(With apologies to Mussorgsky.) Here’s the first:
Figure 1: MODIS/Terra image/Sky Truth, May 10, 2010.
Category Archives: environment
More on the Deepwater Horizon
From Peter Coy and Stanley Reed in Bloomberg:
Should the heaviest portion of the spill come ashore, it may cause damage rivaling the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, despoiling the breeding grounds of species in the fragile coastal-buffer zone that provides hurricane protection.
How much damage does the market think the oil spill has done?
Econbrowser is pleased to host this guest contribution from UCSD Ph.D. candidate Ben Fissel, who shares a quick estimate of the economic damage from the Gulf oil spill.
Where would we be without offshore oil?
As oil continues to pour into the Gulf of Mexico, I thought it might be helpful to review how we got where we are today.
What Are the Externalities of “Drill, Baby, Drill”?
From NYT, “Size of Spill in Gulf of Mexico Is Larger Than Thought”, the extent of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico:
The Global Surface Temperature Anomaly
Cash for clunkers
A victim of its own success?
Green jobs
One of our local papers did a better job of reporting this issue than I have seen from any of the big guys, in part because the reporter started with the question that I think everyone should be asking: what does it mean to create a green job? Here’s what I said:
If you have two people making the same amount of energy that one person used to make, would you want to describe that as creating one new job? I would say no, you’re significantly reducing productivity. Ultimately, creating jobs has to do with promoting productivity….
We might well make a decision that we want to be promoting economic growth in a way that’s more friendly toward the environment. That’s a fine decision to make, but I don’t think we ought to be doing it under the pretense we’re creating jobs for people.
Waxman-Markey and the Great Depression II?
“With the passage of Cap and Trade there is a good chance that unemployment will be worse than 1933 by the end of 2010.”
So writes an Econbrowser reader. Well, anything can happen, but that is not the outcome I predict. Nor the CBO, EPA, and other informed analysts.
Balancing California’s Energy Needs with its Environmental Goals
That was the topic of a talk by Stanford Professor Frank Wolak at the UCSD Economics Roundtable on Tuesday.