Bryan Parthum

Hydropower Was Ecuador’s Answer to Climate Change. Until the Drought Hit. An extraordinary drought has drained Ecuador’s rivers and reservoirs, leading to power outages of up to 14 hours. Some fear this is the beginning of a larger global crisis.

Powerful article on #drought and #hydroelectricity.

"By harnessing water, not burning oil or gas, to produce electricity, this new energy matrix was supposed to help mitigate the effects of global climate change — not make Ecuador a victim of it."

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/w...

Two environmental economics contributions among the 10 featured AEA charts 2024 @frikknesje.bsky.social @eyalfrank.bsky.social
happy holidays everyone 🎄🎄

Synthesis of evidence yields high social cost of carbon due to structural model variation and uncertainties | PNAS Estimating the cost to society from a ton of CO2—termed the social cost of carbon (SCC)—requires connecting a model of the climate system with a re...

Excited to announce a new @pnas.org publication on the Social Cost of Carbon. We integrate evidence from the literature and expert survey to provide an SCC distribution inclusive of both parametric and structural uncertainties. Our mean 2020 value is $283 per ton CO2
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Factors Influencing Customer Participation in a Program to Replace Lead Pipes for Drinking Water - Environmental and Resource Economics Many public water systems are struggling to locate and replace lead pipes that distribute drinking water across the United States. This study investigates factors associated with customer participatio...

Lead service lines are pervasive in drinking water systems. Despite the well-known health risks from their use, replacing them, and even locating them, has been a monumental challenge. In this study, we take a look into why, and possible solutions. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

As Climate Shocks Worsen, U.S. Disaster Agency Tries a New Approach to Aid Changes include immediate cash for more evacuees, and more money for temporary housing and for repairing damaged homes.

Important reforms to enable access to FEMA assistance, particularly for low income folks. But - as the article points out - increasing reliance in federal aid due to faltering insurance markets and growing disaster costs is concerning

www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/c...

Thanks Fran!!

Thanks, I was really interested because we hadn’t found any pub with them. We did come across versions of FUND with HFC forcing, so you likely recovered them at some point, but when there’s prolific Tols out there it’s hard to find everything. These SF6 links are really helpful and timely though!

Oh this is great, we’d just started looking for existing SF6 estimates, thanks! As you know well, there’s a lot on gdp vs. gwp and not a focus of our paper. Instead, we set out to quantify Kigali with recent advances in IAMs.

can you share a link? Thanks!

Sustainability assessment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite... The growth of mega-constellations is rapidly increasing the number of rocket launches required to place new satellites in space. While Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband satellites help to connect...

Would love to see it :)

I've been thinking about CFC/HFC impacts a lot lately because rocket launches for satellite constellations -- we're estimating up to ~5kt of CFC-11eq will be released for some of the planned systems. Your paper is perfectly timed for me haha

arxiv.org/abs/2309.02338

But also your Q just now made me realize that the reviewers (who were really insightful) asked us to disaggregate the incremental changes between the old and new, but we never did that with the ratios (but we have the data). I’ll look at that and share. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks so much! Oof yeah you have it right, that was a surprise to us too. After digging in to why, we concluded it’s a mix of poor climate models in early gen IAMs (and better reduced complexity ones now), scenario projections, and a move to growth-consistent discounting.

Sorry, last post in my disorganized Bluesky thread, #alwayslearning

bsky.app/profile/brya...

The social costs of hydrofluorocarbons and the benefits from their expedited phase-down - Nature Cli... Hydrofluorocarbons are a class of important greenhouse gases, and quantitative estimates of their social cost are still lacking. This research develops a set of direct estimates of their economic cost...

Oops, first time with Bluesky threads, here’s the link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ungated copy of the paper available here https://bryanparthum.github.io/papers/papers/Tan_Rennels_Parthum_2024.pdf

This was a really fun project with two amazing future stars, Tammy Tan (an ORISE predoc fellow of ours) and Lisa Rennels (another ORISE fellow) and if you are lucky enough to have them apply to your program or department you should do everything you can to hire them.

We then apply our SC-HFCs to the Kigali Amendment, a global agreement addressing hydrofluorocarbon emissions, to estimate the climate benefits over the lifetime of the agreement.

Recognizing that recent advancements have been made in estimating the social cost of greenhouse gases, such as those in Rennert et al 2023 (Nature) and in EPA's recent oil and gas rule, we develop the framework to estimate the SC-HFCs consistent with these cutting edge models.

With this in mind, we estimate paths of additional radiative forcing from their release and integrate them into the existing US Government's models that estimate the social costs of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.

Previous attempts to estimate the climate damages associated with their use relied on global warming potentials relative to other greenhouse gases (e.g., CO2). However, we show that this is a poor proxy for estimating their social costs.

What are hydrofluorocarbons? They are a potent greenhouse gas that is used in many cooling technologies (air conditioning/heat pumps, insulations, etc.), the same technologies that are being relied upon to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.

New paper out in Nature Climate Change today where we develop the first direct estimates of the social costs of hydrofluorocarbons (SC-HFCs) and the large climate benefits associated with global agreements that phase down their production and consumption https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01

Unequal climate impacts on global values of natural capital - Nature Country-level changes in economic production and the value of non-market ecosystem benefits show unequal impacts on the global values of natural capital resulting from climate-change-induced shifts in...

What unfolds when ecosystems shift across national borders due to climate change?

Thrilled to share our latest paper in Nature, which delves into the consequences of these climate-driven biome migrations on human well-being.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bringing Environmental Justice into Government Rulemaking, with Ann Wolverton Ann Wolverton discusses how the US Environmental Protection Agency incorporates environmental justice into the agency’s analysis of regulations.

Really enjoyed this conversation with Ann Wolverton about how EPA economists are incorporating environmental justice considerations into their analyses. Check it out #EconSky
www.resources.org/resources-ra...

The U.S. Global Change Research Program seeks nominees for the First National Nature Assessment.

globalchange.gov/notices/call...

New working paper alert!

@julianreif.bsky.social and I tackle the question of "What can we learn about the effects of chronic pollution exposure from shorter-run estimates?"

www.nber.org/papers/w31858

Postdoc opportunities at Yale School of the Environment – Scaling up measurement of natural capital and developing uses of natural capital accounts (with Eli Fenichel)

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8lr78...

But we haven’t had a single pandemic since the pandemic

The US Environmental Protection Agency Introduces a New Social Cost of Carbon for Public Comment The US Environmental Protection Agency has introduced an updated approach to estimating the social cost of carbon that incorporates important scientific and statistical advances.

www.resources.org/common-resou...