Stand-Up Economist

Climate

• 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 carbon emissions [...]

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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 national [...]

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• Time to explore new directions for U.S. climate policy

  Posted 6/13/10

  The 2nd half of 2010 may open a window of opportunity for carbon taxes, and the West Coast is in perfect position to play a leading role. Details in the rest of the post and/or in this memo on carbon pricing in Washington State that I worked on with Sightline Institute. [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 should [...]

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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 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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