Al Zelicoff and Troy Simpson have their latest video up in a series the Albuquerque Journal is doing on stuff you can do to save energy and money. My favorite bit is the fact that Al fills up so rarely that he forgets which side of the car the gas tank is on. update: I …
Roger Pielke Jr., my favorite thrower of inconvenient hand grenades, wrote a provocative post this week about the linkage between malaria and global warming. Malaria, Jeffrey Sachs writes, causes poverty. (( The End of Poverty, p. 197)) It does this by reducing economic productivity, creating a vicious cycle in which people get sick, can’t work, …
I’ve been looking for a standard food price index comparable to the “barrel of oil” or the “gallon of gasoline” we’ve all come to know and love and, more importantly, intuitively grasp. The idea here is a number that’s standardized, readily available and easy to grasp. The Economist has its Food Price Index, but WTF …
Rich Sweeney goes beyond my casual “go read it” reference to the Economist article on renewables in Germany and actually explains its implications: Like a lot of things, economies of scale are more complex than the renewables lobby would have you believe (Joseph Romm makes the scale argument a lot, and recently Daniel Weiss made …
cycling: Been sick for a week, happy just to get on the bike for 40 minutes this morning. paper of the day: Barnes and Roy quantify the radiative forcing due to land use changes in the United States reading: Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty factoid of the day: The average resident of Chad uses …
Source: The Economist update: In response to Eli’s question regarding wind power in Denmark: Source: Renewable Energy Policy Network
Rich Sweeney wonders why you hear so damn much about gasoline prices rather than the cost of food: [W]hy is that I can’t turn on the news without hearing, invariably in very tragic terms, about soaring gasoline prices, yet there is almost no coverage of soaring food prices? The short answer is that the media …
My colleague Michael Coleman had an excellent piece in this morning’s paper laying out the stakes and contending factions in the fight over solar tax credits: Senate Republicans and Democrats, almost all of whom say they support extending the solar tax credit, haven’t been able to agree on how to pay for it. Most Democrats, …
More evidence that getting this whole climate mitigation thing right is going to be hard: Early analysis of data out today from the European Commission shows that emissions rose about 1.1% last year to 1.9 billion metric tons. That’s after similar increases in 2005 and 2006.
That’s all well and good, Marty, but stop squirming and tell us how much you’d price carbon at? That’s all we really care about: Weitzman hemmed and hawed and noted that the whole point of his paper was that there are these big uncertainties, and that previous attempts to calculate the socially optimal price on …