A Serious Environmental Economics Conference at ASU

These are exciting days to work on environmental economics.  Now that my son is a teenager, I’m feeling less guilt about attending more conferences. On a recent trip to China, I attended 3 conferences in 4 days and this weekend I participated in an environmental economics conference at ASU.  This excellent conference as organized by Kelly Bishop, Alvin Murphy and Nick Kuminoff. You can read about all of the details here.  For better or worse, I’ve reached an age where I’m now one of the wise “older people” in the room.  I must admit that I’m grateful to Kerry Smith and Michael Hanemann  both for being good friends of mine and for providing excellent comments on the paper I presented on Friday afternoon (and for being older than me!).

At Arizona State University (ASU) on a hot Phoenix late October day, there are about 35 people in the room.  Some of the best young environmental economists were there and we spoke about many issues. The papers were quite good.  ASU has made a major investment in environmental economics.  My Stanford Student Andrew Waxman is now a junior faculty member  and my new co-author Lucy Qiu also serves on the faculty at ASU.  Conferences are a good time for talk and everyone knows that I can talk about economics for dozens of hours.

Switching gears, I’m really happy that my China piece for The Conversation has been widely covered.  The economics profession doesn’t reward book writers but I’m proud of what Siqi and I have achieved.  This book is less controversial than my 2010 Climatopolis book but as the whole world is now talking about the economics of climate change adaptation — I take great pride that I presented the entire micro research agenda in a book that was published over 6 years ago.  Besides for one Gary Coleman joke, I wouldn’t change a word in that book.

My December 6th 2016 Brookings Presentation will present my new ideas about urban adaptation. Stay tuned.