Political Ecology

Yet the composite Human Development Index, a widely used metric that incorporates measures of literacy, life expectancy, and income, has improved markedly since the mid-1970s in both rich and poor nations. The index correlates strongly with other measures of prosperousness. Some measures of personal security buck the upward trend, but the overall improvement in well-being [...]

I’ve been seeing a good deal of defeatist thinking lately along the lines of this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100824092408.htm.  This line of thought posits that the amount of warming already in the pipeline is unavoidable….so therefore we might as well give up trying and just deal with the consequences. This is a very dangerous and fallacious line [...]

The first page of the calculator asks users to choose a county of interest from anywhere in the US. An input/output window allows them to choose which crops they will grow, yields, tillage practices, and nitrogen fertilizer rates. Default values based on localized USDA statistics are provided as a starting point. Given the farming practices [...]

“Re-defining climate change in public health terms should help people make connection to already familiar problems such as asthma, allergies and infectious diseases, while shifting the visualization of the issue away from remote Arctic regions and distant peoples and animals,” says Maibach. “The public health perspective offers a vision of a better, healthier future — [...]

The NAS recently published a report entitled “Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia“. These are my reactions to that document. I’ve been wondering lately about the relationship between higher atmospheric CO2 ppms and acid rain. I don’t think this is directly mentioned in the report. Has anyone seen these data? [...]

Once again, Mr. Lomborg is out there telling us to ‘Cool It’! This time on the radio show On Point (http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/07/heat-waves-the-new-normal/comment-page-3#comment-65910). Here is my response to Mr. Lomborg’s comments. Mr. Lomborg made a statement to the effect that we will not have renewable energy until it is as cheap as fossil fuels.  As an economist [...]

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied “social bases of environmental concern,” which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people’s environmental views [...]