Another avenue of action: an examination of climate change countermovement industries’ use of PAC donations and their relationship to Congressional voting over time

The political mobilization of American business elites in the 1970s and 1980s has been well studied by political scientists. Environmental sociologists have explored how industries in this elite countermovement have organized to prevent environmental legislation. The literature often focuses on the efforts of this movement to shape public opinion on climate change. However, political scientists argue business elites are running several parallel strategies simultaneously in order to protect their interests. FEC data are utilized in multilevel logit models to examine how donations from industrial Political Action Committees (PACs) relate to Congressional representative’s environmental voting behavior over a 20-year period. Industries associated with the environmental countermovement have increasingly used PAC donations over time, and every additional $10,000 a representative received from countermovement industries significantly decreased odds of their taking the pro-environmental stance even when controlling for representatives’ demographics, districts, Congressional polarization and time-period.     

Moral reasoning in adaptation to climate change

Moral foundations theory argues that moral reasoning is widely observed and fundamental to the legitimacy of relevant governance and policy interventions. A new analytical framework to examine and test how moral reasoning underpins and legitimizes governance and practice on adaptation to climate change risks is proposed. It develops a typology of eight categories of vulnerability-based and system-based moral reasoning that pertain to the dilemmas around adaptation and examines the prevalence of these moral categories in public discourse about specific adaptation issues. The framework is tested using data on climate change impact, adaptation, and societal responsibility, drawn from 14 focus groups comprising 148 participants across the UK. Participants consistently use moral reasoning to explain their views on climate adaptation; these include both vulnerability-based and system-based framings. These findings explain public responses to adaptation options and governance, and have implications for the direction of adaptation policy, including understanding which types of reasoning support politically legitimate interventions.     

Do global climate summits influence public awareness and policy preferences concerning climate change?

A survey-embedded experiment implemented around the time of the 2014 annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (N ≈ 1200) examined whether such summits are able to increase citizens’ awareness of climate problems. This study finds that exposure to positive or negative cues about the COP increases climate change awareness, particularly among participants who start out with a low level of awareness. Neither positive nor negative cues about the COP significantly affect people’s policy preferences. Our finding resonates with Bernard Cohen’s observation that the mass media may not often be successful in telling people what to think, but they are successful in telling readers what to think about.     

Why does the United States lack a global warming policy? The corporate inner circle versus public interest sector elites

Why has the United States not adopted global warming policies? Because the inner circle of the corporate elite has opposed these policies despite some corporate support for cap-and-trade and other policies. Pro- and anti-positions taken by think tanks that have led the policy debate in the post-Kyoto period are analyzed in order to demonstrate this. The corporate and upper class social ties of the directors of these pro- and anti-think tanks are examined, revealing a corporate elite split between the inner circle opposing these policies, and a ‘public interest sector’ of corporate law and media corporations along with top executives from higher education and other nonprofits that is supportive of policies addressing global warming. To enable adoption of major global warming policies, the corporate inner circle will need to become supportive and forge a class-wide corporate consensus on the need to address global warming.     

Ambiguity,reasoned determination,and climate-change policy

This paper examines climate-change benefit-cost analysis in the presence of scientific uncertainty in the form of ambiguity. The specific issue addressed is the robustness of benefit-cost analyses of climate-change policy alternatives to relaxation of Savage's original axioms. Two alternatives to subjective expected utility (SEU) are considered: maximin expected utility (MEU) and incomplete expected utility (IEU). Among other results, it is demonstrated that polar opposite recommendations can emerge in an ambiguous decision setting even if all agree on Society's rate of time preference, Society's risk attitudes, the degree of ambiguity faced, and the scientific primitives. We show that, for a simple numerical simulation of our model, an MEU decision maker favors policies which immediately tackle climate change while an IEU decision prefers “business as usual”.“Each agency shall assess the costs and benefits of the intended regulation, and recognizing that some costs and benefits are difficult to quantify, propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that the benefits of the intended regulation justify its cost.” Executive Order 12866 of the US President.     

Low-impact development for impervious surface connectivity mitigation: assessment of directly connected impervious areas (DCIAs)

Urbanization increases directly connected impervious area (DCIA), the impervious area that is hydraulically connected to downstream drainage by closed pipelines. Although the benefits of low-impact development (LID) have been examined in other studies, its effect on alleviating DCIA levels has seldom been assessed. This study measured the DCIA of urban watersheds in Houston, TX, USA. Five land-use types were categorized and the contribution of LID facilities to reducing DCIA in each type was estimated by using Sutherland's equations. The results showed (1) DCIA in commercial areas was greater than that in residential areas, especially for big-box retailers; (2) the percentage of DCIA reduction by LID varied by land-use type; and (3) optimal combinations of LID application could maximize the effectiveness of DCIA reduction. The results contribute to prioritizing land-use type for implementing LID practices and providing local governments with a useful measure to estimate runoff volume.     

Public participation in municipal solid waste source-separated collection in Guilin,China: status and influencing factors

Currently, China is facing critical problems regarding the management of municipal solid waste (MSW). The failure of existing pilot programs in implementing MSW source-separated collection highlights the need to analyze the factors significantly influencing public participation in this activity. To this end, a comprehensive analysis of MSW source-separated collection in Guilin, which is representative of wider areas located in inland China and with a GDP around the national average, was conducted. The research consisted of in-person interviews involving a questionnaire and theoretical analyses in terms of public perception, public awareness, public attitude, and willingness to pay. The analytical results identify the status of waste source-separated collection and influencing factors in implementation, and provides exercisable suggestions for decision makers in both China and more generally in industrializing countries to design promotion programs and education campaigns.     

Cause,catalyst or conjunction? The influence of the Habitats Directive on policy instrument choice in Member States

In the process of implementing EU policy, Member States sometimes introduce new policy instruments in cases where this is not obligatory. To better understand this phenomenon, this paper reviews three cases in which new instruments emerged and develops a methodology to trace back the influence of EU Directives on instrument choice. The method is illustrated by a narrative of the emergence of new management planning instruments during the implementation of the EU Habitats Directive in three EU Member States: Finland, Hungary and the Netherlands. Three key features of a policy instrument are defined, namely, its authoritative force, action content and governance design. These are used to measure the contribution of the Habitats Directive compared to other potential explanatory causes for the emergence of the new policy instrument. In all three reviewed countries a nested causal relationship between the Habitats Directive and the introduction of the new policy instrument is identified. Based on the relative contribution of the Habitats Directive to the emergence of the new instrument a distinction is made whether the Directive acted as a cause, catalyst or if conjunction occurred.     

中美环保产业对比分析研究

基于对中美两国环保产业的内涵、法律法规、经济政策及市场化发展情况等方面的比较和分析,探讨了中美两国环保产业发展中存在的异同点,针对我国环保产业发展中存在的不足提出了加快我国环保产业发展的政策建议。     

An Ex Post Evaluation of Ohio’s Great Miami Water Quality Trading Program1

Newburn, David A. and Richard T. Woodward, 2011. An Ex Post Evaluation of Ohio’s Great Miami Water Quality Trading Program. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 48(1): 156‐169. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752‐1688.2011.00601.x Abstract: Market‐based approaches to address water quality problems have resulted in only limited success, especially in trading programs involving both point and nonpoint sources. We analyze one of the largest point‐nonpoint trading programs – the Great Miami Trading Program in Ohio, administered by the Miami Conservancy District (MCD). Our evaluation focuses on the economic and institutional aspects of the program, including cost effectiveness, efficiency of bidding, transaction costs, trading ratios, and innovation. We use a unique dataset consisting of all bids from agricultural nonpoint sources and interviews of soil and water conservation district (SWCD) agents in the watershed. We find that the MCD’s reliance on county‐level SWCD offices to recruit and advise farmers has been essential to achieve relatively high rates of farmer participation. Additionally, the MCD is able to partly free ride on the administrative costs that SWCD offices receive to assist federal conservation programs, which is helpful to lower costs for a fledgling trading program. However, the involvement of SWCD offices reduced the potential cost savings from the reverse auction structure because some agents were able to learn about the threshold price over the six rounds of bidding and help farmers bid strategically. Overall, the program structure serves as an effective model for future trading programs in other regions that seek to involve agricultural nonpoint sources.