PCRD

Green Economy - See for Yourself!

This morning on the way to work and listening to PBS, I learned of a new website that allows visitors to input their assumptions about the likelihood of various future energy policies being implemented and then calculates the resulting effect on the Gross Domestic Product and economic growth in the US.  This neat little trick is the product of a "meta-analysis" synthesizing the 27 leading economic models by Robert Repetto of Yale University who writes that the synthesis "... reveals what the crucial assumptions are and how changing those assumptions affects the predicted economic costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by specific percentages below the business-as-usual path by 2030. Surprisingly, only a handful of key assumptions account for most of the differences among model predictions of the economic costs of reducing emissions."

Check the results of your own assumptions at http://www.climate.yale.edu/seeforyourself/ - and See For Yourself!

Using the Tragedy of a Flood to Redefine a Community

Chicago Federal Reserve Economist Bill Testa has an insightful post about the Midwest floods. Here is an excerpt where he draws on experiences from the 1993 flood. Following the 1993 event, many communities and individuals simply choose not to rebuild. Other communities used natural disasters to redefine themselves. An interesting example of a town rebuilding after a flood was Grand Forks, North Dakota. The Minneapolis Fed chronicled the rebuilding of Grand Forks in a September 2006 Fedgazette article. Grand Forks was the victim of flooding in 1997. In April of that year, 80% of the town was submerged. By 2006, the area was largely restored with the region’s economy growing at a faster pace than before the flood. This was due largely to the influx of $600 million in federal disaster aid (approximately $10,000 per resident).

You can read the entire post here.