Social Costs

Yes, it's the start of a new term and I'm teaching Resource Economics again, so more of my gaze is devoted to issues like this. However, this article might've caught my eye regardless: the AP summarizes fossil fuel rollbacks under the current administration to be complicit in billions of dollars of damages and thousands of deaths per year. The catch? It's hard to link specific deaths to pollution. Statistically speaking, the deaths are happening, we just don't know who is dying. At least some mention is being made of this ledger!

Chesapeake update

I haven't done a good job of keeping up with the news on the Chesapeake, but fortunately a couple of articles from the Baltimore Sun this month have bailed me out. First comes a piece talking about the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's State of the Bay report, which showed a deterioration in quality this year sparked by the heavy rains that inundated the region. This is the first time the ranking has gotten worse year-on-year in at least 10 years.

A longer list of bullet points summarizes the situation in this second article. While the rain wreaked havoc on water clarity (and thus didn't work wonders for bay grass health) many categories of the report showed very little change. The above article preaches doom about the crab population, but the CBF is a bit more sanguine, noting that the number of juveniles is up. Still, the authors caution that wastewater must be better controlled going forward, particularly as the developed areas in the watershed continue to expand. Hopefully we have a more normal year as far as rainfall, and bay grasses continue to expand, while runoff is increasingly sequestered in buffers. We'll see!