Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. A shorter version appeared in Project Syndicate January 17th.
Category Archives: environment
Guest Contribution: “How Solar Energy Became Cheap”
Today, we’re fortunate to present a guest contribution written by Greg Nemet, Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. He has also been a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Global Energy Assessment.
Glenn Rudebusch on “Climate Change and the Federal Reserve”
It doesn’t get much more real than this, when the Fed has to take into account the implications of global climate change. Glenn D. Rudebusch, senior policy advisor and executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, lays out the issues in this letter.
Fourth National Climate Assessment
Despite the Trump Administration’s best attempts to bury this report, you should read it.
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Acres Burned to Date
Not a record year, yet.
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Stephen Moore: “When It Comes To Electric Power, Coal Is No. 1”
That’s a title of a July 28 piece in IBD. He writes:
According to the Energy Information Administration, which tracks energy use in production on a monthly basis, the single largest source of electric power for the first half of 2017 was…coal.
Acres Burned, through 29 December
Figure 1: Acres burned (blue, left scale) and total Federal firefighting expenditure in 2016 dollars (orange, right scale). 2017 observation is for acres burned through 29 December. Source: NIFC1, NFIC2, and author’s calculations.
But remember: “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”!!!
Wildfires: Acres Burned to Date
Not a record year yet, but still devastating. The upward trend in acres burned is shown below.
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“We’re Doing a Great Job” in Puerto Rico
I just saw the President re-state this point in a press conference with the Governor of Puerto Rico. He also just said (if I heard it right) that the Federal response deserves a “10” score. Here are some key graphs.
Wildfires: Acres Burned, Suppression Costs
I received this message from USDA yesterday; it reminded me of some other adjustment costs of climate change.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue today announced that wildland fire suppression costs for the fiscal year have exceeded $2 billion, making 2017 the most expensive year on record. Wildfires have ravaged states in the west, Pacific Northwest, and Northern Rockies regions of the United States this summer.
That’s just USDA; it doesn’t include Interior Department expenditures.