James K. Boyce was a featured speaker at TEDxTraverseCity 2013.
Jun 172013
Jun 112013
By Gernot Wagner and Thomas Sterner. Originally posted on EDF Voices.
Last week, the Obama administration released new energy efficiency standards for microwaves, along with an update to the government’s official Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) figure. What do those two things have to do with each other? Well, the efficiency standards will help the planet by cutting the energy needs of microwaves, which will in turn save consumers money. And the new SCC numbers show just how expensive our addiction to fossil fuels has become.
The SCC is used to estimate the damages from carbon emissions (and the benefits from reducing those emissions) for the purposes of regulatory benefit-cost analyses. The central estimate for the SCC is now around $35 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution emitted today.
That’s the administration’s estimate of the damage—to human health, ecosystems, and the economy—caused by every ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. The average American emits about 20 tons each year.
Jun 102013
Three years later, it was time for a new episode. Back in 2010, Congress listened to some climate-denial rants, counted votes, and decided to do absolutely nothing about climate change; this year on Capitol Hill, the magic continues.
Also in 2010, the Obama administration released an estimate of “the social cost of carbon”` (SCC) – that is, the value of the damages done by emission of one more ton of carbon dioxide. Calculated by an anonymous task force that held no public hearings and had no office, website, or named participants, the SCC was released without fanfare as, literally, Appendix 15A to a Department of Energy regulation on energy efficiency standards for small motors.
This year, the Obama administration updated the SCC calculation. The update was done by an anonymous task force that held no public hearings, and had no office, website, or named participants. It first appeared as – yes! – Appendix 16A to a Department of Energy regulation on energy efficiency standards for microwave ovens. Continue reading »
May 032013
By Gernot Wagner. Originally posted on EDF Voices.
Nudge is the best kind of book. It presents the type of head-slappingly obvious solutions to public policy problems that make you wonder why you needed a book to tell you about them in the first place. Place the veggies before the French fries in the cafeteria, and people will eat more greens. Enroll employees into retirement programs with the option of opting out rather than in and they’ll save more as a result.
Such nudges are the best kinds of policy interventions: minimum intrusion, maximum freedom of choice, maximum relative impact. But one area in which Nudge comes up short is global warming. Putting smiley faces on your electricity bill as a reward for using less electricity than your neighbor, something Power has done with utilities around the country, helps bring down electricity use by 1 to 3%. Better than zero, but not the solution by a long shot.
That solution would be making polluters pay: putting a price on carbon dioxide through a direct cap or tax on carbon pollution. Cass Sunstein, who wrote Nudge with Richard Thaler, says as much in his latest piece on the topic. He laments the fact that we don’t seem to be able to get these kinds of taxes passed, and then adds a few items to his running list of things we can do, all under the broad heading of setting “clean-energy default rules”: Change the default printer setting to “print on front and back,” and people will. Enroll people into programs where they spend extra for clean energy (with the option of opting out), and 90% will choose to stick with the clean energy.
Feb 282013
By James Boyce. Originally posted on Triple Crisis.
For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.” These words in President Obama’s State of the Union address came as music to the ears of environmentalists. Do they herald a real effort to break the climate policy impasse in Washington?
Obama urged Congress to pursue a “bipartisan, market-based solution,” citing as a model the cap-and-trade bill sponsored by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman.
The McCain-Lieberman bill failed to clear the Senate in 2003. It failed again in 2005. So did two subsequent cap-and-trade bills, Lieberman-Warner in 2008 and Waxman-Markey in 2010. Any new effort to enact a national climate policy will be the fifth try.
Environmentalists blame Republicans and climate change deniers for the past defeats. But if there is to be any chance of forging a successful policy this time around, some deeper introspection is in order.
An insightful essay by Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol offers a good starting point. Skocpol doesn’t downplay the role of fossil-fueled extremists in blocking climate legislation, but neither does she ignore the fatal weakness in the Democratic party’s past strategy: relying on insider bargains, lubricated by carbon permit giveaways to energy corporations, to get the votes needed to pass a bill.
Jan 082013
By James Boyce, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This post first appeared on Triple Crisis.
Is environmental racism good for white folks? The answer isn’t as obvious as it might seem.
In the United States, there is plenty of evidence that African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans typically face greater pollution burdens than whites, with associated health risks. So if the same total amount of pollution were spread more evenly, whites would wind up breathing dirtier air.
But would total pollution remain the same? Or would pollution decline if it was no longer disproportionately inflicted on minorities?
A recent study by a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, finds that toxic air pollution from industrial facilities is a variable, not a constant, and that the total pollution load is correlated with the extent to which minorities bear higher-than-average pollution impacts.
We measure the extent of disparities in U.S. metropolitan areas by comparing the share of minorities in total exposure risks from industrial air toxics, calculated from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data, to their share of metropolitan population. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, minorities bear 62 percent of the air toxics exposure risk, but constitute only 31 percent of the population. Continue reading »
Nov 292012
By Kristen Sheeran
It appears that scare tactics, slander, and intimidation are no longer exclusively the domain of climate denialists seeking to discredit climate science research. According to the actions of Richard Tol, an economist at the University of Sussex, it would seem that these are now acceptable forms of academic debate in economics.
Tol has waged a campaign to damage the reputation of economist Frank Ackerman. Ackerman’s crime? He published a peer-reviewed technical article in a highly reputable journal (“Climate Damages in the FUND Model: A Disaggregated Analysis,” Ecological Economics, 2012.) that critiques Tol’s signature contribution to the climate economics literature – the FUND model. Since then, Tol has written to Ackerman’s employer and publishers accusing him of libel.
As a well published academic, Tol understands that disagreement is not only common, but encouraged by the academy. When you publish your work, you expect others to critique it. Sometimes you agree with the criticisms; other times you do not. But as an academic, you understand that this is how a body of knowledge evolves. It is an expected part of the process. And no academic, no matter how well accomplished, is immune to critique.
It appears that all of the proper channels to facilitate a healthy and productive academic debate have been pursued – and then some. The article was subject to peer-review prior to publication. Ecological Economics then published a commentary by Tol and Anthoff and a reply by Ackerman and Munitz. It even published an editor’s letter on the controversy. Why then, is Tol still trying to silence a legitimate academic debate?
A statement of support has been signed by Terry Barker, Stephen DeCanio, Paul Ekins, Duncan Foley, Michael Hanemann, Julie Nelson, William Nordhaus, Robert Pollin, J. Barkley Rosser, Juliet Schor, and dozens of other economists. It affirms that the Ackerman-Munitz article is a legitimate, peer-reviewed publication making a valuable contribution to the economics of climate change, and urges scholars to pursue criticisms of each other’s work through normal channels of academic debate. If you are an economist who agrees with this statement, Ackerman invites you to add your signature (e-mail frankackerman12 at gmail.com).
In the interest of full disclosure, Ackerman is a founding member of E3 Network. He blogged about the FUND model on Real Climate Economics back in 2011 We also published Tol’s response to that blog post.
Nov 202012
By Noah Enelow
The world is urbanizing, and fast. In 2008, the size of the world’s urban population passed that of the world’s rural population: the majority of humans now live in cities or urban areas. The implications of this profound shift for the global economy, and the discipline of economics, have not yet been fully explored. Economists concerned about the well-being of people and planet should take this opportunity to set the terms of the discussion.
What role do cities play in the development of economies? The short answer: a very large one. Cities are the major sources of technological, economic and social innovations, and the seedbed for societies’ complex divisions of labor. Influential urban theorist Jane Jacobs argues against the dominant perception that cities arose from prosperous agrarian regions; rather, the growth of highly productive agriculture developed through cities, in which the tools and techniques that made rural agriculture possible were designed and developed.
After over a century of ignoring cities, the economics profession is beginning to come around; today, urban economics is a growth discipline. Most of today’s urban economic theorizing aims to explain the productivity advantages of large cities, taking inspiration from Alfred Marshall’s observations of external economies of scale. This line of research identifies the ways in which knowledge spillovers lead to fast adoption of new technologies, and agglomeration economies lead to lower production costs. A recent article in The Economist attributed the U.S.’s high income relative to Western Europe to its comparatively large cities.
Nov 092012
By Frank Ackerman. This post appeared first on TripleCrisis.
The United States has been called “the Saudi Arabia of coal” since the energy crises of the 1970s; politicians of both parties have embraced this metaphor. It’s certainly true that both countries have more fossil fuel reserves than they can use for decades to come, located in their remote, empty regions; we call ours Wyoming.
Fossil fuel exports are also becoming a potential growth sector of the American economy. As in Saudi Arabia, energy export earnings can be used to pay for high-technology imports from more advanced economies. (And the parallels don’t stop there: does energy production somehow go along with politics based on fundamentalist religion, committed to restricting the lives of women? Let’s leave that for another day; today’s topic is economics.)
Coal use in the United States – almost exclusively for electricity production – is declining, thanks to competition from natural gas and wind power, along with stricter environmental regulation. This might seem like good news for the environment, but to the coal industry, it’s a looming disaster that can only be prevented by increased exports. Five new coal export terminals have been proposed in Oregon and Washington, leading to intense battles over the local and global impacts of increased coal shipments.
At the same time, the huge recent increase in natural gas production, due to fracking of shale, means, according to the Wall Street Journal, that “Energy companies are racing to export natural gas from the U.S.” Even in oil, increases in production in both Texas and North Dakota have led to proposals to export both crude and refined products – despite the continuing massive imports of oil nationwide. Continue reading »
Nov 012012
By Gernot Wagner Ph.D. Economist, Environmental Defense Fund
How serious is global warming? Here’s one indication: the first rogue entrepreneurs have begun testing the waters on geoengineering, as Naomi Klein laments in her must-read New York Times op-ed.
Sadly, Klein misses two important points.
First, it’s not a question of if but when humanity will be compelled to use geoengineering, unless we change course on our climate policies (or lack thereof). Second, all of this calls for more research and a clear, comprehensive governance effort on the part of governments and serious scientists – not a ban of geoengineering that we cannot and will not adhere to. (See point number one.)
Saying that we ought not to tinker with the planet on a grand scale – by attempting to create an artificial sun shield, for example – won’t make it so. Humanity got into this mess thanks to what economists call the “free rider” effect. All seven billion of us are free riders on the planet, contributing to global warming in various ways but paying nothing toward the damage it causes. No wonder it’s so hard to pass a sensible cap or tax on carbon pollution. Who wants to pay for something that they’re used to doing for free – never mind that it comes at great cost to those around them?
It gets worse: Turns out the same economic forces pushing us to do too little on the pollution front are pushing us toward a quick, cheap fix – a plan B.
Enter the Strangelovian world of geoengineering – tinkering with the whole planet. It comes in two distinct flavors: Continue reading »