Environmental footprint of variety of foods

This is the article I've been waiting for forever! So excited to put it in front of my students this semester.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

One commenter on Twitter asks what % of any carbon footprint is attributable to food. Turns out that is about 26%!

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

Nuclear saves lives... compared to coal

Coal is dirty in many ways, from staining the hands of miners to contributions to climate change, but this striking new paper shows that by creating air pollution (presumably primarily particulate matter) coal kills: thousands a year. Here is a one-tweet summary:

For the full paper, see the link.

Update 1/27: Prof. Auffhammer adds some personal recollections.

Update 3/21:  NY Times article on the effects of a coal plant closing. It's a sympathetic view of how the closure will affect the lives of locals.

Fracking back in the news

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf says research will address “the concern that there is a relationship between hydraulic fracturing and childhood cancers.”

In my stats class on Thursday students were upset that they couldn't ever "accept" the null hypothesis: it seems to them that one should either reject the null hypothesis or accept it. Well, here's one reason why not: as the article says, “The fact that there is no known environmental factor associated with the development of Ewing Sarcoma does not mean there is no environmental factor in the development of Ewing Sarcoma,” Dr. Ketyer said. “It just hasn’t been studied. The cancer is very rare.” Just because we don't find evidence doesn't mean that the truth is elsewhere!

In other news, natural gas is showing a lot less promise than it did as little as a few years ago. For one thing, it has proven to be really cheap, and for another, renewables are proving cheaper still. 

Update, January 2020: "produced water" from fracking is often radioactive, and workers dealing with it are often ill-protected, according to this Rolling Stone exposé.

Value of a Statistical dog's life

While this may seem whimsical, creepy, or just nuts, actually this is useful: if a hypothetical policy saves 100 dogs' lives, how much should we be willing to pay for that policy? This paper says that the answer is easy: about $10,000 per dog. Now to find a way to include this in my class in the spring.... :)

Traffic in the city

I've posted many times about ride-sharing, but another under-appreciated factor that is contributing more and more to gridlock is package delivery. It's still more efficient than driving your car however far to pick up one (or a few) items, but the logistical difficulties are starting to pile up. Food for thought....

11/4: Lil more food for thought on traffic:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1191295205187686400

Health and taxes

No one is excited about taxes and fees, but the good news is that they can do a lot of good. For example in London, where kids breathe in high levels of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, new traffic taxes (AKA congestion pricing) are making a difference, reducing pollution by as much as a third. New York City is poised to join the ranks of cities participating by 2021, when a new fee will hopefully curb pollution as well as raising over a billion dollars for transportation infrastructure.

Another positive tax is a tax on soda. In Mexico, an approximately 10% tax on soda decreased soda consumption by about 6%, an impact that is estimated to potentially prevent almost 200,000 cases of diabetes. Wow.

Three of these four were from the Global Health Now newsletter; you can subscribe at https://www.globalhealthnow.org/subscribe

Chicken economics

You've probably had or at least seen Costco's famous $5 rotisserie chicken, but you probably haven't thought about it in this much depth before. From the importance of the size of the chicken through the vital role that Nebraska corn is playing in taking on basically a new agro-industrial undertaking, there's a lot here. Take a look!