Last week, I wrote a piece for the newspaper (adwalled) about the difficulties faced by greenhouse reduction advocates in New Mexico in getting their Western Climate Initiative legislation moving: The difficulty in passing legislation here is mirrored in other states. Efforts in Montana, Arizona, Utah and Washington, which are also part of the Western Climate …
Continue reading ‘Is the Western Climate Initiative tanking?’ »
This paper, a study of the effect of the closure of the Cincinnati Post on elections, got a good ride in the metamedia blogosphere a few weeks back when it came out, but I just got around to reading it. Interesting stuff, and you can see why it was popular with we inkstained scribes: The …
Win Quigley on why it wasn’t really a black swan: [E]very morning my wife and I spend a half hour to an hour reading the newspaper before we walk our dogs. Every morning for many months, up until the real estate market collapse, Bonnie would read the real estate ads and ask the same questions: …
Climate scientists, apparently, are a dour, grumpy bunch, while economists have the cheerful demeanor of a plucky role model heading enthusiastically into the future.* This, at least, is the impression left by Jean-Marie Macabrey’s account** of last week’s Cophenhagen climate fest: At the congress, it seemed that all the scientists had to share with their …
Continue reading ‘The Difference Between Climate Scientists and Economists’ »
Clearing out some old piles of reading material, I ran across an old CBO report from a year ago on gasoline prices. It seems so long ago, my obsession with elasticities (short term and long) and the effect of rising energy prices on behavior large and small. Many drivers have responded to higher gasoline prices …
Frequently, when I’m driving to work, I see what I think is one of the clearest examples of an economic externality: big gravel trucks with lousy covers and a shower of greater or lesser extent of little bits of gravel flying off, threatening the windshields of all who would come near. On the mud flaps, …
Via Michael Campana, a remarkable graph:
It’s not just us: Japan, the world’s third-largest oil user, said gasoline sales in the country fell the most in more than half a century as record prices prompted motorists to drive less. Sales fell 4.2 percent in 2008 to 57.3 million kiloliters (15.1 billion gallons), the biggest drop since the trade ministry started collecting …
New data dump today from the St. Louis Fed includes this striking graph of unemployment in New Mexico (in blue, red is national numbers for comparison): We escaped the carnage for a while, anyway.
Michael Tobis models the lawnmower problem: If you have a typical American house, you have a typical lawn in front of it, a lawn that is in need of occasional trimming. Unless you contract out for lawn services, you almost certainly own a lawnmower too. Most likely it has a cheesy, loud, polluting little engine. You only …