Is it hot in here, or is it me?
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Local News
Employment
Business
Energy
Municipal Finance
Crumbling Infrastructure
Et Cetera
Musical Interlude
Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall
New York State
- Gas industry tries to revive case on fracking home rule | Politics on the Hudson
Here's a short piece about how the Dryden case came about: "Dryden: The Small Town that Changed the Fracking Game - @Earthjustice".- Education groups: NY owes schools $5.9B | Politics on the Hudson
- School pension costs to jump 7.8% | Politics on the Hudson:
This is the flipside of the story on the pensions and the Highway Trust Fund from last month. The low interest rates are making it hard for public pension systems to keep up with their future obligations.
- Public-comment periods set for casino proposals - Politics on the Hudson
- Hey, New Yorkers: You're getting money | Politics on the Hudson:
If you have children or own a home, that is. All thanks to your sugar daddy, Governor Cuomo. Hey did you know he’s up for re-election this fall? What a coincidence!
- Rob Astorino's jobs plan: Fracking, flat spending, canal split and more | Politics on the Hudson:
Apparently, Astorino’s jobs plan is to allow fracking, which will then require a lot of people to clean up the environmental disaster resulting from it. Oh, and cutting government spending, which will reduce the number of government employees. Wait, what?
- Economy - Teachout Wu for New York
- WGXC Newsroom · Cuomo consolidates state’s solar programs
- Chris Michael: Creating Democracy in the Workplace - @grittv
Musical Interlude
The Fracking Song (My Water's On Fire Tonight). Dropping some knowledge on you in the form of music, courtesy of Studio 20 NYU in collaboration with ProPublica.org
Paul Ryan's Budget
Musical Interlude
Marianne Faithful - Working Class Hero
Global Warming
Evidence and impacts
EPA regulations
- Clean Power Plan Proposed Rule | Carbon Pollution Standards | US EPA:
Here is the EPA’s proposal, for the hardy readers among you.
- Economic impact of climate change: 25% snark - Environmental Economics:
John Whitehead removes the snark from Krugman's summary demolition of economic impact claims made by the Chamber of Commerce about the EPA regulations.
- Cutting Back on Carbon - NYTimes.com:
if you want the full-snark version, here you are.
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- Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils - NYTimes.com:
burning natural gas for energy instead of coal will reduce the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere, although it will increase the amount of methane (natural gas), which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, although it has a shorter life-span in the atmosphere than CO2 which will stay a looooong time. On balance, burning gas and containing the leaks looks like the better short run solution too reducing global warming, but fracking has other costs as well.
- EPA Coal Emissions Standards - Cue The Crazies: The EPA's New Coal Standards Are Out - Esquire
- A Paltry Start in Curbing Global Warming - NY Times
- What are the Benefits and Costs of EPA’s Proposed CO2 Regulation? | An Economic View of the Environment:
Global warming “presents the classic free-rider problem of this ultimate global commons problem: It is in the interest of no country to take action, but each can reap the benefits of any countries that do take action. This is why international, if not global, cooperation is essential.” OF course, as Stavins indicates, it may be that US action will spur other countries to take action as well. Of course, countries are not individual rational actors, but they do tend to behave in ways that their leaders believe are in the country’s (or the country’s powerful elites’ anyway) best interest.
All that said, the EPA’s net benefits come mostly from the reduction in health affects from other harmful associated emissions with burning fossil fuels.
Frankly, with the growing chance that we are going to leave behind an earth that will not be able to support the civilization we inherited, I think the use of cost-benefit should be limited to the comparison of different approaches to reducing carbon emissions.
- Coal Mining Is Responsible for 0.6 Percent of Employment In Kentucky | Beat the Press:
4.2 percent in West Virginia. Would it not be better for the world and those workers if we found them something more useful to do?
- Up To A Million Abandoned Wells In Pennsylvania Spew Heat-Trapping Methane | ThinkProgress:
Methane, although it does leave the atmosphere quicker than Carbon Dioxide, is much more powerful as a greenhouse gas. So much for the “cleaner-burning gas” propaganda.
- Why a Carbon Tax is Better Than Obama's Cap and Trade | naked capitalism:
Some good points here about the relative merits of cap and trade proposals, carbon taxes and the EPA’s plan.
- White House Pushes Financial Case for Carbon Rule - NYTimes.com:
"Most Republicans have said that the E.P.A. climate-change rules exemplify what they call the Obama administration’s overreach." Unfortunately for this argument the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency does indeed have the power to limit carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. Executive overreach is simply another way of saying doing things the Republicans don’t like.
- Everything’s Bigger In Texas, Even The Stupid… » Balloon Juice:
In case you don’t know the history of nullification, the idea that states can ignore Federal laws they don’t like, it goes back to the pre-Civil War era and helped lead to that war, since many of the federal laws the southern states wanted to ignore had to do with slavery. But why let that stop us now? This is toddler temper tantrum stuff. Texas is going to hold its breath until that mean old Federal government starts acting more lawless (as in not enforcing the Clean Air Act). And Texas will not be alone in this particular example of teh stoopid.
Musical Interlude
In light of everything that's been happening in Ferguson and Staten Island, and well, everywhere else, I give you Innocent Until Proven Black, the second track of M.C. Justice's 1998 album Utter Subversion. Fun fact: M.C. Justice is now Adam Balm and fronts Dharmacology, a psychedelic funk trio out of Oakland, CA. You can find Dharmacology on Facebook.
Theme Music:
Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang
Provided under a
Creative Commons Public License.
Link to the show:
Your Friendly Neighborhood Economist Show #027 Is it hot in here or is it me?
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