Carlisle Ford Runge

Treadmill desks: A 1-year prospective trial

Objective: Sedentariness is associated with weight gain and obesity. A treadmill desk is the combination of a standing desk and a treadmill that allow employees to work while walking at low speed.

Global agriculture and carbon trade-offs

Significance We assess how to meet growing demand for agricultural production to minimize impact on the environment. Higher levels of population and affluence may require expanding land in agriculture by converting grasslands and forests to cropland. Such conversions often reduce valuable ecosystem services. Our research identifies where are the best places to expand agricultural production that minimize the loss of one ecosystem service, carbon storage. We show that selectively choosing where to expand agriculture saves over

Shifting Foundations of Agricultural Policy Analysis: Welfare Economics When Risk Markets Are Incomplete

1 trillion (2012 US dollars) worth of carbon storage relative to a proportional expansion. Feeding a growing and increasingly affluent world will require expanded agricultural production, which may require converting grasslands and forests into cropland. Such conversions can reduce carbon storage, habitat provision, and other ecosystem services, presenting difficult societal trade-offs. In this paper, we use spatially explicit data on agricultural productivity and carbon storage in a global analysis to find where agricultural extensification should occur to meet growing demand while minimizing carbon emissions from land use change. Selective extensification saves ∼6 billion metric tons of carbon compared with a business-as-usual approach, with a value of approximately

Induced Agricultural Innovation and Environmental Quality: The Case of Groundwater Regulation

1 trillion (2012 US dollars) using recent estimates of the social cost of carbon. This type of spatially explicit geospatial analysis can be expanded to include other ecosystem services and other industries to analyze how to minimize conflicts between economic development and environmental sustainability.

Export Demand, U.S. Farm Income, and Land Prices: 1949-1985

The neat alignment of resources, output, and prices specified by the perfect competition model is far from duplicated in free markets, and the equally neat alignment assumed under the constraints of a program is not experienced when programs are in effect. In particular, areas under empirically determined supply curves are unlikely to represent opportunity costs. The basic theory is invaluable in providing a conceptual orientation for the analysis of programs, but the assumptions implicit in the literal use of simple forms of it for policy conclusions are breathtakingly heroic.

Energy Exploration on Wilderness: "Privatization" and Public Lands Management

Induced innovation in agriculture includes the impacts of technology on environmental quality. The induced innovation hypothesis maintains that technological change substitutes abundant factors for scarce ones (Hayami and Ruttan 1985). This hypothesis may be extended by arguing that agricultural technology change often affects the quality of factors of production such as groundwater or soil fertility. Once adopted, for example, irrigation technology may affect groundwater quality. Yet the market often fails to reflect the scarcity value of environmental quality characteristics.

Assessing the comparative productivity advantage of bioenergy feedstocks at different latitudes.

The growing openness of the U.S. economy has caused world supply and demand conditions to have significant farm-level impacts, emphasizing the important macroeconomic linkages between capital, goods, and factor markets in agriculture (Schuh 1983). This study considers the linkage from the international grain market to U.S. farm income in the post-war period, 194985. This linkage suggests that export demand may also have played an important role affecting land and other input prices through the derived demand relationship. Burt (1986), Phipps (1984), and Robison, Lins, and Venkataraman (1985) have each shown that land prices are closely tied to real and expected net returns to farming. This study seeks to supplement their findings by examining the relative role of exports in determining these returns over time. Empirical results clearly show the export/farm income connection. The further linkage to land values, while present, is somewhat less clear.

Global food demand and carbon-preserving cropland expansion under varying levels of intensification

This note reviews three perspectives relevant to the balance of private and public interests in land resources: 1) the technical feasibility of private exploitation of publicly held lands, 2) economic efficiency, and 3) valuative questions of social welfare. It concludes that greater attention to the technical, economic, and social value of land resources is essential to the development of reasonable guidelines for the allocation of property rights. Policy in some cases will favor privatization, and in other cases will favor wilderness. The level of public debate in deciding these cases will be raised if it avoids ideology and rhetoric, and concentrates on more relevant issues. 88 references, 1 table.

Are we in this together? Risk bearing and collective action

We evaluate the comparative productivity of maize and sugarcane biofuel feedstocks as a function of latitude. Solar radiation for photosynthesis varies by latitude and contributes to differential productivity of tropical and temperate zones. We calculate comparative productivity in two ways—the amount of net sugar energy produced per unit area, and the amount produced per unit of net primary productivity (NPP). NPP measures the accumulation of energy in an ecosystem and can be used as a proxy for the capacity of an ecosystem to support biodiversity and a broader array of ecosystem services. On average sugarcane produces three times more energy per unit area than does maize. The comparative productivity advantage of sugarcane decreases with increases in latitude. Latitudes closer to the equator have higher NPP, so there is a greater trade-off between biofuel production and ecosystem productivity in the equatorial zones. The comparative productivity of sugarcane relative to maize is reduced when comparing biofuel energy per unit of NPP. Sugarcane is still twice as productive on average compared to maize in the amount of biofuel energy produced per unit of NPP. Regions near the equator have lower biofuel energy per unit NPP, making them less attractive for biofuels production.

Institutions and the Free Rider: The Assurance Problem in Collective Action

Increasing demand for agricultural crops and a decline in the rate of yield improvements will require expansion of cropland (extensification), resulting in a loss of carbon storage. This paper uses global, spatially explicit data to analyze how extensification can be located to meet crop demand in a way that minimizes carbon losses under varying levels of intensification. Carbon-preserving extensification can reduce carbon loss by 7.3 billion tons compared to proportionally increasing extensification by 2050, valued at