Home delivery of groceries produces far lower CO2 emissions than driving to the supermarket: Erica Wygonik and Anne Goodchild find this in a recent study of the Seattle area (thanks to Tanya Snyder at Streetsblog for the reference). Wygonik and Goodchild cite similar findings from Sally Cairns in the UK, Hanne Siikavirta and colleagues in Finland, and Tehrani and Karbassi in Iran.
These studies find that the CO2 savings can be as high as 80-90% Continue reading
While we’re on taxes: several counties in Maryland (if your knowledge of American geography is limited, that’s Baltimore and The Wire) will now tax impervious surface cover. That’s rooftops, driveways, decks, etc. The contributions impervious surfaces make to urban heat islands, groundwater depletion, building subsidence, flooding, and water pollution are well understood (the wonkish may want to see Arnold & Gibbons, “Impervious surface coverage: The emergence of a key environmental indicator”). Taxing impervious surfaces is a simple and elegant solution, because there are very often simple, cheap, low-tech fixes (like replacing impervious surfaces with …. pervious ones!, or getting your rooftop exempted from the tax by collecting rainwater in a cistern for garden use): the tax provides an incentive for property owners to go fix these problems themselves.
Now, in honor of UKIP and of the general Brussels phobia that is sweeping Britain and much of the rest of Europe, here’s the connection between this wonderful tax, and federalism: Continue reading
You have to love that title, which comes from a paper by Christopher Ferguson and Moritz Heene, which the excellent Andrew Gelman parses, and passes on to the rest of us. Any field that uses statistics is susceptible to publication bias (i.e., not publishing statistical analyses that find “no effect”). It is notorious in pharmaceutical research, where money talks shouts. I am guessing that the reason psychology gets a particularly bad reputation for publication bias, compared with other social sciences, is that it deals with a lot of small experimental data sets – so you really do have a situation where nearly identical experiments can be run twenty times by different researchers, and the one that gets a significant effect gets published. Statistical work in economics and political science tends to keep re-using a small number of mostly public data sets, so the problems are different.
Richard Murphy reports that the OECD’s deliberations on [tax] base erosion and profit-shifting (BEPS) are showing familiar signs of going nowhere. He points to the disproportionate emphasis given to the views of “business” stakeholders – I put business in scare quotes because I doubt that SMEs have much input here, this is going to be mostly the same multi-national businesses who are evading tax in the first place – read the report, and correct me if I’m wrong. So, if you hold a lot of shares in companies that record all their profits in places where they don’t have to pay tax, you can take some comfort. Otherwise, prepare for further austerity.
In Germany much more than in the UK, according to Simona Iammarino.
Available as a poster from Copenhagenize.com.
Carbon footprints in metropolitan Philadelphia
The basis for comparison is not entirely clear from the picture: it says “population + employment”, so if we use less carbon on the job than at home, the city center gets a bonus. But something similar has been found in other cases: for central vs. suburban Toronto, see Norman, Jonathan, Heather L. MacLean, and Christopher A. Kennedy. 2006. Comparing High and Low Residential Density: Life-Cycle Analysis of Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Journal of Urban Planning & Development 132 (1):10-21; for Dortmund, see Wegener, Michael. 1996. Reduction of CO2 emissions of transport by reorganization of urban activities. In Transport, Land-Use and the Environment, edited by Y. Hayashi and J. Roy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. There’s some discussion of this in my paper on road traffic externalities and the competitiveness of walkable retail.
For more discussion of the study behind the map, see Brendon Slotterback at streets MN.
Image courtesy of Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber.
Research papers that justify today’s austerity policies are scarce, and the first thing economists teach is that scarcity creates market value. The two big jewels in the small crown of austerity justification have been Continue reading
A deal among EU states, apparently overcoming strong opposition from the oil industry.
This is very good news for two reasons.
It’s no secret that proceeds from the sale of oil, timber, etc, often wind up in the pockets (and offshore bank accounts) of public officials around the world. It would be hard to add up the damage this does Continue reading
Frederick Guy 