As gas prices rise, will small cities suffer as airlines cancel small jet flights connecting them to big cities?

Will fear of future drought nudge you to buy plants that thrive in Afghanistan?

In a world where Elton John has been knighted, shouldn't Johnny Rotten's art work be preserved?  London's thought leaders are now wrestling with this issue.  To quote the Express Newspaper;

"The controversial band was based at an apartment in central London in the late 1970s, and drawings on a wall were found when the building was recently converted into offices.

Suppose that a military contractor's earns its revenue from selling hardware to the military.  Suppose that this contractor makes a marginal piece of equipment such as those over-priced Osprey helicopters.  If the market believes that the Super-Committee in Congress will fail to come to an agreement and this triggers military cuts, then does this company's stock price decline as the "new news" that the Committee has failed becomes public knowledge?  This article says yes.

I missed this piece by Joe Romm about future Dust Bowls caused by climate change.  Here is a dramatic quote from this subtle thinker;

"Most pressingly, what will happen to global food security if dust-bowl conditions become the norm for both food-importing and food- exporting countries? Extreme, widespread droughts will be happening at the same time as sea level rise and salt-water intrusion threaten some of the richest agricultural deltas in the world, such as those of the Nile and the Ganges.

This piece published in the Sacramento Bee is not about pepper spray use at UC Davis.  Instead, it focuses on how California's birds are and will adapt to climate change.   There are several interesting patterns as some birds are becoming bigger while others are becoming smaller.  A small bird needs less food to survive. If food supply is becoming more volatile then this is a wise evolutionary strategy.