Utopia, you are standing in it!

While I’m trying to get my ducks in a row regarding RCP 8.5, I want to discuss the social cost of carbon (SCC).

Although the immediate trigger for this post is Pat Michaels’ testimony to Congress (found through Watts Up With That), I have been wondering about SCC for some time. Here is Pat Michaels’ testimony:

I have no doubt that those most worried about climate change and the social cost of carbon will ignore Michaels’ testimony, hoping it disappears from public view.

The EPA fact sheet on the Social Cost of Carbon (which of course they have to rename as SC-CO2) is here. They write, “The SC-CO2 is meant to be a comprehensive estimate of climate change damages and includes, among other things, changes in net agricultural productivity, human health, property damages from increased flood risk and changes in energy system costs, such as reduced costs for…

Suppose there are two bakeries which make wedding cakes and other baked items. The pastries from one bakery are pretty much the same as those from another so the baked goods market is quite competitive and margins and profits are thin.

The legislature passes a law allowing businesses to select which customers they will serve and which they will not.

One bakery, bakery A, decides to be selective and the other, bakery B, decides to be non-selective. The fact that bakery A has become selective becomes public knowledge either because the bakery advertises this fact or through word-of-mouth.

Does economic competition eliminate discrimination? This is the question.

Customers who abhor bakery A’s selection criterion boycott bakery A even if in other respects it would be convenient to just get a doughnut from bakery A. So, bakery B, gets additional business it did not get before.

Surely bakery A is suffering and hence…

Editors’ note: The blog is inviting constitutional lawyers to comment on the UK Government’s proposal to repeal and replace the Human Rights Act. We continue with a post by Dr Mark Elliott, Reader in Public Law at the University of Cambridge. You can read the other contributions in this series here. Posts on the topic are welcome.

In my last post on the proposed repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the enactment of a British Bill of Rights, I considered the extent to which the House of Lords might thwart the Government’s plans. My conclusion was that the Lords might plausibly assert itself so as to delay the legislation, traditional understandings of the Salisbury Convention notwithstanding, but that the Parliament Act 1911 clearly deprives the Lords of any absolute veto. What, however, of the devolved nations? Could they block the implementation of the UK Government’s proposals?

The Scottish Government appears to think…

We have mentioned teh Home Voter hypothesis on here several times – interesting to see a study

Economist

Local opposition to new housing developments is common across Britain. It has long been argued that such opposition—NIMBYism to its critics—is linked to home ownership. Homeowners, unlike distant landlords, vote in local elections and receive planning consultations in their postboxes. They lose out from development in multiple ways. Loss of green space reduces their quality of life and increased supply of housing suppresses prices. Landlords managing diversified portfolios are less exposed to the value of one property. The idea that planning decisions are driven by the desire of homeowners to maximise house prices is known as the “home-voter hypothesis”.

On October 24th the Institute for Government, a think-tank, released a study supporting this theory with data. It looked at English local planning authorities (LAs) between 2001 and 2011 and found that…