Environmental and Urban Economics

Maybe my mother will appreciate what Mother Jones has to say about her older boy?

To my friends and family in New York City, I suggest you listen to the Doors' Riders on the Storm.  As the Big Storm approaches the Northeast, how much damage will it cause?   The NY Times discusses the ex-ante precautions that have been taken.   Government has provided 3 day ahead forecasts of the extent of the possible flooding and has encouraged households to migrate to higher ground and prepare for worse case scenarios.  Government is shutting down at risk public transportation.

The NY Times reports a story about birds and glass buildings in Toronto.  This city has built a large number of glass buildings and birds such as the songbird are flying into them. Millions of such songbirds died due to the impact with the glass.

Rather than attempting to write a bad environmental and urban economics textbook, I have chosen to record a series of five minute youtube videos.  Now that I understand how to do this home production, they are all posted here.

This article claims that if the recent nasty U.S drought hadn't taken place that the U.S economy would have grown by 2.4% rather than by the reported 2%.  Is this "what if" correct?

I see that the U.S GDP in 2011 was roughly $15.2 Trillion.   If I multiply .004*15,200 this yields an estimated drought impact of  $60.8 billion on our GDP.  There are roughly 300 million people in the U.S.  If I take 60,800/300 =     $202 dollars worth of damage to every American citizen.

I have posted my first youtube video related to environmental economics.  It is short and you don't see my face!  (That's the good news).  The bad news is that I have an outline for 70 more of these videos that I will soon post.  Together, these short 6 minute videos will provide an overview to my thinking on modern environmental and urban economics. I hope that some high school kids, grandmas and folks who are not at UCLA can learn a few ideas and debate some new concepts.

Jennifer Gathright is a talented Harvard undergraduate.  I recommend her recent Crimson piece.  I like this paragraph;

"This contradiction isn’t our fault—democracy just doesn’t always reward anticipation. Politicians are accountable to voters whose main concerns generally include how to feed their families and keep their jobs and houses. And it is this combination of preoccupied voters and cowardly lawmakers that has kept the U.S.

I am sitting in Boston's Logan Airport.  My 3 days in Cambridge, MA were great.  On Friday, I went to dinner with my co-author Denise DiPasquale.   While we published our last paper more than 10 years ago,  we have agreed to write a new paper on the energy efficiency of multi-family housing.  The paper will be good!  Saturday I went out to dinner with my co-author Mike Cragg's family.

The NY Times reports that Russ George of California launched his own geoengineering field experiment.  His "treatment" was to dump 100 tons of iron dust in the Pacific waters off western Canada.  His goal was to regenerate plankton that would give salmon something to eat (and hence help them to prosper in our hotter future) and to sequester carbon dioxide.

"The iron spawned the growth of enormous amounts of plankton, which Mr.