Climate Debate Daily

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Bike commuting in Amsterdam

One of the nice things about living in Amsterdam is that I can ride to work on my bike. Compared to the Scandinavians, the Dutch are not very safety conscious. You see many people ride in the dark without lights, and not even children wear helmets. Maybe I have a vivid imagination, but accidents do happen.

Winter is coming, and it will be dark soon on the way to and from work, so I have fitted out my bike with a set of the excellent Reelights (no batteries), and I am thinking about buying a somewhat naf looking Illuminite jacket, and maybe a pair of their gloves. It is worth it, I bike along the Amstel river, and through a beautiful, green area. It is a nice way to start the day.

From the Riviera to Rivierenbuurt

I have moved from the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Amstel River in Amsterdam. I am now in the land of windmills, canals, clogs, and parakeets.

Parakeets? There are flock of bright green Rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri) in Amsterdam. They are noisy birds, and the story goes that one owner got so fed up with his pet parakeets that he let them fly off. Since they came from the foothills of the Himalayas, they had no problem surviving and breeding in the Netherlands.

Will the parakeets compete for resources with the local bird populations? Probably not catastrophically. Owls and goshawks now feed on them, keeping their numbers down. But they are probably here to stay.

Review of Lomborg’s new book

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook reviews Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,

One man who was not rooting for Al Gore to win the Nobel Prize was Bjorn Lomborg. The smiling Dane is the anti-Gore. Unimpressed with An Inconvenient Truth , his new book challenges many of that film’s alarming statements about global warming. Mr Gore and his admirers are paying no attention, needless to say, and that is a pity.

Lomborg’s capacity to anger his opponents is limitless. Of course, he disagrees with them, an outrageous affront in itself. He says that the state of the environment is not dire. He also argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions should not be the world’s top priority, another scandalous provocation. He makes it worse by being pleasant and reasonable (not to mention Danish), turning up in T-shirt and jeans all the time, supporting his arguments with too many footnotes and acting in other ways designed to offend.

Best deal for a Master’s degree in Economics?

This has got to be one of the best deals around. I got this mail from the highly ranked Toulouse School of Economics,

Tuition fees for [the English language] Master’s degree amount around 300 Euros for one academic year. Social security (compulsory health insurance) for students amounts 200 Euros per academic year. For living expenses in Toulouse, you should count at least 500 Euros per month (survival) and more probably 700 to 800 Euros all included.

Best regards
Aude Schloesing

Toulouse School of Economics
Université Toulouse 1
Manufacture des Tabacs
31042 Toulouse Cedex (France)
tel: + 33 (0)5 61 12 87 65
fax: + 33 (0)5 61 12 86 37
tse@univ-tlse1.fr

From the Department of Self Promotion…

Here is an article on The Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace, The Innovator: Can Lars Christian Smith Take Protected Areas to Market?

Freeman Dyson on global warming

Freeman Dyson is usually worth reading. Here he is on global warning and other matters.

Summer reading: non-fiction books

Here are some recent non-fiction books, suitable for summer reading,

Peter L. Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving.

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Niall Ferguson reviews the book here.

Tyler Cowen, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.

Chris Dillow, The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism.

Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.

Are bonobos hippie chimps?

Probably not. Very good article in The New Yorker.

Most of our current knowledge comes from observing bonobos in captivity.

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?”

Prices, prices, prices

From BBC’s website,

The focus on reducing carbon emissions has blinded us to the real problem - unsustainable lifestyles, says Eamon O’Hara.[...]

We urgently need to think about the more fundamental concept of sustainability and how our lifestyles are threatening not only the environment, but developing countries and global peace and stability[...].

How many people are tired and weary of modern living? The endless cycle of earning and consumption can be exhausting and does not necessarily bring happiness and fulfillment. Can we do things differently, and better?

I don’t think an appeal to our better selves to change our lifestyles is going to work. And I certainly don’t want the government to tell me in detail what I can or can’t do.

What we need to do is to get the prices right. The enormous environmental problems in China and India show what happens if you don’t get prices for water, power, and pollution right. This is not at all simple and easy to do; rich OECD countries are also struggling to get to grips with it. But it is absolutely fundamental.

Evolutionary Dynamics

Nice to see an excellent science writer, Carl Zimmer, write about an excellent mathematical biologist, Martin Nowak, in an article in the New York Times (via The Loom).

Here is a non-technical lecture on evolutionary dynamics by Martin Nowak.

I also look forward to reading his most recent book, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life.

Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics was established by Harvard’s then President Larry Summers as a way of using the theory of evolution as a common foundation for biology and economics (I am not sure that he took the other social sciences seriously). Judging from the website, the program’s current mission is now somewhat less ambitious. 

Carbon offsets and waste, fraud, and corruption

On Maverecon, Willem Buiter writes a sensible post, Carbon Offsets: Open House for Waste, Fraud and Corruption,

Offsets, the creation of credits that can be added to the (national, regional or global) CO2E [carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions] quota under cap and trade schemes, require not only the (difficult) verification of how much CO2E is actually emitted in the real world, but also the impossible verification of how much CO2E would have been emitted in some counterfactual alternative universe. The quantity of offset credits earned by some activity is the net quantity of CO2E that has been saved as a result of this activity.

Just stating it makes one shout out: impossible! Fraud! Bribery! Corruption! Wasteful diversion of resources into pointless attempts at verification! And indeed this is what is happening before our eyes. Enterprises get paid for not cutting down trees and for installing filters and scrubbers they would have installed in any case. The new Verification of the Carbon Counterfactual industry is growing in leaps and bounds. The amounts of money involved are vast and the opportunities for graft, bribery and corruption limitless. The offset proposal has birthed a monster.

Who came up with this demented offset concept? It’s an attempt to placate the developing world for not having enough CO2E emitting activities historically to benefit from a significant free initial allocation of credits in proportion to a country’s historical track record of CO2E emissions[...]

- but read the post.

Best universities in economics

1	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	USA	5.75
2	Harvard U	USA	5.56
3	Yale U	USA	4.99
4	Princeton U	USA	4.76
5	U Chicago	USA	4.64
6	U Toulouse I (Sciences Sociales)	France	3.87
7	U California - Berkeley	USA	3.77
8	Northwestern U	USA	3.73
9	New York U (NYU)	USA	3.66
10	London School of Economics	UK	3.57
11	U Pennsylvania	USA	3.51
12	U California - San Diego	USA	3.25
13	U California - Los Angeles	USA	3.19
14	Stanford U	USA	3.12
15	Boston U	USA	3.08
16	U Wisconsin - Madison	USA	3.07
17	U Rochester	USA	3.03
18	U Texas - Austin	USA	3.01
19	Columbia U	USA	2.93
20	Brown U	USA	2.85

Source: Productivity ranking from econphd.net. The ranking is based on the average number of equivalent papers published by a department’s top 15 authors.

Economics in Toulouse is now taught (in English) in the Toulouse School of Economics, research takes place in the excellent Institut D’Economie Industrielle.

President Sarkozy on competition

France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, recently persuaded his fellow European leaders to drop the principle of “free and undistorted competition” from Article 3 of the old constitutional treaty. He asked, “Competition as an ideology, as a dogma: what has it done for Europe?”

He is right. Apart from making the Europeans prosperous, keeping prices low, businesses honest, encouraging innovation, and sweeping away incompetence, what has competition ever done for Europe?

The Paris School of Economics

Why start the new Paris School of Economics? Why not build up the already existing world-class Institut D’Economie Industrielle in Toulouse? (Here is an article about IDEI by David Warsh).

One possibility is that the IDEI is too free-market oriented for the French establishment. The French establishment, both on the left and on the right, is statist.

And of course there is a long French tradition of having the best of everything in Paris. A French academic who made it to one of the Paris institutes is not about to go into exile in the provinces. So if there is a large group of good economists in Paris, why not organize them into a school and gain critical mass?

There is now also a Toulouse School of Economics. It offers various programs, including a two year master’s degree program, taught in English.

Gorillas murdered

The BBC reports from Congo’s Virunga National Park,

Conservationists have expressed concern over the “senseless and tragic” killing of four mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The bodies of three females and one male were discovered by rangers earlier this week in the Virunga National Park.

Officials said the “executions” were not the work of poachers because they would have taken the bodies.[...]

Because poachers would have sold the bodies as food or trophies, conservationists think the apes were killed by a group that was trying to scare wardens out of the park.

Similar killings of mountain gorillas took place in Rwanda to get back at the late Dian Fossey, of Gorillas in the Mist fame. She was widely hated in the local community because of her outspoken racism and violence against local people. It makes one wonder if community relations in the Virunga National Park are as good as they should be. And do the benefits to the local population of Virunga National Park outweigh the opportunity costs of the park?

Update: National Geographic reports that “Virtually all the charcoal supplied to nearby Goma—worth an estimated U.S. $30 million a year—is made from wood harvested illegally inside Virunga National Park”.

Is nuclear green?

Here is an article by Jesse Ausubel, Renewable and nuclear heresies (pdf),

Abstract: Renewables are not green. To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square metre that each source could produce smashes these environmental idols. Nuclear energy is green.[...]

The article is discussed in New Scientist under the heading Renewable energy could ‘rape’ nature.

Dress for success

We have previous mentioned the current predicament of the Hadza. Here is an article in the Daily Mail, Face to face with Stone Age man: The Hadzabe tribe of Tanzania.

Ah, journalists. The Hadza don’t live in the Stone Age. “Hadzabe” is the feminine plural of “Hadza”; this usage is usually considered redundant in English, so we speak of the “Swahili”, not the “Waswahili”. The journalist writes,

I introduced myself and Naftal translated my words into clicks and whistles to an older Hadza called Gonga (Good Hunter in Swahili).

He smiled warmly, revealing surprisingly well-kept teeth.

The Hadza language, like many language in Southern Africa, use clicks as consonants, but no whistles.

There is a picture of the journalist in the article. He has surprising well-kept teeth for a British journalist.

What is interesting about the picture is that the young Hadza man is dressed up for the tourism business. Hadza men don’t usually use animal skins for clothing, and they certainly don’t use hoods. A hood makes no sense in the environment in which the Hadza live. There are photographs of the Hadza dating back to the 1930s, taken by Ludwig Kohl-Larsen, and there are later photographs taken by James Woodburn and others.

It is clear that increasing use of skins and also beads is a response to tourism. The Hadza are now on the tourism circuit. They put on their faux-traditional outfits for the benefit of tourists, and take them off when the tourists have left.

If that provides more income, why not? One danger is that government officials will find it embarrassing that there are people walking about in hides and skins, and will do little to help the Hadza with the biggest problem they face, loss of control and ownership of their lands.

Environment and economy in China

From Washington Monthly,

Like other cities in China, Beijing has a daily weather report and a daily pollution report. On the increasingly crowded freeways, drivers can see only so far ahead; each car leaves a wake in the smog. The dank air creeps inside buildings, into cars, into hotel rooms, leaving you nowhere to escape the distinct smell and the feeling of a weight always on your chest. The sun looks like a flashlight wrapped in cotton gauze, and the sky remains beige no matter the time of day. Most days, the city has no discernible skyline. Most nights, no moonlight or starlight pierces the darkness.

To understand why Chinese officials are genuinely concerned about the country’s growing environmental problems, you must first remember that they live here.

That is obviously true, and it is one good reason why we can be hopeful about China’s future efforts to curb pollution.

Another article in Business Week, entitled Broken China, is skeptical about the sustainability of the Chinese economic boom.

Huge underground lake found

The BBC reports that a huge underground lake has been found in Sudan’s Darfur region, which scientists believe “could help end the conflict in the arid region”.

Presumably it is non-renewable fossil water, like the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System.

Why this should help bring about peace, rather that provide another example of the natural resource curse, it not clear.

There is not much water in Dafur. The is no oil in Somalia. If the Chinese state oil company, CNOOC, succeeds in finding oil in Somalia, will that bring about peace in Somalia?

What happens to any system depends not only on the inputs to the system, but also on the state of the system. Just adding an input, be it water or oil, is no guarantee that peace will be the result. The scientists quoted by BBC seem to have an overly simplistic model in mind.