Is Doing Environmental Economics Especially Depressing? We have now learned that on Aug. 27 last week Matin Weitzman hanged himself, leaving a note citing his failure to share in last year’s Nobel Prize as well as his apparently declining mental acuity. That prize he did not share included William Nordhaus as a recipient for his […]
Figure 1 Via mashable: Alaska’s exceptional summer continues. The most rapidly changing state in the U.S. has no sea ice within some 150 miles of its shores, according to high-resolution sea ice analysis from the National Weather Service. The big picture is clear: After an Arctic summer with well above-average temperatures, warmer seas, and a historic July heat wave, sea […]
The Hurricane/Picture of Dorian Gray: A Perfect Moral Storm in Three Texts Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The temporal aspect is particularly striking,’ writes philosopher Stephen Gardiner, who has done perhaps more than anyone to foreground it, in A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change: it catches us in a bind. Given that global warming […]
When remembered at all, Edward Abbey is mostly thought of as an environmentalist and anarchist but there is no gainsaying the racism and xenophobia on display in his 1983 essay, “Immigration and Liberal Taboos.” The opinion piece was originally solicited by the New York Times, which ultimately declined to publish it — or to pay […]
Climate Equity: What Is It? While action against climate change languishes, the rhetoric keeps getting more intense. For several years now it hasn’t been enough to demand climate policy; we need climate justice. We will not only eliminate fossil fuels in a decade or three, we will solve the problems of poverty and discrimination, and all in […]
Pledging Zero Carbon Emissions by 2030 or 2050: Does it Matter? We now have two responses to the climate emergency battling it out among House Democrats, the “aggressive” 2030 target for net zero emissions folded into the Green New Deal and a more “moderate” 2050 target for the same, just announced by a group of mainstream […]
Dan here. You will be reading more of him soon…David Zetland has contributed here on water issues via Aguanomics. He now publishes his blog The one-handed economist. He is a native Californian who moved to Amsterdam several years ago. David is an assistant professor of political economy at Leiden University College, a liberal arts school located […]
Via Evonomics, Steve Keen critiques Norhaus’s model for predicting economic damage per degree of average temperature rise….nerdy, and includes graphs and math, but worth a look. By Steve Keen This piece is part of a series from Steve Keen, Climate Change and the Nobel Prize in Economics: The Age of Rebellion. In the previous post, Keen noted […]
Juan Cole at Informed Comment has a post up by Will de Freitas Should we cover the Sahara Desert with Solar Panels to Fight Climate Disaster? A map of North Africa is shown, with a surprisingly small box somewhere in Libya or Algeria shaded in. An area of the Sahara this size, the caption will […]