Ride-sharing increased accidents by 2-3%/ year

Wow, big numbers from this study showing $5-13 billion damage per year. "Our estimates, moreover, do not include the costs imposed by non-fatal accidents, for which data is not readily available." Yikes.

At least it's not all the fault of Pokemon Go!

Climate change, travel & meat

Interesting article on making decisions that affect climate change. While they are working hard to make the article accessible, talking about daily decisions, they make some mention of the bigger picture, which I appreciate. See what you think.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181102-what-can-i-do-about-climate-change

Florence and the Meat Machine

Some pretty devastating pictures in today's Washington Post, showing the damage done by animal feeding operations. Cesspools of hog waste, flooding the environment for miles, washing down rivers; that's pretty much as bad as the coal ash reservoirs, breached by the flood, sending accumulated heavy metals downstream. It's going to take a very long time to clean up after this, and remember: North Carolina's gerrymandered legislature has been given the legal OK to continue to organize its voting along racial lines, ensuring that racists and anti-environmental groups still hold sway. Appalling.

Growing pains in Asia

Asia is growing- news flash, right? This article calls attention to the need for production of more meat, whether seafood or land-based.

This article talks about the health consequences of air pollution, and particularly damages that are accruing to intelligence. Crap in the air, it turns out, actually has major consequences for developing brains, with pollution being associated with a penalty of up a year of education.

Finally, another problem associated with climate change is getting worse in India. Climate change changes plant growth patterns in a way that leads to plants having reduced nutritional content. That's bad news for the 1 billion-plus people trying to stay alive on the subcontinent. :(

Uber-uber post

A few of my posts over the past few months have had to do with Uber & Lyft, and I thought I'd keep all of this information in one place before adding an update.

Posts from March and April talks about how ridesharing has increased the numbers of miles driven and the numbers of trips taken in New York and Washington. The reason for this is that the services are subsidizing driving: more miles get driven when the cost of paying for vehicle use is lower.

The update, from the Washington Post's Faiz Siddiqui in July, shows that the numbers are staggering: 5.7 billion miles added in nine major urban areas. If public transit is working efficiently, vehicle miles spent in transit will be reduced, but use of transit goes up by about 2.6 miles per mile avoided. Commentators argue that households are buying fewer cars, but if the overall impact is to put cars on the road, that's a problem. A recent study finds that even automonous cars will increase traffic, since it may be cheaper to drive than to park! There may be a lot of traffic in our future.

Clearly ride-sharing is providing a convenient service, and it doesn't take too many months of renovations in the Metro system to be glad that we have ride-sharing systems. The important thing is to be aware of the full costs of the system, including time in traffic and taxes being paid by Uber and Lyft. As always, we economists are most interested in getting the best system for the costs!

Energy from a battery

While battery technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade or two, this article about a giant battery sort of inside the earth is interesting to think about. The idea is simple: when there's extra flow coming out of a dam, the flow can be literally recycled back up above the turbines, saving the flow for when more charge is needed. There are some reservations about reusing the flow this way, particularly for those benefiting from downstream flow into nearby lakes, but the environmental savings are significant.

Energy and land: bang for your buck

The last few posts have been about meat: how to get the most product at the lowest cost, where "cost" includes damage to the environment as well as producer costs. This article asks the same question: how to get the most product with the lowest costs, but this time the focus is on land. When we take a rock out of the ground and use that to drive our cars or even power our phones, that's a neat trick: hopefully it results in a small footprint environmentally while packing a wallop energy-wise. Of course, we need to be aware of the full set of costs of climate change, but one such cost is land.

This article by Joseph Kiesecker in the Nature Conservancy magazine is about the footprint of energy sources such as wind and solar. The land use costs are pretty high at the moment, though we can limit the damage by repurposing land on sites such as mines and waste pits. Still, keeping the same ideas in mind- getting the most energy at the lowest cost, while thinking of as many costs as possible- is a tried and true recipe for identifying different sides of important and difficult problems. There's always plenty to think about!

Ooo, post script: here is another example of the rising footprint of renewable energy sources. This article by Sarah Gilman for the Atlantic is about an endangered sea bird from northern Chile, where researchers have managed to track it a fascinating habitat underground.

More on food

Dr. Boehm at the University of Connecticut writes that the diet of the average household creates as much greenhouse gas emissions every week as would a drive from DC to Trenton, NJ. The main culprit? Meat and dairy, as the last blog noted, but that's not all. Refrigerated trucks that transport melons and other vegetables also contribute a lot of CO2 (or CO2 equivalent) to the atmosphere.

The news article summary of the scholarly work kind of goes off the rails there, and I'm not going to follow it: something about thinking about how processed your food is, though sometimes that's important and other times not. Bottom line: minimize meats and dairy, as we've noted before, but also watch out for things transported cold!

Meat & climate change

The Guardian writes about the environmental impact of a variety of sources of protein, finding that peas are the least costly option environmentally speaking, while beef- particularly in deforested areas- is the most expensive variety. Note that poultry and fish are remarkably similar in costs, as we discussed a few weeks ago. Also, the article says that cattle eating natural pastures are the low end of the graph here, which is a heck of a lot better than the high end. Still, even the best beef is worse than any pork, poultry, fish, eggs, or plant sources....

Antibiotics & Meat

Although the FDA banned the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animals, growers are still allowed to administer the drugs prophylactically- before any animals are sick. This means that growers are still essentially free to use as much antibiotic as they like on their animals, which helps the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Another possible harm is that exposure to the antibiotics that remain in the meat might affect the bacteria normally resident in our bodies. While this is still somewhat speculative, it's worth looking into....

Marijuana: A Fair and Balanced Look

Yes, I know the phrase has lost its appeal (if you are old enough to remember when Fox News used it as its motto) but this is a really nice article. The author is in favor of marijuana legalization but as a doctor she is also aware of its negative effects, particularly on the teenage brain. Worth a look.

A solar panel on every roof

Have you heard about California's new law that requires homebuilders to put solar panels on every new home they build?

An economist at UC Berkeley's Energy Institute wrote a two paragraph letter to his representative in the California legislature. Basically, he's opposed to the idea: there are many more cost effective ways to fight climate change than this one, so why stick homeowners with a bill like this?

"Sea greens"- the tasty new eco-alternative

What creates jobs, fights climate change, and helps people eat better? The new ocean farming industry raises "sugar kelp," mussels, scallops, and oysters all on the same plot of ocean. The farmer featured in the 60 Minutes short is completely sold out, with his produce going to high class institutions and eateries. And while chefs experiment with using "sea greens" instead of traditional greens like spinach, scientists continue to investigate how underwater forests can help clean the water just as forests above ground help clean the air. Coming soon to a Whole Foods near you!?

Uber and Lyft in the Nation's Capital

A few weeks ago I shared the New York Times' take on ride-sharing services, and today I've come across the Washington Post's take. There are a few facts I found interesting: first, as noted in the NYT piece, the services do seem to add trips: there is less use of Metro than there used to be, and increasing tax revenue from the services shows more trips there. Importantly, the increase in trips is more than the decrease in Metro riders, so there are just more vehicles on the street than there used to be. Second, though, this tax revenue can be an important part of paying for Metro and other public transit: right now taxes are at just 1% of the cost of a trip, and putting them up to even 5% ($1 on a $20 Uber trip) would make a large dent in the budget shortfall facing Metro.

Impacts of climate change

A few papers recently published in the journal Nature are raising awareness of a potentially devastating impact of climate change. The slowing of ocean currents could lead to big temperature changes around the world... and a devastation of world fisheries. That would be bad. This short post sums up that research: hat tip to Prof. Sarah Jacobson at Williams College for pointing it out.

The price of pollution

More great work by one of my heroes, Princeton's Janet Currie. In this latest piece she and her coauthors were able to deduce the effect of a congestion pricing scheme on asthma among local children. It turns out that if you make people pay the costs of what they are doing (i.e. contributing to traffic and making pollution) then they will do it less, and things will move in the right direction. Who knew?

A recent followup (May '19) asks what such a policy might mean for Baltimore. This on the heels of a policy getting the green light in NYC. Food for thought!

Uber increases traffic

Pretty biting editorial in the NYT about Uber: Steven Hill contends that Uber's model, which involves subsidizing rides in order to undercut competition not just from Lyft but from public transit, has hurt the environment and created excess traffic. Earlier studies I'd seen said had ambivalent conclusions, in part because Uber might be substituting for private vehicles, which would be good since private vehicles take up extra space as they search for parking. However, Hill cites studies saying, "ridesharing has resulted in a significant rise in the number of trips made and miles driven in an auto." Take a look at the article for four very on-point suggestions about how to limit Uber's impact on the roads.

Building roads has no effect on traffic

So says this insightful article in Wired, summing up research by Turner & Duranton. If a city builds more roads, people travel more, and you quickly end up in the same situation that you started with. How do you make things better? Even amateur economists might remember a theme on this blog: PRICES! If the roads are free and gas is cheap, people will take advantage of that. If you pay to drive at peak times or pay to park at peak hours, people might think twice about adding themselves to traffic. A few policy recommendations are in the article too... take a look!

Human rights and fishing

A few years ago some great reporting identified a series of human rights abuses on fishing boats in southeast Asia. This recent followup found that conditions have improved somewhat, though there is still a long way to go....

Job-killing regulations

A report from the nonpartisan Office of Management and Budget just released a report showing how EPA and other protective regulations save taxpayers money. I suppose what's surprising about that is that the report came out just the other day, under the Trump administration. And yet I'm pretty sure that this won't keep them from continuing to come under attack....

Down with quotas

Economists hail the ITQ- individual transferable quota- as a success story, limiting catch to protect a fishery while also improving safety. What economists are blind to is the distributional impacts.

Economists argue that free trade is a great thing, improving the "size of the pie" rather than just moving money from one person's hand to another. Although economists acknowledge that trade always has winners and losers, our mantra has always been, "If the winners compensate the losers, then everyone can end up better off." That may be true, but how often do the winners compensate the losers?

The same idea is happening in fisheries. As more and more ITQs fall into the same hands- and, importantly, in most cases these aren't the hands of the people doing the fishing- some negative consequences emerge. I don't want to spoil it for you: take a look at the complaints of the fishers in this article. Hat tip to Ngaio Hotte, @nhotte, a great Twitter follow for Resource Econ issues.

Minimizing meat

Those who've taken my class may remember talking a bit about the impacts of meat on the environment. Cutting down meat consumption even a little can have a big impact, as described in this article. They advocate the "mixed burger," a hamburger that's not 100% meat but is mostly meat mixed with mushrooms. That sounds pretty tasty as well as more eco-conscious than the pure stuff!

Update June 2019: Science magazine is chiming in, arguing that eating less meat is a great step toward decreasing our footprint: "Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change."

Cheaper food to help the poor? Think again

One of the few places where the Cato Institute and I agree! Cheaper food creates problems with obesity. Cheaper fuel exacerbates problems with pollution. Some great paragraphs from the Economist:

Whereas greener countries slap hefty taxes on petrol and diesel, Egypt does the opposite. Motorists pay only 59% of what it costs to fill their cars. Since driving is cheap, more people do it, aggravating congestion and making urban air eye-wateringly foul. The World Bank estimates that traffic jams in Cairo alone cost Egypt 3.6% of GDP. Egyptian cities are the fifth dirtiest in the world, says the World Health Organisation. And since the truly poor cannot afford cars, most petrol subsidies are captured by the better-off. The top 20% of urbanites receive eight times as much as the bottom fifth.

Similarly, bread subsidies are a waste of dough. Egyptians buy up to five loaves a day for a tenth of their cost. The state also subsidises sugar, cooking oil and other calorific staples. This is one reason why Egypt has one of the world’s highest rates of adult obesity. And despite the introduction of smart cards to limit how much subsidised food an individual can take, the subsidies are often stolen.

[I]if all food and energy subsidies were stopped and half of the savings used to pay for cash transfers to the poorest 60% of households, each of those households would receive $622 a year, more than doubling incomes for the bottom 25%.

Eat Mor Chikn

I never would have guessed that I'd be quoting Chick-Fil-A- I've never been there and most likely never will go- but their ads kind of sum up some recent research (and the publication it's based on). Popular wisdom had long held that fish are the most efficient type of animal to raise. For one thing, unlike large animals such as cows and pigs, fish don't have a lot of bones: a larger share of their body mass is muscle, so a larger share of food you give a fish to make it grow turns into meat. However, this paper argues that chicken is more efficient than shrimp or fish aquaculture at turning feed into meat. One reason is that the stuff we give fish has to already be more nutritious: cattle turn grass, for example, into meat, and grass doesn't have a lot of protein in it. On the other hand basically what we feed fish and shrimp is other fish. That makes the whole process less efficient.

Note that no one is measuring any of the externalities of the production process or anything else so this is far from a final word, but it's definitely an important contribution. Feeding fish to fish never seemed like a good idea, but now there's evidence backing it up!

Junk food

Moving from direct environmental issues to the one-step-removed topic of food, I'm fascinated by this article on junk food from Vox. Did you know that 75% of adolescents in the US get more than half of their calories from junk food?! Even though that taxing something bad like junk food seems like a good idea, David Just, who graduated from the same program I did, and Marc Bellemare, a co-author of Towson's Seth Gitter, have some interesting thoughts on problems with the junk food tax. They point to the political problems associated with getting a tax passed and the American addiction to convenience as obstacles. Also, our current food system would need to do better at producing more, cheaper food that isn't as bad for you.

Lots of complicated factors!

Dorchester County: Rising Chesapeake Tides

Gorgeous short 15 minute movie that also packs a wallop of a message. Times are really changing for the eastern shore: if we don't act, tens of billions of dollars of real estate will be under water this century. Take a look at the beautiful photography they use to tell the story....

Quiz time!

How much do you know about how land is used worldwide?

Put numbers in each of the following boxes. The total should add up to 100%.

Cropland:   %
Livestock, including pastures plus land used to grow feed crops:  %
Forests:  %
Shrub land (small woody vegetation):  %
Barren land (deserts):  %
Glaciers:   %
Freshwater:  %
Built area (cities):  %

Answers here.

No cars for you

The good news in American car manufacturing is that many manufacturers are jumping into the electric sector. Unfortunately, there's bad news too: they're basically abandoning the car sector for the SUV market. For a long time the latter have been more profitable, and with low gas prices likely to stick around for awhile, consumer trends are likely to stay with the more bulky vehicles. Sure, Honda and Toyota will continue to crank out their crowd-pleasing Accords and Camrys, but US producers seem likely to back out of the market soon.

Cape town: the city without water

Capetown, South Africa averages about 31 inches of rainfall per year, not that far from Baltimore's 42 inches per year, but a severe drought and recent city expansion is bringing a real crisis to the fore. The city is literally about to run out of water: their supply is currently set to expire on April 22nd. How will they respond? Well, by raising the price of water. Since charging people for an essential good can be seen as evil, the price will be paid in time: people will have to go stand in line with buckets or whatever to get their daily ration of water.

Fortunately it's not that bad yet, but this is looking like another low year for rainfall on the US West Coast as well. Many places are at very low percentiles for the amount of water that has fallen so far this "Water year" (October-September), including central California where percentiles are in the single digits. As I recall, last year wasn't bad, bringing to end a 5 year drought, but one good year doesn't solve every problem....

1/24 UPDATE: more information from Nature. The day they run out of water- Day Zero- has moved closer, to April 12th. Impacts range from a devastating loss of agriculture to an inability to host tourists to an inability to do medical studies because the staff needed to do the work will be forced to spend hours in line waiting to get their daily ration of water. As one scientist quoted in the article says, "This is very, very serious."

Solar is booming

Solar is expanding rapidly around the world....  (Never understood why that song didn't catch on more- juvenile lyrics, cultural appropriation, catchy beat- what else does a pop song need?)

This article, mostly about why a certain governmental report isn't done very well, tells about how fast solar is expanding. The end of coal is upon us!

China doesn't want your trash

While that sounds silly, it's actually a real problem. We used to ship large amounts of recyclables to China, but they recently decided they were done taking it, at least in part because much of it was contaminated with various wastes, some hazardous. Sounds reasonable, but that leaves us with a problem: what to do with all the things we can't recycle, such as thin plastic bags? Burn them? Bury them, hundreds of tons at a time? No good solutions....
h/t Global Health Now email alerts

Coal is now uneconomic

That means that it's too expensive compared to the alternatives to be worth using, even not taking into account the externalities. Take a look!
h/t @martinravallion