Climate 
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Carbon pricing backdrop/storyline (draft #1)
Posted 1/16/12
Here’s a very draft backdrop/storyline that is intended to help make the case for a 2014 campaign for carbon pricing in the Pacific Northwest. Comments welcome! By 2014, the economy will have made progress on the long, slow recovery from the financial crisis. The unemployment rate will still be high but will be less than [...]
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Carbon pricing in Washington State Energy Strategy
Posted 1/03/12
The state Dept of Commerce has just released its State Energy Strategy. Chapter 6 looks at a BC-style carbon tax, and for easy of viewing here’s a PDF of the carbon tax chapter.
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Grading economics textbooks on climate change
Posted 12/01/10
I’ve got a new report out today (Dec 1 2010): “Grading Economics Textbooks on Climate Change”, which evaluates the nation’s top-selling economics textbooks based on the accuracy of their treatment of climate science and climate economics. More…
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Roger Pielke Jr., Part II
Posted 8/03/10
Last week I wrote some thoughts about a talk by Roger Pielke Jr. Roger wrote this in the comments section: [T]here is a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation displayed in this post. Perhaps I did not convey my points clearly. I did not discuss costs or benefits. It was not a talk about climate impacts. [...]
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Thoughts on Roger Pielke Jr.
Posted 7/29/10
Just saw a Washington Policy Center talk by Roger Pielke Jr. Some thoughts: I think he had two main points, the first being that policymakers can’t decide what to do about climate change on the basis of climate science alone. This is an excellent point, but: No duh. His second main point was that reducing [...]
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Ten observations about conservatives and climate change
Posted 7/01/10
1. Conservatives are definitely not going away in the short-term—they are likely to pick up seats this coming November—and they are almost certainly not going away in the long-term either. 2. Right now most conservatives don’t much care about climate change, but some of them do care. These include local folks like Todd Myers and [...]
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Time to explore new directions for U.S. climate policy
Posted 6/13/10
The West Coast is in perfect position to play a leading role, hence the carbonWA.org ballot measure campaign I’m part of! Details in the rest of the post and/or in this memo on carbon pricing in Washington State; see also [More...]
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Krugman on climate change
Posted 4/07/10
Paul Krugman has a climate change article coming out in the NYT magazine this weekend. Mostly I think this is an excellent summary, but I do have a few comments. In reverse order through the article: So what I end up with is basically Martin Weitzman’s argument: it’s the nonnegligible probability of utter disaster that [...]
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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 [...]
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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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