Results for “pollution” 167 found
Lights On, Lights Off
You can learn a lot from satellite pictures of the earth at night; the famous picture of North and South Korea, which Tyler and I feature in Modern Principles, is just one such example.
ESRI has an interesting picture-story illustrating the lights that have turned on and those that have turned off between 2012 and 2016. It’s remarkable how much North India literally turns on in this short space of time. Lights have also turned off around the globe. Not only in places like Syria but also in much of the United States and Northern Europe. In the latter two cases, as the surprising result of more efficient lighting and campaigns to reduce light pollution. Check it out.
Is Dali, Yunnan the very best place in the world to visit right now?
It has just that right mix of exotic and comfort, and is mostly unfrequented by Western tourists. You can spend a day in the center of town and not see ten of them. Here are a few points:
1. Except for the rainy season, the weather is perfect pretty much every day, all year round. Unlike much of China, there is virtually no air pollution.
2. The town is set on a gorgeous lake, backed by lovely green mountains. Dali has about one million people, and so it feels very manageable. Yet it offers virtually every amenity and convenience.
3. Driving to the local villages around the lake is highly worthwhile. Track down the local ceremonies and rituals.
4. The town and the surrounding region is full of ethnic minority groups, most prominently the Bai. You can eat their food and buy their crafts. There are other minority groups too, including various kinds of Muslims. This is where Han Chinese and southeast Asian and Tibetan influences intersect.
5. The local cuisine features fish soups, cured ham, flowers, lotus root, and mushrooms mushrooms mushrooms. For breakfast, bread is served with honey. You can’t get these dishes anywhere else, not even in other parts of China, and yet none of this food is expensive.
6. You can stay at a luxurious five-star Hilton for $130 a night, or spend less and still do well.
7. The old town has crafts and curios and clothes shopping at very good prices.
8. The level of crime and other mishaps is extremely low.
For a good treatment of all of Yunnan, I recommend Jim Goodman, The Exploration of Yunnan. Here is Wikitravel on Dali.
When was the Golden Age of conservative intellectuals?
Paul Krugman says a mix of “never” and “certainly not now” (my paraphrases, not actual quotations from him). Here is one bit:
On environment, a similar turn took place a bit later. The use of markets and price incentives to fight pollution was, initially, a conservative idea condemned by some on the left. But liberals eventually took it on board — while cap-and-trade became a dirty word on the right. Crude slogans — government bad! — plus subservience to corporate interests trump analysis.
I believe this is pretty far from the reality, here are a few points:
1. Conservative intellectuals never have turned against the idea of a carbon tax, as evidenced by Greg Mankiw’s leadership of the Pigou Club. Cap-and-trade is somewhat less popular, but that is probably the correct point of view, given the time consistency problems with governments that increase the supply of permits, as has happened in Europe.
2. Water economics is a big part of environmental economics. “Raise the price” and “define property rights better” remain central ideas in that field, commanding a lot of attention. David Zetland is one recent exemplar of these ideas.
3. The idea that there can be too much environmental regulation in many particular cases remains a central contribution, often associated with the Right. Of course this view is compatible with much tougher restrictions on carbon or other forms of air pollution.
4. The idea of properly applying “value of life” analysis to regulation, and seeking greater consistency (let’s save lives in cheaper rather than more expensive ways), remains a significant and undervalued insight.
5. Some of the key work on valuing biodiversity has come from Chicago-related methods, though I do not know the political affiliations of the authors.
6. Matthew Kahn, one of the leading environmental economists today, I would consider broadly in the classical liberal tradition. He recently published an important book on air pollution in China.
6. Jonathan H. Adler is a significant ongoing contributor to environmental law and economics. Or try the work of Terry Anderson.
7. Applying property rights analysis to animal herds, animal ownership, and the tragedy of the commons remains a significant conservative idea. You will note throughout I don’t like calling these “conservative” ideas, they are simply good ideas or bad ideas. Still, in the broader sociological sense you hear these ideas from conservatives and libertarians fairly often.
8. There is plenty of recent work on the political economy of the administrative state, and whether it generates abuses of the rule of law or bad incentives.
9. I could go on, with perhaps Vernon Smith”s recent work on peak-load pricing for electric utilities being next in line. Or pro-green, pro-nuclear analysis often comes from the Right.
10. Overall, “schools of thought” have been dwindling in economics, and so it might seem that the golden ages of various ideologies or schools of thought lie well behind us. But if we focus on the ideas and their influence, rather than whether carriers of those ideas bear particular political labels, the influence of Chicago, UCLA, cost-benefit, and Montana/PERC ideas in environmental economics never has been stronger. In that sense the golden age is right now.
Addendum: Here is a better Krugman piece on the history of thought, though I would note that capital movements were integrated into the price-specie-flow mechanism in the 18th century and fully by the time of Henry Thornton.
What is the relevant uncertainty for climate change policy?
A number of people have climbed onto Twitter and outlined (correctly) how increased uncertainty about the impact of climate change increases the value of doing something about it. There is downside risk, and of course we wish to buy insurance against that in the form of a more active climate change policy. Still, that is not looking deeply enough. I see some of the relevant uncertainties as embodied in the following scenario, which is more about policy means than climate change science:
Following a Trump debacle, finally the Democrats win all branches of government and pass a climate change bill. There is a carbon tax, and further anti-coal measures, but it isn’t enough to shift energy regimes in a transformational sense (besides, truly transformational technologies require luck and “the right time” far more than price incentives). Instead the United States becomes more like Western Europe, with higher levels of conservation but no ground-breaking new energy source. Solar goes up by ten percentage points, and wind by two or three, given NIMBY opposition. Fracking becomes more efficient yet, which nudges fossil fuels back a bit onto center stage. Nuclear is closed down altogether, and hydroelectric also goes in reverse or stagnates. China is as China does, and they slowly move away from their installed coal base, in the meantime taking steps to control their particulate matter but not so much their carbon, copying America in this regard. India starts a shift from coal to natural gas but still has rising carbon emissions. Africa and Vietnam exceed growth expectations, with a lot of solar power to be sure, but not enough to counteract their growing industrialization. The carbon tax causes a mild recession in America, and environmentalism becomes less popular. The global boost in temperature continues, unchecked. The people who die each year from regular air pollution — six to seven million at last count — diminish in number with economic growth, but we react largely with indifference to that problem, because it doesn’t fit into domestic political struggles very neatly.
Now, to me something like that is the single most likely scenario, albeit with a lot of uncertainty. I am still happy to try remedial policy measures, and to try them now, if only out of non-complacency or perhaps just desperation. But come on, let’s be honest. If all you are doing is trying to combat uncertainty about the science, you are unwilling to look the actual problem square in the eye, just like the climate deniers, the very people you so much decry.
How to invest to fight global warming
Here is a query from a loyal MR reader:
If you had net assets in the six figures, and were very concerned about global warming (some combination of wanting a good life for your children, and believing human civilization is valuable over a time horizon longer than your lifetime), how would you invest those assets?
Some thoughts I’ve had:
Invest in renewable energy companies: Extremely hard industry to figure out where your money would have most value added. Not easy to invest in Tesla.
Invest in water utilities: a lot of the problems with water are regulatory rather than investment.
Buy a house in an urban center: NIMBYism means that this likely just crowds out someone else, with unclear impact on carbon reduction
Housing ETF: Might have more political impact than personal purchase but difficult industry to figure out.
Give money to politicians: Does money actually impact political results?
Buy a house with access to water and a lot of guns: Not an ideal solution
Quit your job and become an activist: seems to have been moderately effective in recent years.
What non-complacent answers am I missing? How would your answer change if someone had 5 figure assets? 7 figures? 8 figures?
My answer is pretty simple: invest in fighting indoor air pollution in developing nations. (Here are further research sources.) The burning of wood indoors, for instance, leads to pretty significant carbon emissions, as does the burning of charcoal, dung, and plant residue. These burnings are also harmful to human health, accounting for perhaps as many as four million (!) deaths last year, maybe more. Some of the problem is inadequate ventilation, but also safer and cleaner gas stoves, among other technologies, represent a better and environmentally friendlier option for many of these households. Pilot projects in India, Kenya, and China have shown positive results.
The nice thing about this target is that you can save lives even if global warming can’t really be stopped. And rather than (implicitly or explicitly) taxing poor people in poor countries, you are helping them out. The broad steps one wishes to take are consistent with these locales become wealthier rather than poorer regions. Here is a paper on indoor air pollution and carbon emissions in Nigeria.
That said, I do not know which are the best non-profits or commercial projects in these areas — could any of you help out in the comments?
Another option would be to continue to apply pressure to Indonesia to limit the burning of their forests: “Indonesia’s carbon emissions from the 2015 forest fires were bigger than the daily emissions rate of the whole European Union, a study reveals.” This would involve working through international organizations and perhaps NGOs in Indonesia itself, again your suggestions are welcome.
Moving to China and how to do it
I’m planning on…spending the summer in China before starting the program in Beijing in September…How much emphasis should I spend generally on language study vs. travel in China vs. reading in English about the country? For this summer, I was thinking of holing up in one city and finding tutors to do 10hrs/day of study, traveling around the country, or some combination of the two.Here’s how one blogger described what three months of intensive gave him: “My level of Chinese is sufficient to deal with most basic necessities of living, travel, make new friends and have interesting conversations entirely in Chinese. I can also read most of simple emails, menus and signs, although my reading still lags behind my speaking ability. I’m still not at a level where I could easily understand group conversations, movies, television or read books or newspapers.”Also, any cities in particular you’d like to spend three months in?What type/mix of books should I be reading over the next few months in the states to prep? Any particular titles come to mind?Ideas for Master theses in economics that would benefit from being in-country even with relatively limited language ability?
TC here: Tough questions! I would offer a few points:
1. You can’t study a foreign language for ten hours a day, as you need to intersperse more rewards to keep yourself motivated (like most things!). The best way to learn Chinese is how I learned German, namely through a romantic partner. That probably implies having a home base city for a big chunk of your time.
2. You need to ask how well you can handle air pollution, especially for the winter months. Overall, I prefer Western China, which also tends to be less polluted. Yunnan province is to me one of the very best visits in the world, and the environment there is downright pleasant, but everywhere I’ve gone in China was worth visiting. Of course Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are where much of the action is at, of those three I enjoy Beijing the most (by far) but would pick Shanghai to live, mostly because it has less air pollution.
3. It is hard to tackle China through books, and single titles don’t get you very far (but here are a few recommendations). Maybe start with John Keay for an overview, but finish up by reading it yet again. Along the way, pick a few particular pre-communist topics, such as the Taiping rebellion, the history of a part of the country, Christianity in China, the Great Divergence, or the Grand Canal (understudied!), rather than just pawing through dozens of basically similar books on “where China is at right now.” If I had to suggest one topic, maybe it would be “reading Chinese history through the lens of the state capacity idea,” as my colleague Mark Koyama has been working on.
4. The economic history of China is an area where economics research is making some very rapid advances from a pretty low base of knowledge.
5. Ask someone who has moved to China.
Food has replaced music as culturally central, at least for America’s professional class
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and here is part of the discussion of food:
Restaurants are increasingly an organizing and revitalizing force in our cities, and eating out has continued to rise as a means of socializing. America’s educated professional class may be out of touch with sports and tired of discussing the weather, and so trading information about new or favorite restaurants, or recipes and ingredients, has become one of the new all-purpose topics of conversation. Food is a relatively gender-neutral topic, and furthermore immigrant newcomers can be immediately proud of what they know and have eaten.
…Music made us get up and dance, or occasionally throw a rock. Food, especially if combined with wine, encourages a state of satiety and repose. Most conversation about food is studiously nonpolitical and removed from controversial social issues. There is a layer of left-wing critique of food corporations, genetic modification and food-associated pollution, but its impact on broader American culture has been marginal. These days, it could be said that food is the opiate of the educated classes. Anecdotally, I observe that the contemporary preoccupation with a particular kind of food fanciness and diversity has penetrated black communities less, and those are also the groups where music might in some cases remain politically important.
Otherwise, the contemporary food world grants diners the ability to cite a multicultural allegiance without controversy. One can mention a taste for Senegalese food, and win credibility for sophistication and worldliness, as well as knowledge of Africa. At the same time, one isn’t pinned down to having to defend any other specific feature of Senegalese culture. Maffa — usually a meat in peanut and tomato sauce — isn’t that controversial or revolutionary as a concept.
The current culinary touchstone is the foodie or TV host who “eats everything,” from pig snouts to worms to scorpions. Cannibalism aside, the list of what has been consumed on television is now so long it’s hard to shock viewers (not only do some insects taste like potato chips, but in some dining circles consuming potato chips is arguably the more rebellious act). The more prosaic truth, however, is that eating everything is not much of a revolution. If anything, historical resonance has been achieved by people who refused to eat certain foods, whether the underlying doctrine was vegetarianism, Jainism, Judaism or Islam.
There is much more of interest, including the take on music, at the link.
Initial Impressions: India and Mumbai
Stanley Pignal, the new Mumbai-based South Asia correspondent for The Economist, tweeted:
Having landed two hours ago, I’m upgrading myself from “India novice” to “India watcher”. Tomorrow “expert”, next week “veteran”
#journalism
With that in mind as also applying to me, here are some initial thoughts:
People in India drive on the wrong side of the road and I’m not talking about the fact that they drive on the left.
It’s easier to find a good Indian restaurant in Fairfax than in Bandra.
The quality of the intellectual class relative to GDP per capita is the highest of any country I know.
The quality of the intellectual class at the top is as high as Singapore but in Singapore the intellectual class runs the government.
You can take a 1-hour UBER ride for a $5, A taxi is even cheaper. A 10-minute auto-rickshaw drive is 50 cents.
Google FI worked right off the airplane. If you are coming to India for a week or two it’s great. Oddly, however, all of the Indian apps for food delivery, calling the Indian equivalent of UBER or paying with digital cash only accept an Indian telephone number so I am going to have to get a SIM card. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, getting a Sim card is a bureaucratic hassle although apparently it’s scheduled to get better.
English is fine for getting around. The surprise is the number of Indians who don’t speak English and yet have to operate in a world in which advertising, signage, operating instructions, and so forth are in English.
Netflix works!
Inequality as measured by a standard Gini index is actually lower in India than in the United States. As measured by what you can see, however, inequality is very high. It’s easy to step out of a Louis-Vuitton boutique and over a child sleeping in the street. Doesn’t appear to be causing a revolution, however.
Crime is low. Much lower than in the United States.
Pollution is high, much higher than in the United States, and at levels that do not seem optimal even give low GDP per capita.
In the developed world you go outside for fresh air. In India you go inside for fresh air. (Many homes and businesses have air purifiers with hepa air filters. I bought two.)
PM Modi wants to bring Elon Musk’s hyperloop technology to India. Delhi to Mumbai in an hour. Mumbai to downtown Mumbai in an hour and a half…on a good day. Start simple!
Retail, one of the largest sectors in many economies including India, is very inefficient. You have to go to a dozen small stores in different parts of town to get half of what you need. I was surprised to see a Walmart in Mumbai on Google maps. Great! I took an Uber. It was fake.
Parts of Mumbai are reminiscent of Havana–elegant buildings put up in earlier times including some art-deco buildings, that are now falling apart and even abandoned due to rent control and poor land use policy. At the same time, Mumbai looks like Miami with much new construction interwoven with the older decay. Capitalist shoots pushing out of socialist pavement.
Aleppo, and other tragedies
There were a number of deadly attacks yesterday (Berlin, Cairo, Jordan, Turkey (multiple)), while the Aleppo tragedy is continuing and a significant part of the world is mired in disaster every day. I sometimes feel bad that I do not post more about such topics, but often I do not have a fresh perspective to offer, nor do I find it cathartic to consume my own self-righteousness, quite the contrary. I also find it problematic to elevate the commonly-shared “tragedy of the day” above the less immediately publicized tragedies. UNICEF for instance claims that three million children die each year for reasons that can be traced back to malnutrition. WHO claims that seven million deaths each year can be attributed to air pollution. Maybe those are not the correct numbers, but you cannot talk them down to anywhere near zero.
Sometimes I feel there is a kind of impossibility theorem, suggesting there is no morally appropriate response to changes in the scope of widespread tragedies. It seems wrong to be happy that “fewer people than usual suffered and died today,” also wrong to let particular upward blips in death and suffering so fully capture one’s attention because of social framing, and all the more wrong to think changes in the numbers do not matter at all. And why is hardly anyone upset about Irkutsk?
This post is not the best I can do, but it is what I have done. The image is a depiction of a long-since-gone 16th century Aleppo, by Nasuh Al-Matrakî, via Rabih Alameddine.
*China’s Banking Transformation: The Untold Story*
By James Stent, I thought this was quite a special book. Most of all, it tries to explain how things actually work (it is sad how rare this is in books, outside the genre of angling tomes). Stent tries to give the reader a good sense of what kind of demotion a failing leader of a big bank might receive, how the 1998 failure of GITIC (Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corporation) shaped the thinking of Chinese leaders on bank resolution, how major bank board directors are chosen, how the percentage of non-performing loans is calculated within banks, how SME loan risk is dealt with, and how the regulators try to ensure safety (lots of liquidity), among many other matters.
It is perhaps no surprise that the author has been an independent director on the boards of two Chinese banks, and has four decades of banking experience in Asia.
It’s not a thrilling read for most people, but if you read books on China or international finance you’ll learn a great deal from this one. That said, I believe the author’s assessments are in general not sufficiently critical, noting that some recent events seem to bear out such a judgment.
You can buy it here. Also useful, for different reasons, is the new book The Economics of Air Pollution in China: Achieving Better and Cleaner Growth, by Ma Jun. It is funny (read: sad) how many people think the planet is at stake when it comes to climate change, and yet they will not deign to read a single book about air pollution in China. Should they not read all of them?
Does Trump spell climate doom?
The Niskanen Center says no, Vox says yes. Bailey and Bookbinder at Niskanen:
…while the Clean Power Plan is a dead letter for reasons explained below, every other such executive action will be litigated and delayed. The environmental NGOs’ law departments are getting back into their 2003-2006 mode even as we write this. Not only were the great majority of similar Bush agency actions overturned by the courts, but the current makeup of both the D.C. Circuit and the other federal appellate courts are significantly more favorable to environmental litigants than they were a decade ago.
…getting rid of the CPP is not going to have much of an effect on steadily-declining power sector emissions. As EPA has indicated, the CPP would have little real impact on emission paths in the early years, as low gas prices and state renewable mandates have done most of the work already. There is no sign either will change soon and technology (e.g. LED streetlights) is driving electricity demand reductions in ways that will probably continue.
Trump’s reputed interest in freeing-up permitting of energy infrastructure (e.g., gas pipelines and drilling on public lands, if indeed it can be achieved) may have the paradoxical effect of further reducing emissions. It could make it easier to get currently very cheap Marcellus / Utica gas into the center of the country and perhaps even increase overall natural gas output. This can have only one outcome; reduced national gas prices overall and less coal consumption.
Roberts and Plumer at Vox:
You can see a partial list of past House Republican bills here. In 2013, they proposed cutting EPA funding by fully one-third. GOP committees churned out bill after bill to cut research funding for renewable energy by 50 percent, block rules on coal pollution, block rules on oil spills, block rules on pesticide spraying, accelerate oil and gas drilling permits on public land, prohibit funding for creation or expansion of wildlife refuges, cut funding for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program, and … well, there are 61 items on the list.
The Senate GOP isn’t far behind: In 2015, they floated a bill to cut the EPA’s budget by 9 percent and block rules on everything from ground-level ozone pollution to climate change. There may be a few more moderate GOP senators who think global warming is a problem, like Susan Collins (R-ME). But they do not dominate the caucus: Fossil-fuel enthusiasts like Mitch McConnell and James Inhofe do.
There’s no indication that Trump will buck his party on these issues.
Overall I am more persuaded by the Niskanen analysis, but both pieces are worth reading. Here is my earlier post on the same issues.
Don’t Take a Test on a Hot Polluted Day
Taking a test on a hot and polluted day can result in a measurably lower score which, if the test is for something like a university entrance exam, can have permanent consequences. I find both of these results hard to believe which doesn’t necessarily mean that they shouldn’t be believed.
Heat Stress and Human Capital Production by Jisung Park
How does temperature affect the human capital production process? Evidence from 4.6 million New York City high school exit exams suggests that heat stress on exam days reduces test scores and educational attainment by economically significant magnitudes, and that cumulative heat exposure during the school-year prior may affect the rate of learning. Taking an exam on a 90°F day relative to a 72°F day leads to a 0.19 standard deviation reduction in exam performance, equivalent to a quarter of the Black-White achievement gap, and a 12.3% higher likelihood of failing an exam. Teachers clearly try to offset the impacts of exam day heat stress by selectively boosting grades just below passing thresholds, while existing air conditioning seems to have a limited protective effect. These findings may have implications for estimating the social cost of carbon, for designing education policy, and for understanding of climate in explaining income gaps across individuals and nations.
The Long-Run Economic Consequences of High-Stakes Examinations: Evidence from Transitory Variation in Pollution by Avraham Ebenstein, Victor Lavy and Sefi Roth.
Cognitive performance during high-stakes exams can be affected by random disturbances that, even if transitory, may have permanent consequences. We evaluate this hypothesis among Israeli students who took a series of matriculation exams between 2000 and 2002. Exploiting variation across the same student taking multiple exams, we find that transitory PM2.5 exposure is associated with a significant decline in student performance. We then examine these students in 2010 and find that PM2.5 exposure during exams is negatively associated with postsecondary educational attainment and earnings. The results highlight how reliance on noisy signals of student quality can lead to allocative inefficiency.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Missing moods. And apolitical reasons to hate politics.
2. No boo necklace markets in everything. Avoid those monsters.
3. The Jewish-American accent. And Donald Trump’s linguistic style.
4. Alan Turing’s computer-generated music has been restored.
5. “A boom in electric cars means Europe would have to look at building the equivalent of nearly 50 power stations the size of the UK’s planned Hinkley Point nuclear plant, EU experts have warned. And if big fleets of plug-in cars are charged with electricity from power plants burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, overall levels of sulphur dioxide air pollution are likely to rise, a study from the government-funded European Environment Agency shows.” FT link here.
Environmental lawsuits and the vengeance donors
There are so, so many environmental lawsuits, often brought by non-profits backed by philanthropists. These institutions, among other things, target polluting corporations and bring lawsuits against them for purposes of constructing a deterrent against yet more pollution. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace would be two examples, and of course a big chunk of the funds comes from the relatively wealthy. How is this for one example of many?:
On 7 October, Greenpeace filed a lawsuit in Superior Court for the District of Columbia against Dow Chemical, Sasol North America (owned by the South African State Oil Company), two public relations firms – Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum – and four individuals.
On top of that, it is easy enough to be an anonymous donor to these groups, and to stay anonymous. That said, I have heard tales — apocryphal perhaps — of donors who gave to environmental causes because they too earlier in their lives had suffered under the adverse effects of pollution. In back room whispers they are sometimes called “vengeance donors,” and it is suggested that because of the vengeance donors soon enough all companies will go out of business or at the very least be at the mercy of the whims of the wealthy.
Now, to be sure, many of these environmental lawsuits are excessive, or unfair, or would fail both a rights and cost-benefit test and we should condemn them, as indeed you see happening with equal frequency on the Left and on the Right. Many companies have gone out of business because of environmental lawsuits or the threat thereof, or perhaps the companies never got started in the first place because they couldn’t afford large enough legal departments. I can safely say that just about everyone sees the problem here.
But we shouldn’t condemn the good lawsuits, right? Right? Or is this whole philanthropic lawsuits business simply out of control and needs to be stopped altogether?
And oh, that Greenpeace lawsuit I linked to above? It actually wasn’t about environmental pollution at all, at least not directly. It was because Greenpeace felt it was under secretive and privacy-intruding surveillance. You should have seen my Twitter feed light up when the vengeance donors let on their role in that one.
Qingdao notes
There are early twentieth century German colonial buildings, some lovely water promenades, and less air pollution than in perhaps any other major Chinese city. Here is the urban plan. The best dishes are the clams, the snails, and the seaweed salads. The cucumbers are an order of magnitude better than what I am used to, and the city’s status as a beer capital comes from the earlier German occupation.
In two days of going around, I did not see a single Westerner. It is sometimes considered China’s most livable city, here is Qingdao on Wikipedia.