The theory of efficient markets, when applied beyond financial markets, is proposed by those who bridle against government regulation of business. Their idea is that markets will punish bad behavior of individual firms or even whole industries and thus create incentives for firms to produce goods and services without harming employees, consumers, or the environment. […]
We went for the first time this year to the Orono Bog Boardwalk on Monday morning. This is an absolute gem of a resource for the Penobscot Valley community, giving people easy access to a part of our Acadian landscape that is not often so easily visited. If you have never been there you will […]
One narrative about the Yellow Vest protests in France is that politicians should not adopt energy taxes to change behaviors that lead to climate change. In this telling, the political costs of wise energy policy are too high. This is an overly simple reading of the French experience and is a convenient excuse for those […]
Let’s start with two facts. First, the human population continues to change in unprecedented ways how the Earth’s systems function. Originally this was called global warming. The realization that changes in the global climate included more than just temperature changes led to use of the term climate change. Now we understand that more in nature […]
If you have read Stirring the Pot blog very much (thank you), you will have noticed two persistent themes — inequality and the environment. Examples of bogs on inequality include: Class Warfare? Shame on Us The Crisis of Our Age: Part II Welfare Economics Among those on environmental issues are: When Did We Stop Worrying […]
Most Mainers know something about seaweed, some of what they know might even be true. My mother sang the praises of dulse in her diet, though I recall that she rarely ate it. My father used what we called rockweed from the shores of Penobscot Bay to enrich his vegetable garden. R.P.T. Coffin describes the […]
For the past few weeks we have heard a Northern Bobwhite singing in our neighborhood. This is a bird we associate with Southern New England, so we were surprised to hear it in Eastern Maine. My first thought was, here is yet another bird whose range has moved north in response to climate change, a […]
Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel and colleagues estimated that the earth might be able to sustain only 2 billion people by the end of the fossil fuel era. There are about 7.5 billion humans on the planet right now. It seems counterintuitive that there is nearly 4 times the sustainable population now living on the […]
Before last weekend, the last time I had spent any time on Maine’s Southern beaches was a field trip for a geology class in my first year of college (don’t ask the year). Professor Hussey used the trip to immerse us in the patterns of coastal geology. In early April we spent a couple of […]
In the environmental debates of the 1970s, one common name hurled at environmentalists was to call them “neo-Malthusians.” This dismissive insult was meant to imply that the concern for environmental issues was nothing more than the contemporary application of the failed analysis of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Malthus was a classical economist in the tradition of […]
