Musings on Ecological vs. Environmental Economics

One way of distinguishing between environmental and ecological economics is that environmental economics has a focus on price while ecological economics has a focus on quantity. Environmental economics focuses on market failures as the main determinant of environmental problems. Seen in terms of externalities, the problem is incorrect prices and the solution is implementing the right prices. In

EPA Modifies the US Sulfur Trading Program

From Richard Woodward posting on ResEcon:"Some of you may have noticed in the news today mention of new regulations by the USEPA on SO2 and NOx emissions. The title of the articles could have been, "The SO2 trading program is dead. Long live the SO2 trading programs!"Since many of us use the SO2 program as the epitome of what a trading program should look like and teach about it in our classes,

Portland State University Report Reveals Uncertain Costs, Risks of Mekong River dams

(Portland, Ore.) July 7, 2011 – The ultimate price tag of building 11 hydropower dams on the lower Mekong River potentially far exceeds the benefits to the region, according to a report released today from Portland State University and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).View the full report and video presentation The study accounts for gains through power generation,

SNIP and SJR: Two New Journal Ranking Indicators from Elsevier

SNIP - Source Normalized Impact per Paper and SJR - are two new indicators provided by Elsevier based on the Scopus citation database. The indicators are available from the Journal Metrics website.SNIP takes into account citation practices in the field of interest. A journal's field is the journals citing that journal and the average length of reference lists in papers in that field are taken

If You Only Have 2 Hours to Teach Environmental Economics, What Would You Say?

All of us teaching Introductory Economics face this problem. This is what I'm going to say on Tuesday.

New Journal: Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy

Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy (EEEP), is a new journal published by the International Association for Energy Economics, focusing on policy issues involving energy and environmental economics. The first issue will be published in January 2012 and a call for papers has been issued. The editors are Jean-Michel Glachant (European University Institute in Florence, Italy), Paul L. Joskow (

Japan Nuclear Crisis

Even the Chinese government has suspended it's nuclear power construction program to learn more about what has gone wrong in Japan, but George Monbiot argues that this shouldn't stop us from pursuing nuclear power with certain safeguards. However, the facts are that large earthquakes are possible perhaps anywhere though their probability within any timeframe is lower away from plate boundaries.

Article on John List

Saw this article on John List linked at Marginal Revolution and decided to link from here too. List has contributed to both environmental and experimental economics and is famous among job candidates in economics for "publishing up" from his initial job at Central Florida U.

OCEAN-OIL

Boston University, Louisiana State University, and the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) have created a resource that will allow you to explore questions regarding the causes, magnitude and consequences of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, as well as to contribute your own expertise.The Online Clearinghouse for Education & Networking: Oil Interdisciplinary Learning (OCEAN-OIL)

Call for Papers

The Journal of Industrial Ecology has a call for papers on the topic of "Greening Growing Giants". Quoting from the call:"Questions relevant to this special issue include but are not limited to: What quantities of resources will be required globally in the near future, given the current dynamics of per capita resource use in developing countries? What role does the demand in industrial countries,

Recent Papers of Interest in Ecological Economics:

van den Bergh, J. C. J. M., Environment versus growth — A criticism of “degrowth” and a plea for “a-growth”, Ecological Economics.van den Bergh makes a much more extensive version of the main argument I made in my review of Tim Jackson's book Prosperity without Growth. There aren't policy levers that can directly stop growth and it might not be what is needed to solve environmental problems

EEN Symposium: 22-24 November

The EEN Symposium will take place between 22nd and 24th November at the Crawford School at ANU. The symposium will showcase the results of the research carried out by the Environmental Economics Research Hub as well as presentations of 14 invited papers from outside researchers. My presentation is at 1:30pm on Monday, 22nd November.Registration is free! You can find the full program here.

Strategic Behavior and the Environment

Another new journal in the environmental economics space. I've never heard of the publisher but the editor is Ariel Dinar (UC Riverside) and they have a bunch of well known people on the editorial board. It's not quite as star studded as the board of Climate Change Economics but still pretty impressive.

Suggest an Article for My Students

They'll only be my students for one guest lecture. They are students in a business masters who are taking an environmental economics class. The textbook for the class is undergrad level and a bit old (they cover the whole book in 3 weeks). I need an overview article about global trends in energy, pollution, climate change, biodiversity, the more the merrier over the last decade at least to

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

How Much Should an Online Product Cost?

Chris Guillebeau asks readers how much he should charge for his products. Could he have learned from the contingent valuation literature? :)

Legal Origin Strikes Again

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4817">van Ewijk and van Leuvensteijn have an article in VoxEU arguing for the EU to reduce taxes on residential mobility. What struck me was this chart:The highest transactions costs are in French legal origin countries, moderate costs are seen in German and Scandinavian legal origin countries and the UK has the lowest costs. Ireland is stuck in the middle of

Environmental Valuation and General Equilibrium

I'm not a fan of most approaches to non-market environmental valuation and one of my criticisms is that once all externalities would be internalized all market prices would change including in turn the valuations placed on the current non-market goods. Existing valuations of non-market environmental goods are partial equilibrium estimates which could be very misleading. I haven't always

Why do Real Economists (and Environmentalists) Hate Stated Preferences?

The only people who like them are some mainstream environmental economists who use stated preference methods, I think. I have a semi-coherent rant in the comments.

ANZSEE vs. AARES

I think that John Tisdell (now at U. Tasmania) and myself are the only two people who attended both the ANZSEE meeting in Darwin and the AARES meeting in Adelaide. There may be others. Sorry, if I forgot about or didn't notice you, but there is certainly not much overlap in participants. Similarly, we found that there was some overlap in topics covered and journals cited by ecological and