Lecture Notes and Short Texts in Environmental and Transport Economics
Overview of climate-related topics including risks, predictions, and solutions. The text, image, and podcast audio content are drawn from a variety of sources. The topics of risk and decision-making under uncertainty are explained from basics using climate examples. All materials are available under a free licence.
This blog, mainly on environmental economic topics, has built up more than 300 posts over its first fifteen years, many of which are explanations of topics such as the valuation of environmental intangibles, or Net Present Value versus Benefit Cost Ratio.
Archived site for a course exploring "the proper role of government in the regulation of the environment," centered on Kolstad's textbook Environmental Economics. It includes PDF format slides, lecture notes and selected assignments without solutions.
This is an attempt to make a freely reusable online textbook for Transportation Economics, aimed at "advanced undergraduate and graduate civil engineering, planning, business, and economics students, though the material may provide a useful review for practitioners". It presently includes fourteen content pages, each of which is meant to have content appropriate for a ninety-minute lecture. All the text and images can be copied, adapted and redistributed.
A five-side primer introducing key concepts from the mainstream and from ecological economics (Microsoft Word format)
Lecture notes and slides in PDF format from a course taught in 2008
Reading list, selected lecture notes and assignments from a Masters-level 2008 course that aims to "give a broad insight into the different facets of transportation systems, while providing a solid introduction to transportation demand and cost analyses."
This 32-page module, drawn from the sixth chapter of the textbook Macroeconomics in Context, presents an overview of innovations in national accounting related to measuring well-being. The module describes satellite accounts for the environment, methods of counting household production, and the construction of well-being indicators such as the Genuine Progress Indicator and the Human Development Index.
This module, based on the 2006 textbook "Environmental and Natural Resource Economics: A Contemporary Approach", discusses the scientific evidence on climate change, including recent projections on temperature and sea-level rise. It then evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of economic analysis of the issue, including discussion of valuation of environmental damages, carbon taxes, tradable permits, and policy issues.
These detailed lecture notes and slides are from an Environmental Economics course at Queen Mary. There are nearly thirty files for download in PDF. Lecture topics include: Introduction, Origins and Prospects, The Origins of Mankind, Population Dynamics, AIDS in Africa, Malthus and His Contemporaries, Fisheries: The Tragedy of the Commons, Global Warming, Depletion of Stratospheric Ozone, Time Preference and Myopia, Nuclear Power and the UK Energy Policy, Neoclassical Analysis of Pollution Costs, Electricity from Renewables, Malthus: Essay on the Principle of Population, Coase: The Problem of Social Cost, Dasgupta: The Population Problem, Boserup: Conditions of Agricultural Growth, McEvedy: European Population History, McEvedy: Asian Population History, Detr: Climate Change and Its Impacts, IPCC WG1: The Third Assessment Report of Working Group I of the (IPCC), Pollution, and Nuclear Power.
Published originally in 2003 as a 57-page booklet, this briefing for the US Congress presents a lay introduction to the climate change and the ways in which government can play a role in its mitigation, including issues of international co-operation. Being in the public domain, the text and images can be copied and reused elsewhere without restriction. The original is a PDF, but this Wikisource edition makes it easier to bookmark or copy individual sections or figures.
Economics and the Environment presents online resources from 2000 linked to the book of the same title. 'The Problem of the Homeless Salmon', which uses the example of declining fish stocks to probe ideas about common-pool resources, external costs and sustainable depletion, setting out the issues as a detective exercise and ending with multiple-choice questions. The site includes the book's Introduction, which outlines market-based solutions to environmental (externality) problems, stressing the importance of property rights and incentives.
