There is a big story running right now (well, on Drudge Report linking to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research) about Al Gore’s household in TN using 20x the energy of the average national household. The accusation states that:

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.

Obviously there is some truth in what the article says. Gore does live in a mansion, and most likely does use quite a bit of energy. He did indeed call for individuals to reduce energy usage at home, and by living in a mansion and consuming plenty of energy himself, he is not following his own word in that regard. This saddens me, and reminds me of a guest article written by Jon H on gimme-five a while ago. Basically, Jon said that it is really difficult for him to adapt a lifestyle of conservation when the very people that preach for conservation are not “walking the walk.”

And Mr. Gore pretends to announce his candidacy in 2008. Slightly amusing.

Professor James Moody of Ohio State University recently completed a fascinating study, mapping the romantic and sexual relationships of students at a high school over the course of 18 months. Although there were not many students who had many partners,

The romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain. (See figure for a representation of the network.)

Granted, to be in the chain, sexual intercourse is not required. Nevertheless, this has profound implications in regard to the spread of STDs. Because students often think that they are acting non-promiscuously by only having one or two partners over eighteen months, they underestimate their potential risk for getting STDs. Because if those one or two partners happened to be linked in a long chain of people, and one of those people happens to have an STD, there is a real chance that a “non-promiscuous” student could end up with an STD.

I think it would be a really interesting idea to have someone do a study on what discount rates people are using in assessing future damages caused by climate change. For those of you who don’t understand the discount rate, it’s basically a way to find the present value of something in the future. For instance, a dollar today is worth a lot more than a dollar in five years, because you could invest that dollar today and have more in five years.

I just read (ok, skimmed) the Stern Review on Climate Change (it’s very long), and a few of its criticisms. One of the most common criticisms is that the discount rate used by the Stern review is very low compared to reality (meaning, it overestimates the present value of future climate change damages). That may or may not be true, depending on how individuals value the future, but that’s a tricky issue and I’m not going to go into that.

But, I think it would be very useful to do a study where every report written about future climate change damages were compiled, and their assumed discount rates were noted. Then, someone could check to see if there is any statistically significant difference in the discount rates due to the fact that a paper advocates action on climate change or does not.

For example, in some neighborhoods especially in Europe, owning a SUV with high fuel consumption might be accompanied by disapproval from neighbors, family members, or other peers, which might prevent people from buying such vehicles.

Interesting. It’s just the opposite here.

From: Does the hybrid Toyota Prius lead to rebound effects? Analysis of size and number of cars previously owned by Swiss Prius buyers.
Peter de Haan, Michel G. Mueller, Anja Peters (2005)