Region: International
Mexico as a Lead Pollution Haven
The New York Times has published a piece about the unintended consequences of U.S environmental regulation. The Times focuses on how U.S lead battery disposal regulation has contributed to our exporting dead batteries to Mexico. If Mexico has more lax disposal regulation and if more people live close to areas where dead batteries are …
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CONTINUE READINGAirpocalypse Now: China’s Tipping Point?
The recent run of air pollution in China, we now know, has been worse than the air quality in airport smoking lounges. At its worst, Beijing air quality has approached levels only seen in the US during wildfires. All of the comparisons to London, Los Angeles, and New York in the last century are beside …
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CONTINUE READINGA New Feast for Environmental Policy Wonks
The Winter 2013 issue of the always-invaluable Journal of Economic Perspectives is just out, and it is a treasure for environmental policy people. It features a symposium on tradeable pollution permits, with contributions from among others William Pizer and Robert Stavins. It not only reviews the history of tradeable permits in air pollution, but also …
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CONTINUE READINGLiterally Trashing the Environment
No, not another rap on Joe Biden. The world literally wastes an awful lot of food, notes the International Herald Tribune: Between 1.2 billion and 2 billion tons of the 4 billion tons of food produced around the world every year never gets eaten, according to a new survey by a group of British engineers. …
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CONTINUE READING5 Things You Need to Know About Africa
Africa is going to be an increasingly important area in the future, if only because a higher percentage of the human race will be living there. Here are some key things you should know about sub-Saharan Africa: Population growth. The African population will reach 1.2 billion by 2025, and 1.9 billion by 2050. Currently, 40% of the …
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CONTINUE READINGNapoleon Bonaparte, Zoning Administrator
This semester, I am teaching Land Use, and in the casebook I came across this evocative and meaningful quote from Tony Arnold: The real law of land use regulation exists mostly in zoning codes and regulatory procedures, as well as in the actions or decisions of local land use regulatory bodies. Consider all the zoning, …
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CONTINUE READINGShould Environmentalists Worry About Chuck Hagel?
Reports out today indicate that within the next few days, President Obama will appoint former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to succeed Leon Panetta as Defense Secretary. Even though Hagel himself is a Republican, the GOP has already promised a fight, ostensibly on the entirely specious grounds that Hagel is anti-Israel. Hagel…hmmm…where have environmentalists heard that …
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CONTINUE READINGJohn Kerry & Climate Change
Whatever else it might portend, Kerry’s appointment as Secretary of State is certainly good news environmentally. The New Republic put it well: Kerry, long an advocate for the U.S. to lead on climate change prevention, has compared the threat posed by poor international effort to confront climate change to that of war. In an August …
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CONTINUE READINGLastest IPCC assessment of future climate changes leaked in draft form
We knew the coming Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which I discussed briefly here, would make waves–just not this soon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produces these assessments every five to seven years. They are the most rigorous and prominent summaries of the science of climate change, crafted by leading scientists from many nations and used …
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CONTINUE READINGInternational Trade in Renewable Power Equipment
In the absence of global carbon pricing, how will the growing world economy decarbonize? We all hope that emissions per dollar of GNP will decline faster than GNP grows but how does this happen when explicit incentives to decarbonize aren’t embraced? The magic of international trade offers one possibility. In this recent …
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