Sean Meriwether's Blog: The Green Economist, page 20

3 Free Things You Can Do To Help The Planet

Vice President Al Gore has led an educational effort on climate change for decades. His lecture was captured in the provocative 1996 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Armed with mounting evidence, scientific consensus, and a gentlemanly southern manner, Mr. Gore linked our industrialization and carbon emissions to the dramatic changes in the climate. While this information was not new, he packaged the complex science into a digestible format and walked his global audience step by step from c...

Interdependencies of Transportation and Employment

There are two key ingredients to successfully grow a city: employment and transportation. In Alain Bertaud’s article, “Cities as Labor Markets”, the author underscores the interdependencies between these two forces.A city can only be scalable if transportation allows employees to get to their jobs in a reasonable amount of time, with a 1-hour commute each way being a maximum. Additionally there needs to be adiversity of employment options spread throughout the city, not a concentrated mono-in...

Changing Behavior in Business Ethics

In an essay by Matthias Philip Hühn, “You Reap What You Sow: How MBA Programs Undermine Ethics,” the author outlined a growing problem in the business world; a lack of ethics in business. He traces this issue back to MBA programs—ubiquitous in the business world— where students are taught what to think, but are not taught how to think critically. Instructors rely on modeling and case studies because their limited time with students does not allow for more robust or thoughtful discussion. Ethi...

Urban Water, Sanitation & Solid Waste

Many urban centers have been unable to develop successful solid waste and wastewater management plans. As cities grow in size the costs associated with treatment and disposal amplify, along with the negative environmental impact. Several metropolitan areas, including New York, have closed their landfills and have had to truck refuse out of state, or continue to dump untreated wastewater into local rivers due to an aging combined sewer system, at extraordinary cost. Failure to have a comprehen...

Sustainable Development in Developing Cities

Urban planning is a Sisyphean task of balancing multiple needs: economic, affordability, education, employment, land use and transportation. For developing cities reeling from expanding populations and poorly managed resources, the goal of sustainable development may be out of reach. In two cases, Ho Chi Min City and the urban areas of Kenya, the obstacles to achieve results are the usual suspects: conflicting interests, lack of funds, lack of direction/planning and corruption. Added to this...

Are Self-Driving Vehicles a Transportation Solution?

Transportation is one of the key elements to the growth and prosperity of a successful city. The lack of options creates overlapping problems which become amplified as the city grows, including congestion, pollution, economic inequality, and urban sprawl. Cities that do not have affordable mass transit options will find it economically and logistically challenging to add a program after the city reaches a certain population size, or citizens will find their own solutions (i.e. motorcycles in...

Urban Energy Infrastructure and Energy Efficiency

Modern cities would not be possible without energy. However we are quickly outstripping our ability to generate enough energy to supply the market, especially in the developing world where demand is growing. A global concern is that at our current level of energy production we are already producing more GHG emissions than our planet can absorb. Additional power generation will only move the climate change needle, and the global temperature, further into the red. In order to manage our energy...