People Stay in Communities After Jobs Disappear

Surprisingly (to economists, anyway), even though these communities remain decimated, many people have still refused to leave them. Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that it was only foreign-born workers and native workers ages 25 to 39 who were likely to leave. Everyone else basically stayed, even if the economic rug was pulled out from under them. It contradicts the standard economic model, which says people will rationally move to where better opportunities present themselves. Why did so many p...

 The Coal Standard

Here's a thought: maybe we could buy off the simplistic goldbug-minded "money is a commodity" thinkers by proposing a coal standard? That is: treat burnable fossil carbon as money? Like BTC, there's a finite amount of it remaining to be mined. Like BTC, mining the last reserves gets incrementally harder over time. Unlike BTC, if you burn it, it's gone for good, so there's an incentive to stockpile it and not burn it (ideally by stockpiling it in the ground, where it comes from, by buying lan...

 Human Respiration is Not a Source of Carbon Emissions

That's not a problem. The CO2 that's released by humans (and animals) is produced by metabolising carbon from food, and the food comes from plants that have been grown recently. During their growth, the plants have absorbed an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Even when eating meat, the animals are typically only a few years old and were fed on recently grown plants. In contrast, the cars run on fossil fuels that are hundreds of million years old.

 Global Warming is a Land Management Issue

One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas. To understand the movement of carbon through the atmosphere and biosphere, we need to measure a lot of numbers. I do not want to confuse you with a lot of numbers, so I will ask you to remember just one number. The number that I ask you to remember is one hundredth of an inch per year. Now I will explain what this number means. ...

 The Charcoal Produced by Respiration

A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely by the act of respiration. That is, the horse in twenty-four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration to supply his natural warmth in that time ..., not in a free state, but in a state of combination.