Environmental and Urban Economics

Not all of my ideas merit publication in a journal. That's why blogs exist.  In this post, I would like to write about the City of Los Angeles' demand for gasoline.

When I'm back in LA, I will read and blog about this new article that claims that climate change could impose a trillion dollar loss on our coasts by the year 2100.   Two things I would ask readers to think about.

Magali Delmas, Stephen Locke and I have just released a new NBER Working Paper.   Stephen is on the rookie job market this year.   I always try to write "original" papers on subjects where I hope that a new literature will emerge.  Let me sketch this paper's big ideas.

How much do cities suffer from "fat tail" extreme events such as Hurricane Sandy or Katrina?  The LA Times reports today that the Mayor of LA is forming contingency plans for an ugly scenario where an earthquake in Los Angeles disrupts the aqueducts that carry water into the city.

At the NY Times, Michael Wines and Jess Bidgood must have studied some economics.  They playfully recast Tiebout "Voting with your Feet" for Cod saying that these fish "Vote with their Fins" as the fish seek out cooler water.

A Tufts Agricultural Economist named Parke Wilde has nudged me to write out a few more thoughts about the carbon emissions from flying.  First, some assumptions based on this web source.

Who knew that the LA Times could cover topics unrelated to Kobe Bryant!  In today's LA Times, Severin Borenstein has an excellent piece about the political economy of California's nascent carbon cap & trade market.

I have been arguing for five years now that urbanization will protect us from many of the blows that climate change will cause.  Cities (relative farming) have an edge in adapting to climate change. Cities always compete for talent.

Read Gov. Jerry Brown's piece in today's LA Times.  He is an optimist about the role that carbon regulation plays in stimulating an economy.  I believe that the WSJ would disagree with the following direct quote from his piece.

In today's WSJ,  Congressman Kevin Cramer (R, Norh Dakota) asks the following questions;  1.  how costly will it be for the stability of the U.S electricity grid to swap out low cost, dirty and reliable coal for more expensive, clean, and intermittent renewables such as wind and solar?  2.

The NY Times published an OP-Ed by Jason Mark that reviews recent Hollywood movies (think of Interstellar, Elsyium, Waterworld!) about the end of the world.

I'm happy to announce that I've accepted an offer to be a Co-Editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics.     Dan McMillen, Yves Zenou and Giovanni Perri will continue as "the Editors".   My role will be to review and edit submissions related to applied environmental and urban economics.

The NY Times has published a nice piece highlighting investments made in Copenhagen Denmark to create a "smarter, greener" city.  New sensors have been installed and they are providing real time data that leads the local residents to make "better choices".

Cost/benefit analysis of government policy requires policy economists who evaluate the policy to take strong stands on how they quantify the costs and benefits of a proposed policy. Both the benefits and the costs of a policy that have not been implemented yet are random variables.

In January 2015, thousands of academic economists will gather in Boston for the Annual AEA Meetings.  Dora and I will be there and we will be presenting new papers and discussing other researchers' work.  I look forward to speaking to  a few hundred friends of mine in the profession.

In yesterday's WSJ, there was an advertisement pointing to the new Phillips Creek Ranch development in Northern Dallas.  Here is a list of the new homes currently for sale.     Located 30 miles from Center City Dallas,  you can buy a 3500 square foot house for $500,000 ($143 a square foot).

An old debate in environmental economics focuses on the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC).  In a very well cited 1995 QJE paper,  Grossman and Krueger run cross-national pollution regressions of the form:   Air pollution indicator =  c + b1*(Per-Capita GNP) + b2*(Per-Capita GNP Squared)  + U .

Mark Thoma and Paul Krugman ask a great question.   In this post, I will sketch an answer.  You won't be shocked that the answer relates to public goods versus private goods.  Republicans are not "anti-environment".   They breathe air and many play golf on pretty courses.

A UC Berkeley Ph.D. student named Liz Carlisle has written a smart  NY Times piece providing some examples of how farmers in rural places such as Conrad, Montana and Valier, Montana are making "greener" choices in production in order to cope with the new conditions they face.

In 1951, a "High Pop Automatic Toaster" was priced at $21 dollars (nominal $).   In 2014,  Kohl's is selling a better $5 (nominal $) toaster.   I realize that this is a simplified consumer price index but this 76% reduction in price is the tip of the iceberg.

The NY Times reports  that a defunct power plant's ugly structure remains on Morro Bay.   You don't have to be Don Trump to recognize that a real estate developer would pay the costs of dismantling it and removing it if he/she could then develop on the vacated land.

Paul Romer serves as the Director of NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management.   I am a Visiting Scholar at this Institute and try to show up there twice a year.   The Institute has just posted my new Working Paper titled: Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Urban Economics.

I was given the chance to speak for 5 minutes yesterday at a public event.  Unlike the other speakers, I stuck to my time limit and tried to give a punchy talk about the Future of Los Angeles.  The event took at place at Prof. Thom Mayne's studio called Morphosis Office in Culver City.

Suppose that upstate New York has a snow blizzard.

Professor Jeff Reimer was kind enough to send me a great example of ingenuity at work to protect natural capital in the Pacific Northwest.  Julian Simon would respect  the salmon cannon.  This video from Last Week from John Oliver tells the story.

An honest discussion is now taking place concerning the unintended consequences of limiting new construction.   Paris hasn't allowed many high rise buildings to be built.

I have read that it is quite cold in Chicago right now.  Cold winters can kill.  How do we protect the urban poor against such climate shocks?  Cook County Chicago has opened up Warming Centers.   Many shut by 5pm and I'm not sure where people are supposed to go then.

Tomorrow, the WSJ will publish an editorial called "China's Environmental Whitewash".  Here is a quote from their piece that mentions me:

"This is the context for Supreme Leader Xi Jinping ’s pledge last week “to achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030,” which has U.S.

The Grateful Dead once asked; "Where Does the Time Go?"    Permit me to offer a time diary for today;

1.  I woke up early and worked on a submission for Chuck Mason's journal.  The paper is now titled;  Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Urban Economics.

2.

I attended Hamilton College in the mid 1980s.  Utica, at that time, was a depressing declining place.  This article in the NY Times suggests that things haven't changed.  Wikipedia says that its population has declined by 38% since 1930.

Joe Romm unintentionally poses an interesting question here .   He focuses on the carbon production implications of the Keystone Pipeline.  He is right to raise the old issue that if the oil in the Canada tar sands stays in the ground then this will reduce global GHG emissions.   But, we knew that.

While I am very happy to hear about the agreement between China and the United States to reduce GHG in the medium term,  there appears to be a fashionable "boosterism" among academic environmental economists and NGO economists to seize this "momentum" to try to claim that there will be  self fulfill

Now there is video proof that I did graduate from Scarsdale High School in 1984.  Here is the video from 30 years ago.  I walk across the stage at the 58:51 mark and after collecting my diploma, I turn to the crowd and make a face.