From the ashes of Greed, Green, & Grains
About 10 years ago I had a semi-regular blog. I'm giving it another shot.
I’m back
I used to have a blog called Greed, Green, & Grains, the awkward vestiges of which can be found here. Then, I moved, increased teaching and outreach efforts, adopted kids, and broadened my research interests, especially in energy and decarbonization. I didn’t have time to blog. But I must have written a thousand posts in my mind.
I’m still not sure that I have the time to pull this off, but I figured I’d create this space to write when I can about hankering ideas that don’t belong in more formal outlets or can’t wait for peer review.
I’ve also switched up the title a bit to reflect my broadened interests.
What I’ll be writing about
I am an academic and a social scientist at heart, but like to think the research I do and things I write about could be useful for policy. I think interdisciplinary work is vital, but rarely done with the care or depth it deserves. While I often think technocratically, I also believe the essence of things can be communicated in plain language to a broader audience. So, I aim to write about serious things in an informal, accessible voice.
Topics will include a combination of:
Greed (economics)
Greed is a simplifying working assumption of economics: people act in their own interest. It’s not always true but it’s a good first approximation in most cases, especially if you’re trying to understand, say, pollution and global warming.
More generally, economics is just about the choices people make, individually and collectively. Markets are a big part of this because it is the primary mechanism through which peoples’ choices are coordinated in the modern economy. Government policy is another big piece. So is social psychology: norms, movements, and fads that influence peoples’ preferences and behavior, but these appear to loom much smaller in the minds of economists like me than other scientists and social scientists. It’s an important disconnect that I expect to comment on occasionally.
Though many loathe to admit it, there are:
scientific aspects to economics: trying to figure out why people do what they do, individually & collectively
normative aspects: trying to determine the best choices for individuals and society (i.e., policy).
I’ll write about both of these but try to keep them distinct.
When private interest gets in the way of public interest, policy choices should step in and coerce a better outcome. This is how economists think about policy, and it’s how I think about it.
Grains (agriculture)
I used to work as an economist for the department of agriculture, and most of my publications are in the domain of agricultural economics.
What causes food and agricultural commodity prices to vary? Answers inevitably boil down to supply, demand, trade, and speculation. It’s fun to unpack these factors in real-time when markets are volatile, as they often are. An emerging side gig of mine is forecasting crop yields, so I may write about that.
How do economists and others go about estimating impacts of climate change, especially agriculture, including some of the intellectual debate and difficult empirical and modeling challenges? This question is a research topic of mine, so I’ll write about that, especially in connection to the question immediately above this one.
Links between agriculture and the environment, especially including (a) water use; (b) chemical and nutrient leaching, perhaps the greatest source of water pollution in the world; and (c) the role of food and agriculture in greenhouse gas emissions.
The role of agricultural policies in the food economy, including things like conservation subsidies, price supports, crop insurance, crop forecasts, ethanol mandates, and food stamps.
Gigawatts (energy)
I’ve always been interested in energy economics, but didn’t really get into it until about a decade ago, motivated mainly by a desire to find solutions to our climate problem rather than just estimate impacts. Topics here will include:
Pathways and costs of decarbonizing the world economy. Experts generally accept that this will happen mainly via the electrification of transport and industry, plus a lot of solar, wind, and batteries.
There’s more to it than that, of course, and the blog will write about those things at different scales ranging from local utility policy, rules and oversight by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the EPA, national policy like the Inflation Reduction Act, and decarbonization planning at all scales.
Energy markets, especially electricity and natural gas. These markets are governed by regulated networks (wires and pipelines). Markets, where they exist, are (very) imperfect and oftentimes arcane. How do these markets work? How can they be shifted to the clean systems we envision for the future?
Regulation of local network monopolies. Regulation can be even more arcane than energy markets; yes, these are intertwined. I’ve come to believe that problems with regulation at all levels, but especially the local level, are the greatest obstacles to decarbonization.
My outlook leans techno-optimist, but that may or may not mean what you think it means. It means we can decarbonize the world economy at a fairly low economic cost if policies are right. And I think the policy changes needed to get there are fairly straightforward. But implementing those needed policies is extremely difficult because the political economy is quite good at complicating or otherwise obscuring essential truths from the public and oftentimes from the regulators themselves. I hope to explain this thesis, probably over a large number of posts.
Hawai’i’s clean energy ambitions. Hawai’i is a poster child for all the promises and pitfalls of a clean energy economy. The State was the first to set “100% clean” energy as the goal. The actual policy isn’t what it’s often purported to be, but there are larger problems with our transition to date, problems that I think are emblematic of clean energy transitions around the country and world. So, hopefully writing about Hawai’i’s challenges will be useful beyond these islands.
Technical tidbits
The underlying science and analysis of all the topics here can be excruciatingly technical. I’ll probably write a bit about technical issues and debates. I expect to include things like:
Discuss causal inference with observational data, past fallacies, and new empirical tools.
Methodological divides between fields and disciplines about how to do science and economics.
Large-scale optimization modeling and power system planning, and how methods are evolving.
What the marginal cost of electricity is in a high-renewable power system that has little or no fuel and almost all costs are fixed (solar+wind+batteries).
Why efficient pricing ought to set prices equal to the short-run, social marginal cost for all things, especially electricity in high-renewable systems (and the weird reasons this is controversial).
Why clean energy requires new optimization software to plan and operate electricity systems and why regulators ought to force utilities to make the software open-source and real-time marginal cost public in real-time.
The growing importance of weather forecasting and how markets and machine learning tools anticipate this growing importance.
Cool graphs from my papers and others’ papers.