Climate 
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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, [...]
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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 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 the authors, emails from [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Climate change in Superfreakonomics
Posted 10/18/09
Update Oct 18 11:07am PST: My email exchange with Steven Levitt is here. Update Oct 19: My (concluding?) thoughts here. Joe Romm at climateprogress.org posts a PDF of the climate change chapter in the forthcoming book Superfreakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, and in my opinion the chapter is misleading and incredibly [...]
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Carbon cap: Be careful what you wish for
Posted 10/07/09
Much of the discussion in the environmental community about the climate strategy known as “cap-and-trade” centers on the fact that this strategy sets a hard cap, a maximum level of carbon emissions. Seemingly forgotten is the flip side of the coin: a hard cap also effectively sets a minimum level of carbon emissions. As with [...]
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