The political economy of certificates for land use in Germany – experimental evidence

Certificate trading schemes have been discussed as a cost-efficient means of reducing urban land consumption in Germany by capping and reallocating permissions to conduct building projects. However, in contrast to the established cap & trade systems for emissions, reputation-seeking politicians would be in charge of buying and trading certificates – an aspect not considered to date. We thus present a laboratory experiment that captures politicians’ incentives connected to electoral cycles in a cap & trade scheme for land consumption, whereby tradable certificates are auctioned and grandfathered in equal shares. We find the cap & trade system to be efficient at large; yet, there are several politically relevant distortions that are aggravated by self-serving incentives. We thus identify potential problems to a cap & trade system for urban land consumption that could substantially reduce both its assumed superior efficiency and its political feasibility.     

Determining Reduced-Emission Goals Needed to Achieve Air Quality Goals— A Hypothetical Case

Air management steps involved in determining reduced-emission goals include determining the effects of various pollutant concentrations on man, animals, plants, and property; deciding which effects to prevent; selecting ambient air quality goals that will prevent these effects; measuring and evaluating pollutant concentrations from sources and in the ambient atmosphere; calculating over-all source reductions needed to achieve selected ambient air quality goals; and finally, determining reduced-emission goals for the various source types. Examples are cited of the various decisions and actions involved in determining a set of reduced-emission goals for stationary and mobile combustion sources.     

An Air Quality Data Analysis System for Interrelating Effects,Standards, and Needed Source Reductions: Part 3. Vegetation Injury

Acute leaf injury data are analyzed for 19 plant species exposed to ozone or sulfur dioxide. The data can be depicted by a new leaf injury mathematical model with two characteristics: (1) a constant percentage of leaf surface is injured by an air pollutant concentration that is inversely proportional to exposure duration raised to an exponent; (2) for a given exposure duration, the percent leaf injury as a function of pollutant concentration tends to fit a lognormal frequency distribution. Leaf injury as a function of laboratory exposure duration is modeled and compared with ambient air pollutant concentration measurements for various averaging times to determine which exposure durations are probably most important for setting ambient air quality standards to prevent or reduce visible leaf injury. The 8 hour average appears to be most important for most of the plants investigated for most sites, 1 hr concentrations are important for most plants at a few sites, and 3 hr S0₂ concentrations are important for some plants, especially those exposed to isolated point sources of the pollutant. The 1, 3, and 8 hr threshold injury concentrations are listed for each of the 19 plant species studied. To prevent or reduce acute leaf injury, fixed, nonoverlapping ambient air quality measurements and standards are recommended for averaging times of 1, 3, and 8hr.     

An Air Quality Data Analysis System for Interrelating Effects,Standards, and Needed Source Reductions: Part 8. An Effective Mean O3 Crop Reduction Mathematical Model

A plant injury mathematical model, applied previously to acute and chronic leaf injury data, is used here to model National Crop Loss Assessment Network (NCLAN) data for 15 cultivars and to calculate species parameters from the cultivar analyses. Percent crop yield reduction is estimated as a function of a new parameter, the effective mean O₃ concentration: m_e = [(Σ c_h ^?1/v)/n]^?v, where c_h is the hourly average ambient O₃ concentration for each daytime hour (defined here as 9:00 A.M.–4:00 P.M., always standard time) of data available at an air sampling site for summer (defined here as June 1–August 31), n is the total number of such available hours, and v is an exposure time-concentration parameter, calculated here to be approximately –0.376. Crop yield reduction for soybean is calculated here as z = 0.478 In (tm_e ^2-66) – 0.42, where z is the Gaussian transform of percent crop reduction, t is the hours of exposure (525 h is used here; 7 h/day for 75 days), and In indicates that the natural logarithm is taken of the quantity within parentheses. Crop yield reductions for seven plant species are estimated with similar equations for each of the 1824 site-years of 1981–1983 hourly O₃ concentration data available in the National Aerometric Data Bank (NADB). County-average effective mean O₃ concentrations are indicated by shading on a U.S. map. State-average O₃ parameters and estimated percent crop yield reductions are tabulated. The National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for O₃ specifies that, on the average, the second highest daily maximum 1-h average O₃ concentration in a year shall not exceed 0.12 ppm. For years 1981-1983,71% of the NADB sites recorded annual second highest daily maximum 1-h average O3 concentrations below 0.125 ppm (for summer daytime hours). Ambient O₃ concentrations reduced the total U.S. crop yield an estimated 5% for years 1981–1983. (Summer, daytime, and all acronyms are always used herein as defined above.)     

An Air Quality Data Analysis System for Interrelating Effects,Standards, and Needed Source Reductions: Part 10. Potential Ambient O3 Standards to Limit Soybean Crop Reduction

Soybean percent crop reduction was estimated as a function of ambient O₃ concentrations for each of 80 agricultural sites in the National Aerometric Data Bank (NADB) for each available year of data for years 1981-1985. Fourteen O₃ concentration statistics were calculated for each of the resulting 320 site-years of data. The two statistics that correlated best with estimated crop reduction were an effective mean O₃ concentration (1 percent of variance unexplained) and an arithmetic mean O₃ concentration (4 percent unexplained). The worst correlation of the 14 was for the statistic used in the present O₃ National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS), the second highest daily maximum 1-h O₃ concentration (42 percent unexplained). The number of site-years for estimated percent soybean yield reductions was plotted versus increasing O₃ concentrations for each of the 14 O₃ statistics. A maximum crop reduction line was drawn on each plot. These lines were used to estimate (and list) potential ambient O₃ standards for each of the 14 statistics that would limit soybean crop reduction at agricultural. NADB sites to 5, 10, 15, or 20 percent.     

Issues and Trends in Electrostatic Precipitation Technology for U.S. Utilities

The pace and direction of electrostatic precipitator (ESP) technology evolution in the United States will be governed by two key forces. The first is new clean air legislation passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Bush on November 15,1990. This law requires electric utilities to further reduce SO₂ and NO_x emissions, which may impact particulate controls. In addition, very fine (< 10 micron) participates and potentially toxic trace emissions from utility power plants may be regulated. The second major factor is the expected upsurge in new plant construction beginning in the late 1990s. Together, these forces should define the performance requirements and market for new ESPs.

This paper identifies and briefly describes technologies that the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is developing to help U.S. utilities meet these challenges cost-effectively. Among the technologies addressed are: advanced digital voltage controls, flue gas conditioning, intermittent energization, temperature-controlledprecharging (i.e., two-stage ESP), wide plate spacing, positive energization of corona electrodes for hot-side ESPs, and integration of conventional ESPs with pulse-jet baghouses.     

Biophysical suitability,economic pressure and land-cover change: a global probabilistic approach and insights for REDD+

There has been a concerted effort by the international scientific community to understand the multiple causes and patterns of land-cover change to support sustainable land management. Here, we examined biophysical suitability, and a novel integrated index of “Economic Pressure on Land” (EPL) to explain land cover in the year 2000, and estimated the likelihood of future land-cover change through 2050, including protected area effectiveness. Biophysical suitability and EPL explained almost half of the global pattern of land cover (R ² = 0.45), increasing to almost two-thirds in areas where a long-term equilibrium is likely to have been reached (e.g. R ² = 0.64 in Europe). We identify a high likelihood of future land-cover change in vast areas with relatively lower current and past deforestation (e.g. the Congo Basin). Further, we simulated emissions arising from a “business as usual” and two reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) scenarios by incorporating data on biomass carbon. As our model incorporates all biome types, it highlights a crucial aspect of the ongoing REDD + debate: if restricted to forests, “cross-biome leakage” would severely reduce REDD + effectiveness for climate change mitigation. If forests were protected from deforestation yet without measures to tackle the drivers of land-cover change, REDD + would only reduce 30 % of total emissions from land-cover change. Fifty-five percent of emissions reductions from forests would be compensated by increased emissions in other biomes. These results suggest that, although REDD + remains a very promising mitigation tool, implementation of complementary measures to reduce land demand is necessary to prevent this leakage.     

Interaction of temperature and an environmental stressor: Moina macrocopa responds with increased body size,increased lifespan,and increased offspring numbers slightly above its temperature optimum

For organisms, temperature is one of the most important environmental factors and gains increasing importance due to global warming, since increasing temperatures may pose organisms close to their environmental tolerance limits and, thus, they may become more vulnerable to environmental stressors. We analyzed the temperature-dependence of the water-soluble antioxidant capacity of the cladoceran Moina macrocopa and evaluated its life trait variables with temperature (15, 20, 25, 30 °C) and humic substance (HS) concentrations (0, 0.18, 0.36, 0.90, 1.79 mM DOC) as stressors. Temperatures below and above the apparent optimum (20 °C) reduced the antioxidative capacity. Additions of HSs increased body length, but decreased mean lifespan at 15 and 20 °C. There was no clear HS-effect on offspring numbers at 15, 20, and 30 °C. At 25 °C with increasing HS-concentration, lifespan was extended and offspring numbers increased tremendously, reaching 250% of the control. Although the applied HS preparation possesses estrogenic and antiandrogenic activities, a xenohormone mechanism does not seem plausible for the reproductive increase, because comparable effects did not occur at other temperatures. A more convincing explanation appears to be the mitohormesis hypothesis which states that a certain increase of reactive oxygen production leads to improved health and longevity and, with Moina, also to increased offspring numbers. Our results suggest that at least with the eurythermic M. macrocopa, a temperature above the optimum can be beneficial for several life trait variables, even when combined with a chemical stressor. Temperatures approximately 10 °C above its optimum appear to adversely affect the lifespan and reproduction of M. macrocopa. This indicates that this cladoceran species seems to be able to utilize temperature as an ecological resource in a range slightly above its thermal optimum.     

Evaluation of Beta‐naphthoxyacetic Acid for Mutagenic Activity in the Salmonella/mammalian Microsome Assay

1,3‐β‐d‐Glucan derived from baker's yeast was chemically modified in two steps yielding crosslinked carboxymethyl glucan as the sodium salt (2). After cation exchange with hexadecyltrimethylammonium chloride, a hydrophobic adsorbent (3) was obtained which showed an excellent binding of the estrogenic mycotoxin zearalenone with a maximum adsorption of up to 183 mg/g. Compound 3 additionally showed a relatively high adsorption capacity for the trichothecene T‐2 toxin of at least 10 mg/g. Starting from 2, various derivatives were prepared by cation exchange using quaternary ammonium salts bearing substituents besides methyl from four to 18 carbon atoms. The adsorption of T‐2 toxin on these derivatives were compared with compound 3 leading to the conclusion that 3 is the best adsorbent of all investigated tetraalkylammonium‐modified derivatives of 2.