NEWEST ITEMS

ENVIRONMENTAL RANKING FOR CANADA AND THE OECD
Together with Elmira Aliakbari and Ashley Stedman of the Fraser Institute we constructed a comprehensive index of environmental quality for 33 high-income countries. Canada ranks 10th, contrary to a number of past studies that claimed we were a filthy bottom-dweller:


On some key individual measures Canada is well inside the top 1. We ranked poorly on sulphur dioxide, which surprised me, but if you look closely at that one, most countries are clustered together near the top and there is little distinction among them. 
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​JUNE 20, 2018

​ENVIRONMENTAL RANKING FOR CANADA AND THE OECD

RECENT ITEMS

Newspaper Columns, Commentary and Other


CORRECTING FALSE CLAIMS IN THE NYC LAWSUIT

The City of New York has filed a lawsuit against a group of large oil and gas companies including Exxon Mobil, alleging among other things that they conspired to mislead the public about the dangers of global warming. Paragraph 87 of the complaint alleges that I was paid by Exxon to do the "hockey stick" work for the Fraser Institute. The claim is completely false and the paragraph is full of untrue statements. I have issued this statement in response:

WHAT'S IN THE NUNES MEMO?

In a departure from my usual fare, I have taken a stab at predicting what will be in the Nunes memo, and what the US Department of Justice Inspector General will report.
​This may be amended or edited as new information comes to light. To my mind this story is as fascinating and convoluted as any Le Carre-style spy thriller. 

​FIVE QUESTIONS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

In late 2017 I was contacted via email by a group of high school students in Europe who asked if I would answer some questions about global warming for a project they were doing. Here are the questions they posed, and the answers I gave them.  
ARE CLIMATE MODELS OVERSTATING WARMING?

There has been a lot of discussion about a new paper tying model over-estimation of warming to the policy agenda; viz., there is more time than previously claimed to implement emission controls. I have written on this previously but in light of the current discussion I put up a blog post at Judy Curry's Climate Etc. blog:
Basically I go through a couple of indicators and arrive at an affirmative answer. 
Data/code here. 
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Yourenvironment.ca

The idea of this site is very simple: to build the complete environmental record of every community across Canada. The site currently shows air emissions by source (back to 1990), air contaminant levels (back to 1974), monthly average high temperatures (back to 1900) for hundreds of places across the country, and water pollution records for several provinces. 

The layout is self-explanatory and it's very easy to use. The data are all from government agencies, but most of it has not hitherto been disseminated in a usable form to the public. All my sources are linked and the data I use are easily-downloadable.

So the next time you find yourself in a conversation about some aspect of the environment and you wonder what is actually going on, look at yourenvironment.ca to find out.

Journal Articles and Discussion Papers

Back in January 2017 I published a study through the Frontier Centre for Public Policy on Brownfields Remediation in Ontario. It was based on a series of interviews with experts working in the field of site remediation and construction. The system has developed some acute bottlenecks since reforms were implement in 2011, leading to escalating costs and long delays in construction approvals. With the election of a new growth-oriented government in Ontario, I thought it would be timely to draw attention to the paper once again:
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In addition to explaining the current system for obtaining a Record of Site Conditions we identify where and why the bottlenecks are forming and we make a set of recommendations for speeding up the system without compromising the intent of the regulations. 
THE IMPACT OF HIGH ELECTRICITY COSTS ON ONTARIO MANUFACTURING EMPLOYMENT

Elmira Aliakbari and I completed a report for the Fraser Institute looking at the changes in Ontario's manufacturing sector since 2005, isolating as best we can the effects of rising electricity costs. We estimate that energy cost increases cost the province about 75,000 manufacturing jobs since 2008, roughly 2 jobs lost for every 1 the province claims was created by its Green Energy Act. 
The study received a higher-than-normal amount of media attention including articles in almost all daily papers across Canada, and countless radio interviews including 6 CBC affiliates.

EMISSION TAXES AND DAMAGE THRESHOLDS IN THE PRESENCE OF PRE-EXISTING REGULATIONS

Many commentators on carbon taxes have only a superficial grasp of the economic theory, which leads them to think that pricing carbon at the marginal damage rate is economically efficient, even though this is only true under very limited and unrealistic circumstances. Lots of previous studies have shown that the rule breaks down under pre-existing taxes, but no one has looked at the effect of pre-existing regulations. I have released a new working paper looking at this topic. Studies have shown that the optimal emission tax should be reduced when pre-existing taxes are present (i.e. always, everywhere) to take account of the distortionary burden of the tax system. Some numerical studies have also found a threshold effect whereby damages have to exceed some minimum level before the emission tax should go above zero, but theoretical treatments typically rule this out by construction. I derive a model with two polluting sectors and show that a threshold effect can arise under non-optimal taxes and pre-existing regulations, which are common real-world conditions. This means that emission taxes can potentially be welfare-reducing even if marginal damages are positive. 
EMPIRICALLY-CONSTRAINED CLIMATE SENSITIVITY AND THE SOCIAL COST OF CARBON
I have completed a study with Kevin Dayaratna of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC and David Kreutzer of the EPA, which recomputes standard Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimates using updated empirical estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). We applied the 2015 Lewis and Curry ECS distribution to the widely-used DICE and FUND Integrated Assessment Models. Previously the developers of these models (and others) have relied on model-simulated distribution of ECS values, especially from a 2007 paper by Roe and Baker. The Roe-Baker distribution underpins the US government's current SCC values used for regulatory purposes. We critique this aspect of SCC computation, explaining why the Roe-Baker distribution is unsuitable. A major reason is that simulated ECS distributions have been superseded by a suite of empirically-estimated distributions. Using a recent, well-constrained empirical ECS distribution we find the estimated SCC drops substantially in both the DICE and FUND models, and in the latter there is a large probability it is no longer even positive.
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Since 30 July 2010