Climate Change
Climate Change in the Second Inaugural
From the prepared text: We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Political Path to Federal Climate Legislation
For climate legislation to pass, U.S. politics will have to become more like California.
CONTINUE READINGTheda Skocpol on Federal Carbon Policy Design
Harvard’s Theda Skocpol provides a compelling narrative and analysis of why Waxman-Markey didn’t become law. In terms of my own empirical work, Kotchen and I document using Google Trends that interest in “global warming” fell in states with rising unemployment rates. Gurney, Zhou, Michael Cragg and I document that Conservative Representatives from high carbon and …
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CONTINUE READINGEarly Warning Signs
Change is (literally) in the air. For the U.S., last year broke heat records. “2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the …
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CONTINUE READINGSeaWorld Doesn’t Care THAT Much
As the father of an eight-year-old, I am painfully aware of the attractions of charismatic megafauna. Over the weekend, I took Rose to SeaWorld, pretty much the capital of charismatic megafauna, for an overnight with her YMCA youth group. We slept with the penguins, and saw lots of other — well, charismatic megafauna. The highlight …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Shape of Things to Come
The National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee has issued a draft of its next report on U.S. climate impacts. The draft will no doubt change as a result of the public comment period, but the broad outlines are likely to stay the same. Here are some of the key predictions: Higher temperatures. “U.S. temperatures …
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CONTINUE READINGDarwin and Climate Change Adaptation
The Stanford Press Office has released a blurb about new research examining what types of coral are most nimble in adapting to climate change. In the case of humans, it is self evident that more educated, higher income people and nations will have an easier time adapting to climate change. If we anticipate this …
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CONTINUE READINGUC Berkeley report demonstrates need for strict resource shuffling rules in cap-and-trade
The Energy Institute at Haas, part of UC Berkeley, has a new study that looks at California’s rules for regulating electricity importers in the cap-and-trade program. These rules attempt to keep importers from gaming the cap-and-trade system via resource shuffling. The Energy Institute has simulated different counterfactual cap-and-trade rules using 2007 electricity market data. The …
CONTINUE READINGMore About the Distributional Impacts of a Carbon Tax
I’ve posted before about the equity effects of pricing carbon. A new paper from Brookings provides further evidence on the subject. The main conclusions are that a carbon tax is indeed regressive, but the problem could be fixed by spending about 10% of the proceeds on social welfare programs. The authors find that the direct …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat More Does it Take to Get the U.S to Act on Climate Change?
One standard explanation for why the U.S. has failed to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is that it isn’t worth it for us economically. Conventional wisdom has held that we would experience fewer consequences from a warming planet and could adapt more easily to a changing climate than countries in the developing world. Reducing …
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