Between Estimates of the Emissions Income Elasticity

My paper Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve has been accepted for publication by Ecological Economics. I changed the title though to "Between estimates of the emissions income elasticity", which seems reasonable given that I don't reject a log-linear relation between (sulfur and carbon) emissions and income per capita. So I confirm the findings of Wagner (2008) and Vollebergh et

Martin Parkinson Gives the Sir Leslie Melville Lecture

This lecture was part of an annual series in memory of economist Leslie Melville who was the second vice-chancellor (=president) of the Australian National University. Parkinson, who has a PhD in economics from Princeton, made a point related to ">Ken Henry's recent comments. He said that there was limited engagement on climate change among Australian economists (with exceptions such as Ross

Top Environmental and Energy Economics Journals

Following on from my post on the 2009 Journal Citation Report I've extracted a list of energy and environmental journals. I've ranked them by "Article Influence Score":Article Influence Score is a recursive impact factor. It is derived from the Eigenfactor Score by scaling for the number of articles published by a journal and for the average number of citations received by all journal articles. A

Jotzo and Stern Paper to be Published at Energy Policy

Our paper: How Ambitious are China and India's Emissions Intensity Targets? has been accepted for publication at Energy Policy.

New Climate Change Economics Journal

A new journal published by World Scientific titled: Climate Change Economics has been launched. The aims and scope statement states:"Climate Change Economics (CCE) publishes theoretical and empirical papers devoted to analyses of mitigation, adaptation, impacts, and other issues related to the policy and management of greenhouse gases. CCE is specifically devoted to papers in economics although

2009 Journal Citation Report Released

ISI has released the 2009 edition of the Journal Citation Report. Ranking journals by the traditional two year impact factor:The first thing I notice is how impact factors have been increasing rapidly in recent years. At least the top journals are getting considerably more citations to their articles. Also, REEP, JEEM, and Ecological Economics are all in the top 20 journals by this measure. In a

IPCC AR5 WGIII Authors Announced

This won't get much attention in this country, today :), but the IPCC has formally announced the lead and coordinating lead authors for the IPCC 5th Assessment Report.

Long-Term Outcomes?

My initial thoughts on tonight's developments * in terms of long-term effects is that this could lead for a push for a republic with an executive president and/or longer government terms which give the prime minister more time to implement the government's policies and show that they are working before an election needs to be called. Both ideas have been floated before, of course, and the first

McKibbin on Henry

Following on from yesterday, Peter Martin has a post today where he interviews Warwick McKibbin. I mentioned McKibbin in my comments yesterday. I mostly agree with what McKibbin says in Peter Martin's post. What he doesn't mention and what shocked me the most, though, was that Henry's comments were an attack on academic freedom/freedom of speech from a government official. That is anti-democratic

Ken Henry Tells Economists to Get Behind Policy Proposals

And stop arguing in public reports Peter Martin. Would we argue that medical doctors who believe there are problems with some treatment should not speak out because it is better than no treatment at all and the medical profession should form a united front to the public? What is the proper role of academic economists in policy debates? Do you agree with Henry?

Chalmers Introduces Online Climate Model for Public Use

Christian Azar and Daniel Johansson, at the Division for Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers University of Technology, have built a simple climate model for online use, the Chalmers Climate Calculator. The model is an easy-to-use tool meant for anyone who wants to learn more about the climate problem. Journalists, students, policy makers, and international negotiators, along with everyone else,

Where is it Cheapest to Cut Carbon Emissions: Estimating Marginal Costs

This is the second part of a series on my new working paper on where it is cheapest to cut carbon emissions.In the previous post I assumed that all countries shared the same marginal cost of abatement curve. In reality this is not the case and in order to rank countries by marginal cost of abatement or total costs of meeting a given policy we need to estimate a cost curve for each country. The

Nature Feature on "Metrics"

This week's issue of Nature has a feature on citation metrics and their use. There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction with their use:I presume that most people think they are used too much and too indiscriminately. I wish that they were used more in economics in Australia. But as there is a lot of noise in the relationship between paper quality and the number of citations received,

Jerry Hausman on the RSPT

MIT economist Jerry Hausman has an article in The Australian today that includes a link to his full paper. As I suspected, real option analysis comes into play here.

Where is it Cheapest to Cut Carbon Emissions?

The answer to the question depends on what you mean by "cheap". In other words, how you measure cost.I have a new working paper coauthored with Ross Lambie that attempts to answer the question using the results of the GTEM modeling exercises carried out as part of the Australian Treasury review of climate change policy.Development of policy on the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions has in many

New Energy Blog

Cutler Cleveland, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Boston University has a new blog on energy issues: The Energy Watch. He is editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of the Earth, edited the Encyclopedia of Energy, and was editor of Ecological Economics for several years. He was also my PhD advisor :)

Is Too Much Research Being Published?

The authors of an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education certainly think so. The article seems to be behind the curve on what is happening:1. Here in Australia, for example, government financial incentives to universities used to favor quantity explicitly over quality but that has changed. Depending on the field either journal quality or number of citations will be the way things are

New EERH Research Reports

We've put up several more Environmental Economics Research Hub Research Reports on the web. #63 is coauthored by Ross Lambie and myself and I will be blogging soon more about that one. We've also corrected all the problems in our RePEc file so several older ones that were missing from RePEc are showing up properly now too.

How I Keep Up To Date on the Scientific Literature

I suppose that most academic's reading can be divided into two categories: Specific reading for projects you are working on; general background reading. Most people probably don't have enough time for the latter so it is important to maximize the value you get from the time applied. After finding a very useful paper yesterday, though I was disappointed to find that I had been "scooped" to some

ResearchGate

I just received an e-mail invitation to join ResearchGate. I'd never heard of this network before. In contrast to Academia.edu it seems to be organized more on disciplinary lines than institutional lines. I looked through some of the names of people who have registered under environmental economics and saw only one I knew. So it seems to be even less successful than Academia.edu so far at

Was There No Little Ice Age?

Morgan Kelly and Cormac O Grada have a new working paper titled: The Economic Impact of the Little Ice Age. But their main point seems to be that there wasn't much of a Little Ice Age at all. Rather there were some years with particularly bad weather in the middle of the last millennium. If temperatures are smoothed using moving averages these bad years will reduce the temperature of extensive

TV Ad Campaigns

Though both the government and the union movement are running TV ads for the RSPT, I've only seen the mining industry's anti-RSPT TV ad so far:Apparently, I'm not in the target demographic that either the government or the unions think they can influence. I'm amused how the guy says "if it goes ahead" and it sounds like he's talking about all that investment that's on hold rather than the

UCL Australia

University College London has opened a program in Australia in collaboration with oil and gas company Santos. They are offering interdisciplinary graduate certificate, graduate diploma, masters (2 years including a 9 month internship), and PhD programs. So far, they have 4 academic staff in Australia with the head of the program, Prof. Tony Owen, recruited from Curtin University of Technology (

Ben Smith on the RSPT

Ben Smith, who did some research in the past on resource rent taxes, has an article in today's Australian on the RSPT. He favors the pure "Brown tax".

Associate Director: Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices

The Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices at Portland State University is http://www.uvm.edu/~ikubisze/Associate Director hr_posting_csp_001.pdf">searching for an associate director. Bob Costanza has just been appointed as director of the center. If you are interested in the position, please follow the directions in the linked pdf.

Equations in Microsoft Word 2008

The equation editor in Microsoft Word 2004 was incompatible with the latest Macintosh operating system, rendering some symbols in equations incorrectly. So I "upgraded" to Word 2008. But now when I saved a document in the new .docx format all equations were converted to pictures. Some online research showed that the bug was due to interaction between footnotes and equations. I got around this bug

Changes to CRU Database

I recently wrote about the controversy regarding climate change and malaria. I've now applied a couple of different models to both the data we used in our 2002 Nature paper and data from the latest version of the CRU database. Our Nature paper used an older version of the CRU database. One of the models I used was the basic structural model also used by http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/05