We wrote earlier about how concern over climate change may lead to a nuclear-power revival in the U.S., despite longtime opposition and fear on many fronts. The issue is unfolding similarly in Europe. Here’s a fascinating short article from Spiegel, via BusinessWeek: Italy on Thursday said it would join a growing number of European countries returning to nuclear power in . . .
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 . . .
The actor Ed Begley Jr. has a widely-circulated OpEd piece touting his eco-friendly activities, featuring a proud announcement that his exercise on his stationary bicycle generates the electricity he uses to toast two pieces of bread. Now those two pieces give him 200 calories, but he burns at least 100 calories on the bike. So half of his eco-friendly exercise . . .
When it comes to saving the environment, things are often not as simple as they seem at first blush. Take, for instance, the debate about paper bags vs. plastic bags. For a number of years, anyone who opted for plastic bags at the grocery store risked the scorn of environmentalists. Now, it seems that the consensus has swung the other . . .
Mayor Ken Livingstone of London is urging his citizens to forego bottled water in light of the drag it puts on the environment. Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York has done the same. Others, meanwhile, have taken the further step of an outright ban on bottled water. Your thoughts?
Divorce is bad for the environment. Survey shows that doctors fail to report each others’ errors. (Earlier) A complete compilation of science fiction baby names. (Earlier) Researchers study zebra social networks to aid conservation. (Earlier)
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 . . .
There’s been a good bit of back-and-forthing on this blog about nuclear power, most notably regarding a Times Magazine column we wrote recently about the past and future of the nuclear industry. In a nutshell, we posited that the U.S. anti-nuke revolt in the 1960s and 1970s may look misguided in retrospect since it helped thwart the proliferation of nuclear . . .
In the last few years, magazine covers and newspaper front pages have often been dominated by disaster coverage: wildfires in California, hurricanes in the Gulf and elsewhere, and of course the Sept. 11 attacks and their myriad repercussions. (Whether the incidence of such events is higher or coverage is just noisier is a separate question, which is addressed below.) So . . .
An e-mail just turned up in my in-box. It was clearly selling something, and the text ended with the following thoughtful note: Please consider the environment — do you really need to print this e-mail? And what, you ask, was the e-mail selling? Private jet travel. Like the man said: please consider the environment.
Seth Schiesel wrote a fascinating piece in the Times about a new collaboration between game maker Electronic Arts and the energy company BP in designing the latest version of E.A.’s SimCity computer game. In case you don’t know, SimCity “focuses on building and managing a modern metropolis.” As Schiesel tells us, “coping with environmental pollution has long been part of . . .
Note: There is a new research assistant here in the Freakonomics office, and his name is Ryan Hagen. He’s 24 years old, a graduate of N.Y.U. (he majored in English and American literature), and for the past two years he’s worked as a research associate for N.Y.U.’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness & Response. We are very happy to have him . . .
Video We’ve got a new column in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the past, present, and future of nuclear energy. The column is called “The Jane Fonda Effect” — any guesses why? — and the research took me down to the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pa. (That’s why my family and I got to spend . . .
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 . . .
A reader named James Thompson recently sent in a request for help in solving a wildlife conservation problem. We decided to put the question to a set of diverse, smart people we know or tracked down, who might have particular insights to this particular problem. As such, we bring you the inaugural Freakonomics quorum, composed of the following group: the . . .
July 18 is National Ride to Work Day, in which commuters are encouraged to abandon their cars for the day in favor of motorcycles or scooters.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post published an article suggesting that much of the decline in crime in the 1990s may have been due to the reduction of childhood lead exposure after the removal of lead from gasoline and house paint. This is an intriguing hypothesis. There is evidence on an individual level that high exposure to lead is harmful . . .
Newspapers have historically been vocal advocates for good environmental policy. So when millions of people start to consume them electronically, on computer screens, instead of on paper that comes from trees and must be thrown away, wouldn’t you think that newspapers would stand up and cheer? Well, not necessarily, since newspapers still make a lot more money selling ads on . . .
This week marks the launch of Covestor, an online investor service that allows other “covestors” to assess and even mimic your investment style. (Hat tip: Matthew Hertz.) Reader Elizabeth Gonzalez alerted us to an interesting consumer trend: high-end furniture and fashion accessories made from recycled trash. Here’s an example. Because nothing says “green” like a purse made from old Firestones. . . .
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.
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 . . .
Taking off on Levitt’s recent blog post about pesticides in the water in Indiana, James Altucher at Stockpickr has assembled a Freakonomics portfolio of clean water stocks. He has also blogged about it in more detail at TheStreet.com.
The media has been abuzz lately over a new research paper by Dr. Paul Winchester of the Indiana University School of Medicine. It purports to find that babies conceived between June and August in Indiana perform worse on standardized tests. I can believe that this conclusion might be true. Fifteen years ago, economists Josh Angrist and Alan Krueger found that . . .
We’ve blogged before about a pay-what-you-wish coffee shop and pay-what-you-wish downloadable music. Now Luciana Silvestri, a reader from Argentina, writes with news of something different: An all-you-can-eat restaurant with a prix fixe twist. As she explains: A friend has just returned to Argentina from a six-month internship in Chicago and told me about a Japanese restaurant with quite an original . . .
M. Scott Taylor, an economist at the University of Calgary, argues in a new working paper that the epic 19th-century slaughter of American bison — with 10 to 15 million buffalo killed on the Great Plains in barely a decade — was driven by a technological advance and a profit motive that both came from Europe. (Incidentally, this makes me . . .
Peter Maass wrote the NY Times Sunday Magazine piece on “Peak Oil” that I have been blogging about recently. He was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. During the course of the interview, he defended Matthew Simmons, saying, “Matt Simmons, he is not some kind of wild environmentalist, or kind of rogue economist, or anything like that…” Phew, we already have . . .