Environmental Economics Archives

Project 21 Senior Fellow Deneen Moore has a letter in today's Wall Street Journal:

Regulate Gasoline, Create a Nightmare

In regard to the June 5 editorial-page commentary 'Tradeable Gasoline Rights' by Martin Feldstein: Mr. Feldstein believes that the government should be the arbitrator of individual liberty by allowing government authorities to design an economic scheme to regulate drivers' behavior and thereby control the amount of gasoline used in the nation each year.

Let's not be deceived -- tradeable gasoline rights is socialism cleverly disguised as a free-market mechanism. Why not suggest 'tradeable calorie rights' to address the obesity issue. The surgeon general can declare an ideal weight for American citizens and obese individuals can buy calorie rights from thin people.

Deneen Moore
Senior Fellow, Project 21
New York

Dr. Feldstein is a reputable fellow, to say the least, but his idea in this case sounds awful. Reminds me of World War II gasoline rationing. (Yes, I know we won that war.) I suspect an unintended consequence of Dr. Feldstein's idea, should it ever be implemented, would be to teach a generation of young people to hate the federal government ("sorry, junior, we can't go, Mommy used up her TGRs"). However, surrendering freedom to teach people to love freedom would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

P.S. Speaking of gas prices, my husband David has an op-ed out about this topic this week. Here's a link to it as it appeared in the Biloxi Sun Herald.

Project 21 Senior Fellow Deneen Moore has a letter in today's Wall Street Journal:

Regulate Gasoline, Create a Nightmare

In regard to the June 5 editorial-page commentary 'Tradeable Gasoline Rights' by Martin Feldstein: Mr. Feldstein believes that the government should be the arbitrator of individual liberty by allowing government authorities to design an economic scheme to regulate drivers' behavior and thereby control the amount of gasoline used in the nation each year.

Let's not be deceived -- tradeable gasoline rights is socialism cleverly disguised as a free-market mechanism. Why not suggest 'tradeable calorie rights' to address the obesity issue. The surgeon general can declare an ideal weight for American citizens and obese individuals can buy calorie rights from thin people.

Deneen Moore
Senior Fellow, Project 21
New York

Dr. Feldstein is a reputable fellow, to say the least, but his idea in this case sounds awful. Reminds me of World War II gasoline rationing. (Yes, I know we won that war.) I suspect an unintended consequence of Dr. Feldstein's idea, should it ever be implemented, would be to teach a generation of young people to hate the federal government ("sorry, junior, we can't go, Mommy used up her TGRs"). However, surrendering freedom to teach people to love freedom would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

P.S. Speaking of gas prices, my husband David has an op-ed out about this topic this week. Here's a link to it as it appeared in the Biloxi Sun Herald.

Writing in the Washington Post, Joel Schwartz of the American Enterprise Institute says:

...in the real world, the costs of air pollution control mean higher prices, lower wages and lower returns on investments, reducing the resources we have available for everything else that affects our health, safety and quality of life. If our air is already safe to breathe, then the EPA's never ending war on air pollution is costing us much and providing little in return.

But is our air already safe to breathe? Read the entire piece here to find out.

Here is a blog from down-under focusing on the intersection of economics and environmental policy.

Tim Haab discovers the cost of green gifts.

The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists is launching a new journal, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. As explained in the AERE newsletter (and posted on the Environmental Economics blog)

The editors will be Rob Stavins (Harvard), Carlos Carraro (Venice and FEEM), and Charles Kolstad (UC Santa Barbara) with Rob taking the lead. Our new journal seeks to fill a niche similar to the Journal of Economic Perspectives by publishing less technically oriented papers that will help advance the policy debate on key environmental and natural resource issues.

After publishing this uninformed critique of economic thinking in Sierra magazine, it seems that the Sierra Club lost Jason Scorse as a member. Scorse explains his decision here. I agree with many of his points, other than his suggesting that RFK Jr. understands anything about economics, for reasons I've explained here.

biologists or economists? John Whitehead makes the case for economists here. To add my own two cents: In my experience economists have an additional edge because they have a greater understanding of the incentives that drive over-exploitation of fish stocks. But the greatest conservationists of all are the fishermen them selves if -- and this is a mighty big if -- they have property rights that tie their economic well-being to the health of the resource and reward their stewardship. And the stronger the property rights, the stronger the conservation incentives. In New Zealand, for example, it's not uncommon for the fishermen themselves to push for lower catch limits than government biologists would authorize (something that reinforces Whitehead's point). Also, as I've chronicled at length here, where such arrangements are allowed, fishermen have powerful incentives to organize so as to reduce harvesting pressures on the fishery upon which they depend.

The folks over at Gristmill have been pondering why conservationists have not been more active in the fight against poverty (see also here). One thread in the discussion focuses on the extent to which good institutions are necessary for both environmental protection and economic development. The relationship between good institutions -- in particular transferable property rights and the rule of law -- and economic growth is clear, but what about conservation?

Available research suggests that conservationists should be as concerned with basic economic institutions as anti-poverty activists. Research by economist Seth Norton, for instance, has shown that economic freedom and the rule of law greatly improve both the economic and environmental conditions associated with poverty in developing nations.

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Here's nother new environmental economics blog: Environmental and Urban Economics.

For those interested in environmental economics -- a group that I suspect includes most regular readers of The Commons Blog -- I heartily recommend the (relatively) new Environmental Economics blog. Edited by Tim Haab and John Whitehead, contributors include Robert Stavins, Jason Shogren, and many other folks well worth a regular read.

This post by Chris Bruce comparing Soviet-style central planning with environmetal decision-making (the first of four planned posts on the subject) is of particular interest, and I look forward to reading his final take (and perhaps commenting on it as well). My take on the general subject -- where I argue that ecological central planning is no wiser than economic central planning and suggest principles upon which to base a true market alternative -- is available here.

In April the Economist repeated a story that is often told: how New York City preserved the quality of its water by choosing to invest in "natural capital" (wild habitat in upper-state New York) instead of building a multi-billion-dollar water filtration plant. This story got its start in the journal Nature in 1998. But Mark Sagoff blows the legend apart in "The Catskills Parable" in the June 2005 PERC Reports. New York City's water is fine, the city uses traditional means to keep it clean, and the city is not depending on wildlands to protect it.