On the politics of the Keystone pipeline
This article from the New York Times a couple of days ago describes how President Obama, on a fundraising visit here in the Bay Area, made clear how difficult environmental politics are for a President in the midst of a recession – especially the Great Recession: Appearing at the home of an outspoken critic of the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama on Wednesday night told a group of high-dollar donors that the politics of the environment “are tough.” Mr. O...
CONTINUE READINGUS Food Aid Rules: If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention
The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it wants to change US food aid rules to allow for more "local procurement" of food aid in the countries that need it. Predictably, the special interests are aghast. But the administration is right: current food aid rules are among the most egregious special interest legislation in the world right now, preventing this country from stopping starvation, often helping it, wasting taxpayer money, increasing greenhouse gas ...
CONTINUE READINGWho’s Afraid of Environmental Regulations? (Not Small Businesses)
There has been a lot of chatter about the burden of regulations on small businesses. It turns out that small business owners do worry about regulations a lot -- but not so much environmental regulations. According to a new survey, what they really care about are licensing and tax regulations. Environmental regulations just don't matter much. The Thumbtack internet site provides services to small businesses and conducts a business climate poll with support from th...
CONTINUE READINGPoll Shows Vast Majority of Americans Favor Sea-Level Rise Adaptation. Now, Time to Start Planning.
Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions recently released the results of a survey finding that the majority of Americans favor proactive sea-level rise adaptation actions. According to the survey results (margin of error: +/- 4.9% at the 95 percent confidence level), 82 percent of the Americans surveyed said that people and organizations should prepare for the damage likely to be caused by sea level rise and storm...
CONTINUE READINGWhen streamlining environmental review really means undermining it
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has unanimously endorsed S 601, the Water Resources Development Act of 2013. Although it's nice to see some bipartisanship in the capitol -- S 601 is co-sponsored by Committee chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and ranking minority member David Vitter (R-LA) -- the bill as approved by the Committee would badly undermine environmental review of federally funded water projects under the guise of streamlining. Congress periodically...
CONTINUE READINGThe Case for Carbon Austerity
Many people are worried that a high national debt imposes a burden on future generations, though not all economists agree. But carbon emissions are also a burden on later generations -- the CO2 will stay in the atmosphere many decades to come, causing damaging climate change. If we're worried about burdens on later generations, is it better to use money to pay down the national debt or to reduce carbon emissions? The answer depends on how much it costs to reduce carb...
CONTINUE READINGMajor Progress on Climate Legislation
Well, I certainly didn't expect this one: Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) announced today that is reconsidering his long-held position that climate change represents "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." Oklahoma is currently suffering under the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, and thousands of farmers across the state have gone bankrupt. "The evidence is simply too overwhelming to reject," said Inhofe. "We talk a lot about protecting our gra...
CONTINUE READINGDomestic 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....
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