Environmental Econ Updates

Here are some quick hits as we wrap up this term’s ENST 151 and ECON 280 courses:

Will shuttering the Keystone pipeline leave a “billion” barrels of oil from tar sand production in the ground?  That’s a recent assessment out of Berkeley (blog post).

Speaking of not opening Keystone, what’s with all of these tank car explosions?  Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.  Yikes.

In other news, should we take a “wait-and-see” approach to climate change? Not according to this recent Brookings piece.  Tax, baby, tax!

Or cap, baby, cap.  The New York Times shows us how a carbon market works!

And, finally, James Hamilton gives the rundown on resource scarcity and prices for myriad commodities.