Enforcement of mitigation measures resulting from environmental impact assessment

Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to the problem of enforcing mitigation measures identified in environmental impact assessment. Present or proposed enforcement systems in the USA, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia are described and discussed. Although the best enforcement system would depend on the local social, political, and legal systems, five universally desirable features are identified. First, a comprehensive coordinated monitoring and reassessment system is needed. Second, the agencies concerned must have adequate resources to do the work and incentives to carry it out well. Third, there must be the necessary legal powers. Fourth, provision must be made for changing the conditions based on experience. And fifth, the system should be equally effective against private companies and public authorities.     

Enforcement missions: Targets vs budgets

Enforcement of policy is typically delegated. What sort of mission should the head of an enforcement program be given? When there is more than one firm being regulated the firms’ decision problems—otherwise completely separate—become linked in a way that depends on that mission. Under some sorts of missions firms compete to avoid the attention of the enforcer by competitive reductions in the extent of their non-compliance, in others the interaction encourages competitive expansions. We develop a general model that allows for the ordering of some typical classes of missions. We find that in plausible settings ‘target-driven’ missions (that set a hard target in terms of environmental outcome but flexible budget) achieve the same outcome at lower cost than ‘budget-driven’ ones (that fix the enforcement budget). Inspection of some fixed fraction of firms is never optimal.     

Inherently safer sustained casing pressure testing for well integrity evaluation

This paper presents the use of a model to predict sustained casing pressure (SCP), from early pressure buildup data, as a basis for inherently safer well integrity testing. Inherently safer principles aim to eliminate or reduce the hazards by design rather than by using protective features. SCP, a well integrity issue exhibited in many wells, is any measurable pressure that rebuilds after being bled down and attributable to causes other than artificially applied pressure or temperature fluctuations in the well. Intrusion of gas, resulting in SCP, can occur because of poor cement bond in the casing or cement deterioration. Gas entering the annulus migrates to the wellhead and represents a hazard due to increased wellhead pressure and the gas inventory. Compromised well integrity can have catastrophic consequences on both environmental and safety aspects.Most regulations require the monitoring, testing and, eventually, the elimination of SCP. However, test data analysis is predominantly qualitative and limited to arbitrary criteria. Due to the high percentage of wells that present SCP, accurate, safe and preferably fast testing methods are needed. This paper implements an analytical model, rooted in the transport processes and thermodynamics of the system, to predict pressure profiles and gas accumulation during SCP testing from early-time pressure buildup data. The amount of gas accumulated during different testing criteria, being 1) current practices and 2) early diagnostic by the analytical model, is calculated and compared. Results show that using the analytical model as a predictive tool, testing time is reduced significantly, thereby limiting the amount of gas accumulated and reducing the risk. This makes the testing procedure inherently safer as well as less time consuming.     

试论劳动保护法规建设

探讨了劳动保护法规的特性、作用和现状，并就劳动保护法规建设提出了建议。力图引起劳动保护立法界人士和工作者的注意，推动劳动保护法规建设与市场经济同步发展。     

关于环境行政处罚的强制执行

《中华人民共和国行政处罚法》规定当事人逾期不履行行政处罚，行政机关可以依法实施强制执行。行政处罚的强制执行分为行政强制执行和司法强制执行，两者在执行的条件、程序等方面存在着许多不同。由于环境保护行政主管部门实施行政处罚强制执行必须拥有行政强制执行权，而行政复议和行政诉讼期间环境行政处罚实际上的停止执行会带来一些负面效应，因此建议适应赋予环境保护行政主管部门一定的行政强制执行权。     

Tying enforcement to prices in emissions markets: An experimental evaluation

We present results from laboratory emissions permit markets designed to investigate the transmission of abatement cost risk to firms' compliance behavior and regulatory enforcement strategies. With a fixed expected marginal penalty, abatement cost shocks produced significant violations and emissions volatility as predicted. Tying the monitoring probability to average permit prices effectively eliminated noncompliance, but transmitted abatement cost risk to monitoring effort. Tying the penalty to average prices reduced violations, but did not eliminate them. Some individuals in these treatments sold permits at low prices, presumably in an attempt to weaken enforcement. While tying sanctions directly to prevailing permit prices has theoretical and practical advantages over tying monitoring to prices, our results suggest that tying sanctions to prices may not be as effective as predicted without additional modifications.     

The role of enforcement programs in increasing seat belt use

Seat belt laws by themselves led to increased belt use in the United States and Canada, but initial effects were limited. Canadian provincial officials launched highly publicized enforcement campaigns in the early 1980s that resulted in substantially increased belt use. Canadian-style enforcement programs subsequently were adopted in the United States, and the use of such programs has grown in recent years. Lessons from these efforts include the importance of police leadership, focused publicity about enforcement, and sustained rather than single-shot efforts. What is needed in the United States to achieve a national belt use rate of 90% or greater is widespread, methodical, and sustained application of enforcement programs augmented by creative publicity. Enhanced penalties-in particular drivers license points-likely will be needed to reach hard-core nonusers.     

The optimal pricing of pollution when enforcement is costly

We consider the pricing of a uniformly mixed pollutant with a model of optimal, possibly firm-specific, emissions taxes and their enforcement under incomplete information about firms’ abatement costs, enforcement costs, and pollution damage. We argue that optimality requires an enforcement strategy that induces full compliance by every firm, except possibly when a regulator can base the probabilities of detecting individual violations on observable correlates of violators’ actual emissions. Moreover, optimality requires discriminatory taxes, except when a regulator is unable to use observable firm-level characteristics to gain some information about the variation in firms’ abatement costs or monitoring costs.     

Climate treaties and approaching catastrophes

If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries' behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower, treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe, sustaining only modest cuts in emissions. These results are unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of catastrophe. By contrast, uncertainty about the catastrophic threshold normally causes coordination to collapse. Whether the probability density function has “thin” or “fat” tails makes little difference.