Environmental and Urban Economics

The NY Times has published a fun "Room for Debate" focused on climate change fiction and the role of such work in shaping public opinion.   To say something new here, let's think about this topic through the lens of the modern field experiment literature.  I will embrace the essential heterogeneity model.

Suppose that climate change authors could randomly assign their books to adults and that adults were required to read them.  Note that this is a typical field experiment research design.  The random assignment of books removes concern that readers "self select" what books to read such that a Conservative Republican only watches Fox News.  The random assignment of the book means that this selection concern vanishes.

Suppose that Mr J and Mr Q and Ms M   are randomly assigned book #3.

UCLA does not have enough Ph.D. students interested in a graduate course on environmental economics.   That's a shame but I don't take it too personally (maybe I should?).   Fortunately, the University of California's Center for Energy and Environmental Economics offers a week long summer course. Ph.D. students from all of the ten campuses are welcome to attend and I have taught in this program twice before.  This summer, I will be lecturing about China and its urban pollution challenges.

This article highlights that President Obama and the Democrats are changing tactics in their worthwhile attempt to build a political coalition to reduce U.S GHG emissions.  The Green Team now wants to tell a narrative that the U.S will save money over the long run by reducing GHG emissions now.

Secretary Rubin recently wrote an Opinion Piece in the Washington Post.  Having read his autobiography (and having met him once at Brookings), I know that he is the ultimate prudent man thinking hard about future scenarios, their likelihood of taking place and the impacts of such scenarios.  In simple English, he walks the reader through some nasty climate change scenarios and stresses that Americans will suffer serious economic damage from future Hurricane Katrinas.

As I walk the streets of Berkeley, CA,  I hear many chickens clucking away.  Today, the NY Times presents a video profile of my Hamilton College classmate Robert McMinn.   I see that after 26 years he hasn't changed!  He has his hair and his chickens.  Time has not been so kind to me.   I have neither.

At the University of Chicago, I was taught human capital theory by several future Nobel Laureates and Clark Medalists (Becker, Heckman, Murphy) and by a man who would have won a Nobel Prize.  None of these scholars ever mentioned the link between human capital and environmental economics.

Ice melts when temperature exceeds 32 F.  Many Canadian kids have practiced hockey on frozen outdoor ponds and lakes. If climate change warms winters, will the quality of NHL hockey suffer?  This article says "yes".    An economist might posit that indoor hockey rinks are a close substitute for outdoor frozen lakes.

For some pessimism about quality of life in the year 2393 read this blog entry by Joe Romm.  He indicts free markets ideology with encouraging an individualism that chips away at collective action solutions. In the absence of a collective solution such as a global carbon tax, he argues that we we will face nasty days of pain caused by cruel climate change.  I agree and I disagree with Dr. Romm.

1.

NBA basketball players know their age, their contract's terms and the likely length of their playing career, and they can form a good guess of their post-career earnings.