Stand-Up Economist

Climate

• Round Two (part 2) with libertarians on global warming

  Posted 2/21/10

  Here’s Rossputin’s response to my recent post on climate change. This statement stands out for me:
  There is probably an atmospheric data set we could agree on…
  Great, Ross, what is it? The hallmark of science is testable predictions, so give me a data set and make a prediction about it. How about the satellite data from [...]

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• Round Two with libertarians on global warming

  Posted 2/12/10

  About two years ago I had a back-and-forth on climate change with libertarian blogger Rossputin, the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor, and the Heartland Institute’s James Taylor. Rossputin recently emailed me to ask: “After ClimateGate, GlacierGate, etc…. do you give even a little credence yet to my view that [anthropogenic climate change is] essentially a hoax?” [...]

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• C’mon, Bill G, you’re smarter than this!

  Posted 1/25/10

  From the last page of Bill Gates’s annual letter:

  One area that I have been spending a lot of personal time on is energy and its effect on climate. The most important innovation required to avoid climate change will be a way of producing electricity that is cheaper than coal and that emits no greenhouse [...]

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• On “The Story of Cap and Trade”

  Posted 12/05/09

  There’s a new video out that criticizes cap-and-trade. Overall, I’d give it a “C”. Here’s why:
  The good

  The dangers of promising something for nothing. Many supporters of the current cap-and-trade legislation work hard to avoid the fundamental truth about cap-and-trade, namely that—like a carbon tax—it reduces pollution by making polluting expensive. As a result, it is [...]

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• Air travel CO2 from UW and other ACUPCC signatories

  Posted 12/01/09

  The University of Washington is part of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), a pledge to measure and reduce college and university emissions that has been signed by over 650 other schools. Part of that effort involves measuring CO2 emissions from school-related air travel, and the ACUPCC provides a methodology for estimating [...]

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• My hilarious global warming exchange with Ruffin and Gregory

  Posted 11/06/09

  In November 2000 (almost ten years ago!) I received a complimentary copy of a new microeconomics textbook by two professors at the University of Houston. The book’s treatment of global warming was so amazing that I picked up some HTML (thanks Barb!!!) and brought their text onto the web, along with an email exchange with [...]

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• Tragedy of the Commons R.I.P.? Not quite.

  Posted 10/24/09

  Congratulating Elinor Ostrom for winning the Nobel Prize is terrific, but please don’t get carried away like Jay Walljasper, who writes Tragedy of the Commons, R.I.P.
  It is one thing to say that the Tragedy of the Commons is sometimes solved by community-based management or other bottom-up processes, but it is quite another thing to imply [...]

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• I agree with George Will!

  Posted 10/22/09

  Not about everything, of course, but we do both agree that mandatory recycling laws are mostly pointless (so much for my chances of ever being elected to public office!) and believe it or not we even have some common ground on climate change, and I don’t just mean that we both support replacing payroll taxes [...]

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• A bit more on Superfreakonomics

  Posted 10/20/09

  We’ve all spent more than enough time on this, but since my previous posts are getting some play (e.g., from Greg Mankiw) I’m going to take the time to write up a few more (concluding?) thoughts:
  First: In an earlier post I wrote that “since Steven Levitt doesn’t do any research on climate economics my hunch [...]

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• More Superfreakonomics: emails from Steven Levitt

  Posted 10/18/09

  [Update Oct 19: My (concluding?) thoughts here.]
  This may not be terribly interesting, but here is an email correspondence I had with Steven Levitt this morning:
  From: Yoram Bauman
  To: Steven Levitt
  Hi Steve: This email is a hard one for me to write because it may void your kind offer to mention my forthcoming cartoon book on your [...]

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