Weathering
The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts
Renato Molina & Ivan Rudik
NBER Working Paper, June 2024
Abstract:
What is the impact and value of hurricane forecasts? We study this question using newly-collected forecast data for major US hurricanes since 2005. We find higher wind speed forecasts increase pre-landfall protective spending, but erroneous under-forecasts increase post-landfall damage and rebuilding expenditures. Our main contribution is a new theoretically-grounded approach for estimating the marginal value of forecast improvements. We find that the average annual improvement reduced total per-hurricane costs, inclusive of unobserved protective spending, by $700,000 per county. Improvements since 2007 reduced costs by 19%, averaging $5 billion per hurricane. This exceeds the annual budget for all federal weather forecasting.
In the Eye of the Storm: Hurricanes, Climate Migration, and Climate Attitudes
Sabrina Arias & Christopher Blair
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Climate disasters raise the salience of climate change’s negative consequences, including climate-induced migration. Policy action to address climate displacement is especially contentious in the United States, where weak support for tackling climate change intersects with high opposition to migration. Do climate disasters foster receptivity toward climate migrants and broader willingness to combat climate change? To study this question, we leverage the occurrence of Hurricane Ian during fielding of a preregistered survey in autumn 2022. Hurricane exposure increased concern about and support for policies to address climate migration. Hurricane exposure also increased support for climate action and belief in anthropogenic climate change. Effects of hurricane exposure cross-cut partisanship, education, age, and other important correlates of climate attitudes but decay within 6 months. Together, these results suggest that climate disasters may briefly increase favorability toward climate migrants and climate policy action but are unlikely to durably mobilize support even in severely impacted areas.
Good news about good news? The limited impacts of informing Americans about recent success in climate change mitigation
Olivia Chiancone et al.
Research & Politics, May 2024
Abstract:
Slowing the process of global warming will require sustained reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over decades, which in turn depends on public support for decarbonization. We are beginning to see evidence of success in cutting emissions. Will wider recognition of this “good news” strengthen or soften support for further action? In contrast to previous research showing a demotivating effect of good news about climate mitigation, our pre-registered survey experiment finds no average impact of factual reports of climate progress on Americans’ worries about climate change, perception of efficacy in fighting climate change, willingness to pay additional taxes, support for green industrial policy, or willingness to donate to a climate NGO, and no evidence of heterogeneous effects across relevant subgroups. Given the importance of sustained public support for decarbonization, these null results can be seen as good news for mitigation policy, but more research is needed to assess the impact of the perceived tractability of climate mitigation on support for mitigation efforts.
Property Insurance and Disaster Risk: New Evidence from Mortgage Escrow Data
Benjamin Keys & Philip Mulder
NBER Working Paper, June 2024
Abstract:
We develop a new dataset to study homeowners insurance. Our data on over 47 million observations of households’ property insurance expenditures from 2014-2023 are inferred from mortgage escrow payments. First, we find a sharp 33% increase in average premiums from 2020 to 2023 (13% in real terms) that is highly uneven across geographies. This growth is associated with a stronger relationship between premiums and local disaster risk: A one standard-deviation increase in disaster risk is associated with $500 higher premiums in 2023, up from $300 in 2018. Second, using the rapid rise in reinsurance prices as a natural experiment, we show that the increase in the risk-to-premium gradient was largely caused by the pass-through of reinsurance costs. Third, we project that if the reinsurance shock persists, growing disaster risk will lead climate-exposed households to face $700 higher annual premiums by 2053. Our results highlight that prices in global reinsurance markets pass through to household budgets, and will ultimately drive the cost of rising climate risk.
Credit Markets, Property Rights, and the Commons
Frederik Noack & Christopher Costello
Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Credit markets and property rights are fundamental for modern economies, but their implications for the commons are unknown. Using a dynamic model of competitive resource extraction, we show that improving property right security unambiguously increases conservation incentives, but the effect of credit markets on resource extraction effort hinges on the security of property rights. We test these predictions using data on global fisheries, credit markets, and the largest ever marine property rights assignment. We find that property right security reduces resource extraction and that credit market development increases resource extraction under insecure property rights but reduces resource extraction under secure property rights.
High Traffic Roads and Adverse Birth Outcomes: Comparing Births Upwind and Downwind of the Same Road
Andrew Larkin et al.
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Traffic related air pollution is a major concern for perinatal health. Determining causal associations, however, is difficult since high-traffic areas tend to correspond with lower socioeconomic neighborhoods and other environmental exposures. To overcome confounding, we compared pregnant individuals living downwind and upwind of the same high-traffic road. We leveraged vital statistics data for Texas from 2007-2016 (n=3,570,272 births) and computed hourly wind estimates for residential addresses within 500 m of high-traffic roads (i.e., annual average daily traffic greater than 25,000) (10.9% of births). We matched pregnant individuals predominantly upwind to pregnant neighbors downwind of the same road segment (n=37,631 pairs). Living downwind was associated with an 11.6 gram (95% CI: -18.01, -5.21) decrease in term birth weight. No associations were observed with low term birth weight, preterm birth, or very preterm birth. In distance-stratified models, living downwind within 50 m was associated with a -36.3 gram (95% CI: -67.74, -4.93) decrease in term birth weight and living 51-100m downwind was associated with an odds ratio of 3.68 (95% CI: 1.71, 7.90) for very preterm birth. These results suggest traffic air pollution is associated with adverse birth outcomes, with steep distance decay gradients around major roads.
Fueling Alternatives: Gas Station Choice and the Implications for Electric Charging
Jackson Dorsey, Ashley Langer & Shaun McRae
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper quantifies the value of electric vehicle (EV) charging networks and the marginal value of network speed and density. We estimate a model of gasoline drivers’ refueling preferences and simulate how these potential future EV drivers value refueling time under counterfactual charging networks. Drivers value refueling time at $19.73/hour. EV adopters with home charging receive $675 per vehicle in benefits from avoiding travel to gas stations, whereas refueling travel and waiting time costs $7,763 for drivers using public charging. Increasing network charging speed yields three times greater time savings than a proportional increase in station density.
Cropland abandonment between 1986 and 2018 across the United States: Spatiotemporal patterns and current land uses
Yanhua Xie et al.
Environmental Research Letters, March 2024
Abstract:
Knowing where and when croplands have been abandoned or otherwise removed from cultivation is fundamental to evaluating future uses of these areas, e.g. as sites for ecological restoration, recultivation, bioenergy production, or other uses. However, large uncertainties remain about the location and time of cropland abandonment and how this process and the availability of associated lands vary spatially and temporally across the United States. Here, we present a nationwide, 30 m resolution map of croplands abandoned throughout the period of 1986–2018 for the conterminous United States (CONUS). We mapped the location and time of abandonment from annual cropland layers we created in Google Earth Engine from 30 m resolution Landsat imagery using an automated classification method and training data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Cropland Data Layer. Our abandonment map has overall accuracies of 0.91 and 0.65 for the location and time of abandonment, respectively. From 1986 to 2018, 12.3 (±2.87) million hectares (Mha) of croplands were abandoned across CONUS, with areas of greatest change over the Ogallala Aquifer, the southern Mississippi Alluvial Plain, the Atlantic Coast, North Dakota, northern Montana, and eastern Washington state. The average annual nationwide abandoned area across our study period was 0.51 Mha per year. Annual abandonment peaked between 1997 and 1999 at a rate of 0.63 Mha year−1, followed by a continuous decrease to 0.41 Mha year−1 in 2009–2011. Among the abandoned croplands, 53% (6.5 Mha) changed to grassland and pasture, 18.6% (2.28 Mha) to shrubland and forest, 8.4% (1.03 Mha) to wetlands, and 4.6% (0.56 Mha) to non-vegetated lands. Of the areas that we mapped as abandoned, 19.6% (2.41 Mha) were enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program as of 2020. Our new map highlights the long-term dynamic nature of agricultural land use and its relation to various competitive pressures and land use policies in the United States.
Strong economic incentives of ship scrubbers promoting pollution
Anna Lunde Hermansson et al.
Nature Sustainability, June 2024, Pages 812–822
Abstract:
In response to stricter regulations on ship air emissions, many shipowners have installed exhaust gas cleaning systems, known as scrubbers, allowing for use of cheap residual heavy fuel oil. Scrubbers produce large volumes of acidic and polluted water that is discharged to the sea. Due to environmental concerns, the use of scrubbers is being discussed within the International Maritime Organization. Real-world simulations of global scrubber-vessel activity, applying actual fuel costs and expenses related to scrubber operations, show that 51% of the global scrubber-fitted fleet reached economic break even by the end of 2022, with a surplus of €4.7 billion in 2019 euros. Within five years after installation, more than 95% of the ships with the most common scrubber systems reach break even. However, the marine ecotoxicity damage cost, from scrubber water discharge in the Baltic Sea Area 2014–2022, amounts to >€680 million in 2019 euros, showing that private economic interests come at the expense of marine environmental damage.
Large methane mitigation potential through prioritized closure of gas-rich coal mines
Qiang Liu et al.
Nature Climate Change, June 2024, Pages 652–658
Abstract:
Large-scale closure of coal mines is required for China to achieve carbon neutrality. However, what this means for methane emissions, particularly for abandoned mine methane (AMM), is highly uncertain. Here we construct a detailed and dynamic coal mine database to estimate China’s coal methane emissions during 2011–2019 and evaluate future emission trajectories based on different mine closure policies. We find that AMM emissions have been largely underestimated, which leads to an increased proportion of AMM in China’s total coal methane emissions, and are expected to become the dominant source by 2035. We develop a coal mine closure strategy prioritizing high-gas-content mines. Compared with the current closure strategy based on mine scale, this strategy could reduce cumulative methane emissions by 67 Tg (26%) to 2050, potentially reaching 100 Tg (39%) with improved methane recovery and utilization practices.