Environmental and Urban Economics: Professor Stavins’ Climate Change Piece in the NY Times Today
25 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, entrepreneurship, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate change adaptation, global warming
He makes the following points:
- Global GHG emissions continue to rise
- The UN’s goal for sharply reducing emissions over the next few decades will be a very difficult target to reach
- It will be very costly to reach this goal
- He cites current cost estimates of what we would have to sacrifice to achieve the carbon reductions…
To my deep surprise, he never mentions climate change adaptation. That a very serious Harvard economist is not willing to even mention this topic says something on several levels.
The IPCC has only made a small investment in investigating the possibilities for adaptation to help us to minimize several of the threats we will face from climate change.
In my humble opinion, too many economists are working on the economics of climate change mitigation in part because there is so much demand by policy makers (and private consulting) for such studies. But from a research perspective, we have hit sharp diminishing returns.
In contrast, we need active researchers to more fully explore the politically incorrect topic of climate change adaptation.
via Environmental and Urban Economics: Professor Stavins’ Climate Change Piece in the NY Times Today.
Leo vs. science: vanishing evidence for climate change | New York Post
21 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism, global warming
According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.
via Leo vs. science: vanishing evidence for climate change | New York Post.
Climate Consensus: Do Little for Now
16 Sep 2014 1 Comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics of natural disasters, environmental economics, global warming, health economics, liberalism, technological progress Tags: climate alarmism, cost benefit analysis, global warming, moral panic, richer is safer, wealthier is healthier
Fact sheet on Green scaremongering about more flooding because of global warming
15 Sep 2014 1 Comment
Who Is More Irrational – Consumers or Regulators?
08 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, energy economics, entrepreneurship, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming Tags: Bjørn Lomborg, expressive voting, futile gestures, global warming, Kip Viscusi, nanny state, regulatory failure, The fatal conceit, The pretence to knowledge
A study by Ted Gayer and W. Kip Viscusi looked into this implied irrationality of consumers. They have found no empirical evidence to support the view that if consumers are so irrational that government agencies must prohibit certain energy consuming products for us to make the right choices:
Rather than accept the implications that consumers and firms are acting so starkly against their economic interest, a more plausible explanation is that there is something incorrect in the assumptions being made in the regulatory impact analyses.
Indeed, upon closer inspection it is apparent that there is no empirical evidence provided for the types of consumer failures alleged.
Even the EPA acknowledged this logical gap in its economic analysis of energy efficiency regulations:
it is a conundrum from an economic perspective that these large fuel savings have not been provided by automakers and purchased by consumers
Not surprisingly Kip Viscusi observed that
The regulatory impact analyses examined in this study contain virtually no empirical evidence to support the irrationality proposition.
• This proposition ignores the fact that consumers and firms purchase products based on a number of factors—only one of which is energy efficiency.
• Government agencies exhibit a parochial bias by ignoring all product attributes other than energy efficiency.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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