Temperature records compiled by the International Panel on Climate Change are biased by non-climatic factors that are largely socioeconomic in origin. The result is that as much as 50 percent of the land-surface warming that has been detected in recent decades may not be the product of global...

This article explores how deeply held philosophies and environmental risk allocation are "real" values in terms of enivronmental impacts, and as such should be considered under NEPA. If this were the case, this would make the operation of NEPA more transparent and efficient

Pigou (1920) advocated for taxes, set equal to marginal damages, on goods produced and consumed that involve negative externalities. Samuelson (1954) laid out the conditions for optimal pure public goods provision, but noted that free-riding (the “demand revelation” problem) was likely to...

Decisions concerning environmental protection hinge on estimates of economic burden. Over the past 30 years, economists have developed and applied various tools to measure this burden. In this chapter, we present a taxonomy of costs along with methods for measuring those costs. At the broadest...

In this paper, I develop an operational methodology to consistently compare alternative sustainability paradigms (weak sustainability [WS], strong sustainability [SS], a-growth [AG], and de-growth [DG]) and different assessment approaches (life-cycle assessment [LCA], cost-benefit analysis...

Discounting future costs and benefits is a crucial yet contentious practice in the appraisal of long-term public projects with environmental consequences. The standard approach typically neglects that ecosystem services are not easily substitutable with manufactured goods and often exhibit...

Water is scarce in many countries. One instrument to improve the allocation of a scarce resource is (efficient) pricing or taxation. However, water is implicitly traded on international markets, particularly through food and textiles, so that impacts of water taxes cannot be studied in...

Policies to cap emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), such as the recently announced agreement among seven northeastern states, are expected to have important effects on the electricity industry and on the market value of firms that own electricity generation assets. The economics literature finds...

In the last few years, several studies have found an inverted-U relationship between per capita income and environmental degradation. This relationship, known as the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), suggests that environmental degradation increases in the early stages of growth, but it...

Water policy experts contend that the United States is heading toward a water scarcity crisis in the coming years. Global climate change is likely to make water scarcity much worse in the long run. This article argues that demands of current and projected water management challenges can best be...