Whither glyphosate?

Mexico recently announced that it will ban glyphosate for domestic production and also imports of GMO corn, which are a big component of their livestock industry. Is Mexico's policy, enacted by Pres. Lopez-Obrador (popularly called AMLO) just more clueless populism? 

source: NY Times

This picture shows the President of Mexico with the "magic amulets" he used to protect himself from COVID. While fortunately he seems to have made a recovery, it will probably not come as a surprise to learn that the protection they provided him was somewhat lacking. 

It is easy lampoon someone like AMLO: are his beliefs about GMOs equally nuts? 

On the one hand Mexico is home to an incredible wealth of biodiversity in terms of corn; on the other hand, the livestock trade is big in Mexico, and feed (mostly GMO corn) is mostly imported from the US. Will they shut down all of that? If they do, the economic repercussions are likely to be considerable. The same actually may not be true of glyphosate: although Bayer (the producer) is on the hook for over $11.5 billion to claimants alleging that they got cancer from the herbicide, revenue from its sale is over $8 billion per year (PER YEAR!) with forecasts of as much as $13 billion in 2027. Translation? Cancer shmancer. Other commentators continue to argue that the cancer scare is bogus. 

Well, the market thinks that we should keep using the product. While the profits are surely poorly distributed, meaning that as monopolists they will surely take more than their share, actually that might mean a drop in use compared to the regular market outcome.

Finally, I wonder if this will continue: for example Germany appears poised to ban the use of the herbicide. Mexico's ban is sure to be tested in court. We'll see how things shake out!

Power from the sun

A quick dump of links on solar power recently:

1) This article riffs on an Our World in Data article showing the falling price of solar. Watch out- you might get hit!

2) The full set of benefits associated with solar power are enumerated in this article based on this research (behind paywall) include the fact that solar is most productive during times when the grid is under the most stress, i.e. when air conditioning requires a lot of electricity. Also they say that having solar on the grid helps make sure that the grid itself is better maintained.

3) Finally, not about solar but about the alternative: the Guardian (lefty-alert!) writes that fossil fuels were associated with over 8 million deaths in 2018, mostly due to air pollution, and mostly in East Asia, including India and China. The former was dramatized in a NY Times piece in December. 

Shifting demand curves

 An example in the news today: as new car production has dropped, used car prices have risen. From NPR

Oysters in the Bay

One type of collateral damage from the COVID pandemic is that many people's diets changed significantly. For example, there were not a lot of people eating at oyster bars, leaving many oysters unsold. The good news is that the SOAR (Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration) program is using many of these to re-seed the Chesapeake Bay. The downside? Just that it takes really a lot of oysters to make a dent in the pollution: 100,000 oysters remove six pounds of pollution. So is that a lot? Well, according to this 2017 article, a good assumption is that about 23 grams per day of nitrogen are emitted from a single septic system. That's about 18 lbs per year, so you'll need 300,000 oysters to clean up a single septic system. Given that these systems are really common on the Delmarva peninsula, and that many, many other sources of pollution are out there besides septic systems... just ugh.

Externalities and meat

I'm just getting ready to teach externalities in class, and so it was pretty great to find this Vox piece on the price of meat. We will watch Super Size Me 2 in a week or two to learn about the chicken industry: it's pretty entertaining movie that makes some good points even though the director, Morgan Spurlock, has confessed to some pretty abhorrent behavior.

Tabarrok on vaccines

Libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok talks about how he thinks the government should have handled COVID vaccinations. Some interesting facts here....

Tracking bicycling fatalities

While we will learn later about the use of roads for driving in the US, this article shows that folks' use of roads for biking is somewhat different. (They do miss the relatively obvious point that surely places with more people will account for more cyclists and for more deaths.) There are a few interesting bits, though; for one thing, Louisiana?! For another, deaths on rural roads are way over-represented: they are 1/3 of the total, while I'm sure that a lot fewer vehicle miles traveled are located there. Cyclists, be safe: stick to the rivers and lakes that you're used to.

Land use change

New research in Nature on the impact of agriculture and land development shows that although greenhouse gas emissions have increased over time, total emissions from land use change were fairly low for a long time. That changed in about 2001, perhaps in large part due to aggressive deforestation in Southeastern Asia and the South American rainforests. Since then, the share of global emissions attributable to land use change has increased to as much as 25% of the total. This graphic shows that although agricultural production per unit of land has increased greatly, other trends offset that progress, leading to a net increase in emissions.