Shipping 3,000 Miles

Today I called Amtrak to find out more about Amtrak Express shipping service. Apparently, there is an Amtrak shipping booth at every Amtrak Station, where you can drop off packages, and it gets delivered to any other Amtrak Station by freight. It's pretty affordable.

For Boston South Station to Oakland California:

50lbs $52

100lbs $67
$.57 each lbs over 100

500lbs $295 max
delivery in 4-7 days

Train also emits the least CO2 at 0.055lbs CO2 per Ton-Mile. Plane is a whopping 3.366lbs CO2 per Ton-Mile, and car is about 0.654lbs CO2 per Ton-Mile.

I've been trying to do my own little calculations for transporting things in my particular car. The easiest way to approximate how much extra emissions it takes to transport an extra 100lbs is to compare the average fuel economies with and without the extra weight. With just me, my car can average 33mpg if I'm driving on the highway 80% of the time. With an extra 100lbs, which is just a bit less than another person, I estimate that my fuel economy gets down to 28mpg at most. It takes an extra 5.4 gallons to travel 1000 miles with the extra 100lbs. There is about 19.4lbs of CO2 per gallon of gas. It comes out to being about 1lb of CO2 per Ton-Mile. The cost in extra gas would be about $64 for $4/gallon gas, so about the same as Amtrak Express.

(An optimistic estimate would be 30mpg, which comes out to 3 gallons more, which is about .582lbs per Ton-Mile and $36.)

Green Economy Labor Economics

Yesterday I applied for a research job at the UCB Institute for Research on Labor and Employment to do research on the minimum wage.

On their main page, they were spotlighting research by the Vial Center on Employment in the Green Economy. They just put out a new report that "California’s energy efficiency policies have a big job impact, but state needs to support more highly skilled and highly paid construction trades work force."

GSPP Autobiographical Sketch

I am entering the Goldman School of Public Policy's Masters in Public Policy Program this fall. This is my introduction. I'm not sure how long they would like it to be, though.

Yang Ruan was born in China and grew up in the United States. She studied electrical engineering at MIT and worked in the electrical engineering field for several years. She has always been interested in environmental sustainability, and is changing careers to shape environmental policy more directly. Yang's interests range from environmental finance and environmental markets to energy and technology policy. She wants to learn more about quantitative tools, economics, and dynamical systems to design effective and equitable environmentally sustainable economic policy. She also enjoys painting, drawing, singing, dancing, playing piano, eating, and event planning.

UCB Professor Lee Friedman

Professor Lee Friedman is another economist who works on environmental policy. He works on a broader range of topics, though, than Professor Hanemann, and his research tends to be more applied. He specializes in applied microeconomics and environmental markets. I am most interested in his work on pricing in the energy market and carbon market to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He teaches a core GSPP class, the Economics of Public Policy Anaylsis.

UCB Professor Michael Hanemann

Professor Michael Hanemann is an economist who works on environmental policy. He is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

Dr. Hanemann’s research interests include non-market valuation, environmental economics and policy, water pricing and management, demand modeling for market research and policy design, the economics of irreversibility and adaptive management, and welfare economics.

He is an expert in the economics of water, the valuation and the demand of water. I would be more interested in applying his techniques to other material resources, though. On the one hand, according to standard environmental economics analysis, my drive to reduce the use of other material resources is to minimize the negative externality of pollution or climate change. However, I feel it is more than that. I suppose that fundamentally I feel that exponential increases in material resource use is a problem. I also think that improving supply chain is an insufficient solution. It only seeks to make resource use efficient, but there is no mechanism to ultimately constrain it. Even so, it's a necessary first step.

UCB Assistant Professor Margaret Taylor

Another faculty member who works on environmental policy and technology is Margaret Taylor. Her line of research has lately been about technology push and demand pull policies. She studies how policies can effectively achieve environmental goals through supporting technological innovation.

She works with the climate modeling community as well. It seems that climate and technology modeling becomes important to all environmental policy work.

I'm not sure what the defining differences are between her and Dan Kammen. It seems that they don't work together. I wonder if they have opposing perspectives or there is just no interest overlap.

UCB Professor Dan Kammen

Another professor who works on environmental policy is Dan Kammen. He is also a professor in the Energy and Resources Group, and he is the director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, which seems to be pretty well funded. He actually has a background in physics.

Dr. Kammen's research interests include: the science, engineering, management, and dissemination of renewable energy systems; health and environmental impacts of energy generation and use; rural resource management, including issues of gender and ethnicity; international R&D policy, climate change; and energy forecasting and risk analysis.

I need to find out more about his research on engineering management. The dissemination of renewable energy systems is appealing because those policies and projects could be implemented immediately. However, part of me wants to work on projects that are more general in scope.

There is a project in RAEL on clean energy financing that is well-aligned with my interests. Maybe I could work with that group.

Professor Kammen teaches a GSPP class that has been highly recommended called Energy and Society.

UCB Professor Richard Norgaard

Professor Richard Norgaard is one faculty at UCB whose work I am excited by. He is a founder of ecological economics and an Energy and Resources Group professor.

Among the founders of the field of ecological economics, his recent research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently, and how globalization affects environmental governance. He has field experience in the Alaska, Brazil, California, and Vietnam with minor forays in other parts of the globe.

His research seems to be more focused on the interactions of social systems, science, and governance than on the economic impacts of policies or setting up markets for managing resources. That may just be a more recent focus, though. He has written a lot about a coevolutionary interpretation of ecological civilization. This is the concept that the evolution of a species is the aggregate of the evolution of our values, knowledge, organization, technology, and environment. I am not sure how this line of research can help us evolve towards environmental sustainability or even how to conduct this research in a rigorous way, but it is an interesting concept.

Berkeley People

I've been doing some research on faculty at Berkeley I am interested in. When I get there I'll probably try to take some classes or seminars with them and see if they have any openings for research positions.

W. Michael Hanemann

Richard Norgaard

Daniel M. Kammen

Margaret Taylor

Lee S. Friedman

Environment and Labor Classes at UC Berkeley

I am starting to look at interesting classes I'm interested in at Berkeley.

The Governance of Global Production would be pretty interesting.

This graduate seminar explores critical policy and theoretical questions regarding the governance of global production. The seminar engages current trends in the restructuring of industrial production, distributions of environmental, labor, and social impacts from this production, and new strategies for democratic governance. The course presents existing theories of regulation and governance, assesses market and state “failures,” and critically analyzes emerging responses to the limits of traditional regulation. Using cases from the wood products, electronics, garments, shoes, coffee, food, chemicals, and oil industries, the seminar explores the potentials and limitations of new governance strategies, including: corporate voluntary self-regulation, codes of conduct, multi-stakeholder monitoring systems, certification and labeling schemes, fair trade programs, transparency and reporting initiatives, legal strategies, and international accords and agreements. The course seeks to evaluate why these new institutions and policies have emerged, how they function, and when and under what conditions they can be effective in mitigating environmental, labor, or social impacts of production