Domestic Manufacturing Worker Chemical Exposure and OSHA
We seek more manufacturing jobs in the United States and we want these jobs to be high paying and low risk. Is this "win-win" achievable? The NY Times has a long article about long term toxic exposure risk in North Carolina manufacturing plants. "A chemical she handled — known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB — is also used by tens of thousands of workers in auto body shops, dry cleaners and high-tech electronics manufacturing plants across the nation. Medical researc...
CONTINUE READINGThe Economic Approach to Handling Water Scarcity in New Mexico
The New York Times alerts its urban readers in the Northeast (including my Manhattan parents) about drought in the West and in particular in New Mexico. To an economist, its a pinch surprising that the vaunted Times doesn't mention the price of water in New Mexico. Being an adept user of the Internet, I spent 5 seconds searching and I found this valuable article about New Mexico water prices. If you scroll down to Table 1 on page 10, you will see that cities suc...
CONTINUE READINGWe Forgot The Horse!
It's been a while since we discussed Great Environmental Songs. But we missed an important one. In 1972, when I was seven, if your radio was not playing Don McLean's "American Pie," it was playing "Horse With No Name" by a new band called "America" -- a somewhat ironic name since the band was in fact from England. America was hardly a one-hit wonder, but that song is seared into my mind, especially its highly articulate refrain: "La-la-la la-la-la-la la-la-la LA-la....
CONTINUE READINGClear Views in the High Desert
If you are looking for a politically progressive city, Lancaster, California would not make it on your list. Located in the deeply conservative Antelope Valley of north Los Angeles County, it has attracted attention by, inter alia, 1) electing Pete Knight, one of the most vicious anti-gay politicians in the country, to a series of state legislative positions; 2) being sued by the NAACP for a pattern and practice of discriminating against Section 8 housing voucher reci...
CONTINUE READINGThe Demand for Temperate Climate and The Quality of Life Impacts Caused by Climate Change
Some good friends of mine have written an important paper on the economic costs of climate change with a focus on its impact on amenities and the "good life". In a nutshell, will San Francisco continue to be "San Francisco" as climate change plays out? What would we lose if it becomes Fresno? This is an academic paper written for other academic economists but I believe that a broad audience can skim the paper to get a better sense of how economists speak to ...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Adaptation and the Two Chinas (and the Two Brazils, and the Two Indias….)
The world used to be divided into developed countries and developing countries, but a third group has now taken the stage: emerging economies like China, India, and Brazil that are growing very rapidly but haven't yet attained developed country status. But development in these countries is uneven. In China, for example, there has been explosive economic growth in urban areas but the countryside still remains very poor. International climate law has long had the conc...
CONTINUE READINGIf It Quacks Like a Duck: Intermittent Renewables and the Grid
At an energy policy conference that I attended on campus recently, one of the speakers asked how many people in the audience were familiar with the Duck Chart. As someone who tries to stay on top of things in the energy world, I was surprised by how many people raised a hand to express familiarity with this thing I had never heard of. Fortunately, with the benefit of the Internet, I was staring at a duck-evoking image within a few minutes. It’s a bit of a Rorschach te...
CONTINUE READINGComparing U.S. Universities’ Environmental Programs
When the U.S. News rankings came out, naturally I looked first at the rankings for environmental law. But then I got curious about the rankings for other environmental fields. I had very little idea, for example, about how ecology departments were ranked. Of course, we all know about the issues with U.S. News's methodology. There were certainly great environmental law programs that didn't make their top-ten listing, and this is probably true in other fields. But...
CONTINUE READINGRemedial Education for Berkeley Law Faculty
Or at least for John Yoo, who argues: Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn't the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein's family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are unwilling to consider that remedy, aren't you conceding that on balance, the benefits of the war outweigh the costs? Uh, that would be no and no. This is first-year Tort Law. The point of ...
CONTINUE READINGCongress Increases Climate Research Funding!
...even if they didn't intend to. The Republican War on Science has morphed into a more general war on knowledge. As Dan has pointed out previously, the GOP has now declared war on social science funding, and particularly on political science. Last night, the Senate accepted the amendment of Senator Tom Coburn (R - Olduvai Gorge) forbidding the National Science Foundation from funding political science research. This provision, which will undoubtedly be accepted ...
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