A quick visit to the U.K. confirms that environmental and global-warming concerns are, on the surface at least, acutely more pronounced here than in the U.S. Reminders and nudges seem to be everywhere, many of them seemingly intended to make you feel guilty for every breath you draw and every bite you swallow. A bottle of Belu water arrives at the table: “All Profits to Clean Water Projects,” it says. “The U.K.’s First Carbon-Neutral Bottled Water.”
Biologists from the Proctor Maple Research Center at the University of Vermont plan to study how climate change might affect this year’s “foliage viewing season,” whether it is longer, shorter, or more muted.
Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver challenged bloggers to stand behind their beliefs on climate change by wagering money and risk shaming by Silver if they back out. No takers.
Thirty percent of U.S. electricity consumption could be erased through gains in energy productivity, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. (Related: see R.M.I. chairman Amory Lovins‘s recent guest post.) The institute’s analysis arrived at electricity productivity stats for all 50 states by dividing each state’s G.D.P. by the kilowatt hours of electricity it consumed. New York state topped its list. . . .
Newspapers are disappearing faster than alpine glaciers, and a new paper by journalist-turned-public-policy scholar Eric Pooley suggests the two may be related. Pooley’s paper argues that newspapers have failed as referees of the public debate on preventing climate change, reporting junk economics and good economics with equal weight. In these muddied waters, Pooley suggests, it’s harder for the government to . . .
Apparently not. Consider this interesting passage from The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, by James Lovelock:
Last month I blogged about Chris Goodall‘s claim that walking could exacerbate global warming more than driving if the person doing the walking gets his or her calories from foods like beef or milk. A group called the Pacific Institute has done some further analysis of the data. Their analysis suggests that for most reasonable assumptions about the diet of . . .
Times columnist Nick Kristof recently highlighted economic research showing that climate change may be driving up the rate of executions of suspected witches in East Africa. Tough times in the Congo may have been behind the recent witchcraft panic there, where police arrested 13 people accused of using black magic to shrink men’s penises. University of Chicago economist Emily Oster . . .
Can studying earthquakes lead to a cure for epilepsy? Should we be able to buy organs? AEI to host a discussion. The irrational truth about humans and money. (Earlier) Ferrari explores switching to ethanol. (Earlier)
California’s environmental policy has made headlines recently, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announcing that he plans to sue the federal government over its refusal to let the state enact its own plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and instead adopt a more lax federal plan. While the E.P.A.’s regulation promises to increase fuel efficiency standards by 40 percent come 2020, the . . .
Urbanization has been climbing steadily of late, with more than half of the world’s population now living in cities. Given the economic, sociological, political, and environmental ramifications, how should we be thinking about this? We gathered a quorum of smart thinkers on this subject — James Howard Kunstler, Edward Glaeser, Robert Bruegmann, Dolores Hayden, and Alan Berube — and posed . . .
It’s tough to imagine a world without cars. They serve as a base for our social and economic structure in a way that wasn’t thought possible a century ago. But the rapid growth of an automobile-based culture has produced economic and environmental consequences that, if left unchecked, could cripple society. As such, we’re facing a major dilemma: we can’t tell . . .
A proposed history of the efficient markets hypothesis. (Hat tip: MidasOracle) U.N. climate change conference to discuss global warming post-2012. (Earlier) Senator proposes national registry for convicted arsonists. (Earlier) The misery of economy air travel continues. (Earlier)
You may remember Paul Feldman as the Bagel Man we wrote about in Freakonomics. You may also remember that he was an economist before he got into bagels, with an interest in agricultural, medical, and military issues. He recently wrote to us about an environmental issue he’s been looking into: the abundance of underground coal fires in abandoned mines and . . .
What’s the solution to air pollution in China? Becker and Posner speak. (Earlier) Also in China: man dies after three straight days of online gaming. (Earlier) More than a quarter of a billion people to use mobile dating services by 2012. Does smoking marijuana have long-term effects?
Attack of the killer text message spam. (Hat tip: Consumerist) Local businesses lagging in online markets. Jogging near traffic can harm your heart. (Earlier) Why do terrorists restrict their business to illegal drugs?
We have blogged occasionally about different pieces of the global-warming puzzle (see here, here, and here), and we touched on the subject briefly in a New York Times Magazine column. It is an extraordinarily interesting issue, to say nothing of its importance and complexity, in part because there are so many foundational economic principles at play: not just supply and . . .
Match the drug to the warning label. (Hat tip: BoingBoing) Does Consumer Reports need a lesson in data analysis? (Earlier) Meet Harvard macroeconomist Robert Barro. Hotels grapple with going green.
Well, at least the folks at the PopSci Predictions Exchange listen. Last week Dubner blogged about Jatropha, a weed that could spearhead a biofuel revolution. At the end of his post, he urged the PopSci Predictions Exchange to launch a contract on Jatropha. Voila. So far there are only sellers — people betting against Jatropha — and no buyers.
See? Even bacteria cheat. (Earlier) Dissed by Oprah: one author’s tale. Global warming hits the fashion industry. (Earlier) Can railroad track layouts show the causal effects of segregation?
August 21 is the 21st anniversary of the Hubbard Glacier’s sudden and rapid shift, threatening the Alaskan town of Yakutat with an eco-disaster. Two decades later, the story would have been just one in the slew of climate change headlines.
Levitt discusses Louis Michaud, whose attempts to create tornadoes and harness their power as electricity may point us in the right direction towards creating a global warming solution.
The 2005 Hurricane season was the most active and destructive in recorded history. The devastation from hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, and Wilma was powerful evidence that man-made global warming had triggered an onslaught of unforeseen consequences — at least, that was the way the media tended to portray it. Maybe I am wrong, but I think the current focus on . . .
For a long time I have felt the price of gasoline in the United States was way too low. Pretty much all economists believe this. Greg Mankiw blogged back in October about the many reasons why we should raise gas taxes. The reason we need high gas taxes is that there are all sorts of costs associated with my driving . . .
Once again, James Altucher has turned some recent blog posts into Freakonomics stock portfolios. Here is his most recent column from TheStreet.com, picking up on Dubner’s post about corporate thinking about global warming and Levitt’s take on risks of global warming vs. a global pandemic.
If a genie came out of a bottle and gave me the choice between magically doing away with global warming or getting rid of the threat of global pandemics, I think I would choose the latter. I am probably in the minority on this one, but I think a pandemic might be the graver threat. A few years ago I . . .
With global warming having become Topic No. 1 of so many discussions, to me the big question is the degree to which behavioral changes are produced on three separate levels: 1. The individual level — where change seems well underway, but probably won’t amount to all that much without major institutional/structural changes. 2. The governmental level — where change will . . .
A reader named Andrew Gendreau recently wrote in on the topic of distributed computing, which refers to a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more computers while they communicate with each other over a network. According to Wikipedia (whose reliability is imperfect but often commendable), distributed computing differs from networking . . .
A few nights ago in San Antonio, Al Gore gave his global-warming lecture at the American Institute of Architects’ national convention. “It’s in part a spiritual crisis,” he said. “It’s a crisis of our own self-definition – who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not.” According to the San Antonio Express-News, Gore was “especially . . .
Quite by accident, I’ve blogged three times on this site about Happy Feet: 1. Whether Savion Glover, the human tap dancer behind Mumble’s moves, got sufficient credit; 2 When Glover himself took in a showing of the film, with his own child in tow; and 3. Whether the success of films like Happy Feet have raised awareness of global warming. . . .