School Notes: School of the Environment
May/June 2010

When measuring air pollution’s effect, it’s all about location

Where air pollution occurs can greatly affect its economic consequences, according to research conducted by an environment school professor and a colleague. Robert Mendelsohn ’78PhD, Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy, and Nicholas Muller ’07PhD, an economics professor at Middlebury College, examined the costs of the damages caused by air pollution emissions at various locations. They found that air pollution has something oddly in common with real estate: “It’s all about location, location, location,” Mendelsohn said. “Just like where a house is located makes a big difference in its value, a polluter’s location can make a huge difference in terms of the economic consequences of its emissions.”

As an example, they estimate that an extra ton of a single pollutant, sulfur dioxide, spewed from a power plant in, say, parts of the New York metropolitan area would cost society 50 times more than that same ton emitted in the rural Pacific Northwest. Most of that cost involves harm to human health, although the two economists also considered other factors, including the known damage that pollution can do to crops, forests, and man-made materials. Mendelsohn and Muller propose a new era of pollution regulation that takes into account these differences. The research was published in the December 2009 issue of the American Economic Review.

Online magazine wins national award

Yale Environment 360, the environment school’s online magazine, has won the award for best video in the 2010 National Magazine Awards for Digital Media, for an original report that it produced and posted on the site about mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.

The video, Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, was one of five finalists in the video category that included National Geographic and the New York Times style magazine. Directed by Chad Stevens and produced by Yale Environment 360 and the multimedia company Media Storm, the 20-minute video depicts the enormous environmental and human costs of mountaintop removal mining. The practice, which involves blasting the tops off mountains to get at the coal seams below, has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of Appalachian forest, buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams in mining debris, contaminated water supplies, and driven some local residents from their homes.

Launched in June 2008, Yale Environment 360 was one of just six online-only magazines to receive a nomination as a finalist for this year’s National Magazine Awards, which are regarded as the most prestigious awards in magazine publishing.