Environmental Economics.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

The NBER's Working Group on Environmental Economics met in Cambridge on April 6 and 7. Working Group Director Don Fullerton of the University of Texas, Austin organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

Michael Greenstone, MIT and NBER, and Olivier Deschenes, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Climate Change, Mortality, and Adaptation: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather in the U.S."

Discussant: Robert Mendelsohn, Yale University

Gilbert E. Metcaff, Tufts University and NBER, "Energy Conservation in the United States: Understanding its Rote in Climate Policy"

Discussant: Catherine Wolfram, University of California, Berkeley and NBER

Charles Kolstad and Nicholas Burger, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Voluntary Public Goods Provision, Coalition Formation, and Uncertainty"

Discussant: Talbot Page, Brown University

Nathaniel O. Keohane and Andrey Voynov, Yale University, and Erin T. Mansur, Yale University and NBER; "Averting Enforcement: Strategic Response to the Threat of Environmental Regulation"

Discussant: Louis Kaplow, Harvard University and NBER

Matthew J. Kotchen, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Voluntary Provision of Public Goods for Bads: A Theory of Environmental Offsets"

Discussant: Geoffrey Heal, Columbia University and NBER

William D. Nordhaus, Yale University and NBER, "The Economics of Hurricanes in the United States" (NBER Working Paper No. 12813)

Discussant: Wolfram Schlenker, Columbia University

Deschenes and Greenstone measure the welfare loss associated with the direct risks to health posed by climate change in the United States: they develop estimates of the impact of temperature on human mortality and energy consumption (perhaps the primary form of self-protection against high temperatures). Using predictions from the Hadley 3 Model and A1FI scenario from 2070-99, which indicate an increase in the daily mean temperature of 6[degrees]F on average in the United States, their preferred mortality estimates indicate that climate change will lead to roughly 35,000 more deaths per year by the end of the century. That is roughly a 1.3 percent increase in the annual fatality rate. However, these estimated overall impacts are statistically indistinguishable from zero--and the 95 percent confidence interval ranges from a decline of 23,000 fatalities to an increase of 93,000 per year. The estimates for some subgroups are more precise, as statistically significant increases in mortality...