Pollution eJournal最新文献

{"title":"The Shale Oil and Gas Revolution, Hydraulic Fracturing, and Water Contamination: A Regulatory Strategy","authors":"T. Merrill, David M. Schizer","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2221025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2221025","url":null,"abstract":"The United States is expected to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020, overtaking Saudi Arabia, and the world’s top natural gas producer by 2015, surpassing Russia. In the past decade, energy companies have learned to tap previously inaccessible oil and gas in shale with “hydraulic fracturing” (“fracturing” or “fracking”), pumping fluid at high pressure to crack the shale and release gas and oil trapped inside. This “shale revolution” has created millions of jobs, enhanced our energy independence, and reduced U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by substituting natural gas for coal. Even so, fracturing is controversial. It may undercut the renewable energy industry, exacerbate air pollution and congestion, and use significant amounts of water. The most unique risk, which is the focus of this Article, is the potential contamination of groundwater. The fluid used in fracturing contains toxic chemicals. There is little evidence so far that subterranean fracturing can directly contaminate groundwater, and this risk may never materialize. The layer of shale that is fractured is usually thousands of feet below the water table, with a buffer of dense rock or clay in between. But there are other ways in which fracturing might contaminate groundwater, including surface spills of fracturing fluid, improper handling of waste, and the migration of natural gas into water wells. Some of these risks are familiar from decades of conventional oil and gas production, while others are new. In response, this Article proposes a strategy for regulating water contamination from fracturing. For issues that are already well understood, we would rely on best practices regulations. For issues that are unique to fracturing and are not yet well understood, we would rely on liability rules – and, specifically, a hybrid of strict liability and a regulatory compliance defense – to motivate industry to take precautions, develop risk-reducing innovations, and cooperate in the development of best practices regulations. To facilitate more accurate determinations of causation, we recommend information-forcing rules (e.g., requiring energy companies to test water quality before they begin fracturing). We also suggest other design features for the liability system, such as one-way fee shifting and provisions to ensure that defendants will not be judgment proof. To ensure that the regulatory regime draws on existing regulatory expertise and is both dynamic and tailored to local conditions, we recommend keeping the regulatory center of gravity in the states, instead of fashioning a new federal regime.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132208453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Indoor Air Quality and Academic Performance","authors":"T. Stafford","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2339850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2339850","url":null,"abstract":"I examine the effect of school indoor air quality (IAQ) on academic outcomes. I utilize a quasi-natural experiment, in which IAQ-renovations were completed at virtually every school in a single Texas school district at different points in time, combined with a panel of student-level data to control for many confounding factors and thereby uncover the causal effect of IAQ-renovations on academic outcomes. Results indicate that performance on standardized tests significantly improves while attendance is unresponsive to improvements in IAQ. Rough calculations suggest that IAQ-renovations may be a more cost-effective way to improve standardized test scores than class size reductions.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"6 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121010874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Effect of Environmental Regulation on Plant-Level Product Mix: A Study of EPA's Cluster Rule","authors":"A. Elrod, A. Malik","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2342179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2342179","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the effect of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Cluster Rule on the product-mix decisions of plants in the pulp, paper, and paperboard industries. The Cluster Rule combines regulatory requirements from the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act that are based on plants altering their production processes away from chlorine-based bleaching agents. In addition to, or instead of, altering production processes, plants may plausibly comply with the regulation by reducing output of bleached products or dropping some of these products entirely. Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence that plants facing both air and water Cluster Rule regulation (treatment group) are more likely to drop bleached products relative to unbleached products compared to plants facing only air Cluster Rule regulation (control group). Furthermore, we find evidence that plants in the control group alter their product mixes toward bleached products.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121116199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Missing Inaction: Internalizing Beneficial Omissions","authors":"Adi Libson","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2338406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2338406","url":null,"abstract":"The omission bias has been much discussed in both the legal scholarship and the behavioral scholarship. Scholars have noted that a harm stemming from an omission is preferred over equivalent or lesser harm stemming from action. In this article I would like to highlight a neglected form of omission — a beneficial omission. I argue that an omission bias causes us to downplay social contributions stemming from omissions, even at the policy level. The environmental field is the central arena for beneficial omissions. The legal mechanism I suggest for encouraging beneficial omissions in the environmental field is the negative consumption tax. The negative consumption tax provides a refundable credit to individuals who abstain from a polluting consumption pattern, in contrast to the standard green tax which applies to polluting individuals. In this Article I argue that recognizing and increasing the salience of a contributive omission through a negative consumption tax may have three advantages. First, it may be a more effective mechanism both for internalizing externalities and for enhancing the welfare of the worst-off individuals. Second, it would transform individuals of low socio-economic backgrounds into recognized contributing citizens. Third, it is more likely to gain political currency by passing political-economy barriers.This Article provides three possible applications of the negative consumption tax in the realm of environmental policy: car ownership, air travel, and residential consumption of electricity.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133890256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can Property Values Capture Changes in Environmental Health Risks? Evidence from a Stated Preference Study in Italy and the UK","authors":"Dennis Guignet, A. Alberini","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2317904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2317904","url":null,"abstract":"Hedonic property value models are often used to place a value on localized amenities and disamenities. In practice, however, results may be affected by (i) omitted variable bias and (ii) whether homebuyers and sellers are aware of, and respond to, the assumed environmental measure. In this paper we undertake an alternative stated preference (SP) approach that eliminates the potential for unobserved confounders and where the measure of environmental quality is explicitly presented to respondents. We examine how homeowners in the United Kingdom and Italy value mortality risk reductions by asking them to choose among hypothetical variants of their home that differ in terms of mortality risks from air pollution and price. To our knowledge this is the first stated preference study examining respondents’ willingness to pay for properties using a quantitative and clearly specified measure of health risks. We find that Italian homeowners hold a value of a statistical life (VSL) of about €6.4 million, but UK homeowners tend to hold a much lower VSL (€2.1 million). This may be due to the fact that respondents in the UK do not perceive air pollution where they live to be as threatening, and actually live in cities with relatively low air pollution levels. Exploiting part of our experimental design, we find that Italian homeowners value a reduction in the risk of dying from cancer more than from other causes, but UK respondents do not hold such a premium. We also find that those who face higher baseline risks, due to higher air pollution levels where they live, hold a higher VSL, especially in the UK. In both countries, the VSL is twice as large among individuals who perceive air pollution where they live as relatively high.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128156356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Environmental Regulation of Upstream Sector of Oil and Gas Industry","authors":"Patson W. Arinaitwe","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2486551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2486551","url":null,"abstract":"The extraction of hydrocarbons is an inherently hazardous activity with potential grave risks to the general environment. Environmental woes occur during all the stages of oil and gas cycle but more notable during the upstream stage of operations. The upstream stage involves exploration, appraisals and production. This stage is accompanied by a range of environmental issues like accidental spills and blow out during development stage, operational discharge and atmospheric emissions like gas flaring during production stage. Major incidents like Ecuador rain forest pollution, Piper alpha offshore disaster (1988), gas flaring in Nigeria, Montara accident (2009) and macondo blowout (2010) are but a few examples. This paper evaluates different approaches employed by governments to minimise the risk of upstream operations on the environment. The evaluation will also show how these approaches work and criticisms levied and offer an opinion on what the writer considers the best approach. It is the author's hypothesis that a combination or two or more approaches could be the best option depending on the host country's legal framework.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122465969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Anti-Monopoly and the Radical Lockean Origins of Western Water Law","authors":"M. Blumm","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2302848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2302848","url":null,"abstract":"This review of David Schorr's book, The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier, maintains that the book is a therapeutic corrective to the standard history of the origins of western water law as celebration of economic efficiency and wealth maximization. Schorr's account convincingly contends that the roots of prior appropriation water law -- the \"Colorado Doctrine\" -- lie in distributional justice concerns, not in the supposed efficiency advantages of private property over common property. The goals of the founders of the Colorado doctrine, according to Schorr, were to advance Radical Lockean principles such as widespread distibution of water to current settlers and avoiding monopolization of the resource by large landowners and corporate speculators. The book explains how western water law doctrines like the abolition of riparian rights, beneficial use as the basis and measure of water rights, the sufficiency principle, the no-injury rule limiting the transferability of rights, and public ownership of water all served these Radical Lockean goals. Schorr generally downplays the significance of temporal priority, thought by many to be the hallmark of western water law, and he explains the early Colorado courts surprising and consistent favoring of small-scale farmers over large-scale corporations like ditch companies. Schorr also attempts to draw lessons from his careful and detailed history of the rise of prior appropriation law for contemporary concerns like allocating the burdens of climate-change pollution control. Although he overlooks a few matters -- like the motive underlying the rejection of riparian rights as an anti-federal government doctrine and the failure of the founders of the Colorado doctrine to grant limited terms instead of perpetual rights in water -- and his assumption that public property will inevitably be distributed to the wealthy and the well-organized might be questioned -- this book is law and history at its finest and should be read by all serious natural resources and property law teachers and scholars.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126770837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Modelling Non Gaussianity of Oil Price Returns","authors":"I. Mauleón","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2295582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2295582","url":null,"abstract":"Non Gaussian densities suitable for multivariate generalizations are fitted to daily oil price returns. The absolute and comparative goodness of fit of the several estimated models, is assessed with descriptive and formal methods. A new statistical density forecast test is introduced for that purpose. Extensive descriptive and statistical analysis of the estimated models show that an asymmetric Student' t, with the EGARCH conditional variance model yields a remarkable good fit. The parameters of this density are also stable over several subsamples, while the remaining model parameters are not.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134390278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ship Inspections in Invasive Species Management: Alternate Regimes and Their Properties","authors":"A. Batabyal, H. Beladi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2286903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2286903","url":null,"abstract":"When it comes to inspections in invasive species management, the literature has shown that there is frequently a tension between economic cost reduction and inspection stringency. As such, we analyze the properties of two probabilistic inspection regimes that are designed to screen arriving ships in a seaport for the presence of one or more deleterious invasive species. In the first regime, the seaport inspector screens arriving ships by using fast (less stringent) and slow (more stringent) protocols. In the second regime, the inspector uses a uniformly stringent protocol with stages. We use the theory of continuous time Markov chains (CTMCs) to delineate both inspection regimes. Next, we derive some key long run performance measures associated with each of these two regimes. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis for practical invasive species management.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122942896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Application of Intersectoral Input-Output Model for Water Consumption and Air Pollution in Russia","authors":"E. Yakovleva, O. Kudryavtseva","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2260915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2260915","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this paper is analyzing of intersectoral material flows in Russian economy by means of input-output approach that is necessary for National Green Accounts (air pollution and water consumption were under consideration). The special attention was paid to the embodied or “virtual�? water (water that is “accumulated�? in the production of sectors in the course of manufacturing process, or “ecological rucksack�?). Sectors exporting their production were under consideration: oil-and-gas industry, ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy, wood, pulp-and-paper. The first aim was to estimate the amount of “exported�? water which is “embodied�? in production. The second aim was to analyze intersectional allocation of air pollution for Russian economy (SO2 is an example), to indicate the main polluting sectors paying attention to direct and indirect pollution in each sector of economy and to trace some recent changes in eco-efficiency.","PeriodicalId":340493,"journal":{"name":"Pollution eJournal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120900079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}