Browsing by Subject "environmental regulation"
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Item Bringing About Pro-Environment Behavior Through Policies and Social Norms(2019-07) SANKAR, ASHWINIAs human population and consumption have risen, waste generation and air pollution have also increased leading to steady environmental degradation. To stem overflowing landfills and combat air pollution, policies and social norms have often been used as tools to bring about change. My dissertation analyzes the impact of these tools to achieve pro-environment behavior. The first chapter tries to understand two such behaviors, i.e., how to increase recycling and reduce waste. They are key to protecting natural resources, but households probably do not derive any benefit from recycling other than social approval. Based on a theoretical model I built for households, I show that when the social norm of recycling increases, the recycling rate of the household rises and waste per capita falls. My paper is one of the first to test these propositions empirically for Minnesota data using an instrumental variable setup. I show that while waste per capita declines significantly with an increase in social capital, recycling rate does not seem to be influenced by social capital. My second chapter studies the impact of environmental regulations in India on mortality that includes all causes and all ages (or mortality). We know that chronic exposure to air pollution is more harmful to adults than babies and hence focus on mortality as the outcome, for the first time for India. Using a difference-in-differences framework, in the first part of the paper, I show that environmental regulations in India have led to a significant drop in mortality. The second part analyzes the effect of different pollution types on mortality, where I show that PM2:5 exposure is more harmful to mortality (but not infant mortality) than TSP. This further strengthens the claim that policies should focus on adults and shift its focus from TSP to PM2:5 to get greater gains in health. The last chapter studies the functional form of the relationship between PM2:5 concentrations and mortality for the first time for India. The shape of this concentration-response curve will determine if the air in India affects public health at a different or the same rate as the U.S. baseline rate. My paper is one of the first studies to analyze this relationship using panel data for India, without simply extrapolating coefficients from U.S. or European data, following a rigorous identification strategy. I then arrive at the relative risk of mortality estimates at higher pollution concentrations as well as the estimated lives saved due to the reduction in pollution exposure.Item EME Homer City Generation, L.P. v. EPA: The Search for Meaningful Regulation of Interstate Pollution Under the Clean Air Act(Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, 2013-07-01) Dooley, BryanEME Homer City Generation, L.P. v. EPA illustrates the difficulty the EPA faces as it attempts to formulate effective and efficient regulation of cross-border environmental harm within the boundaries created by the Clean Air Act. The decision imposes new limitations on the EPA’s ability to enact and enforce regional solutions to what is a fundamentally regional problem. Meanwhile, downwind states continue to bear the public health and regulatory burdens resulting from upwind contributions to poor air quality. This Comment analyzes the implications of EME Homer City Generation for future attempts at meaningful regulation of interstate air pollution. Part I briefly examines the historical failures of federal regulation to adequately address the problem and recent attempts to regulate under the Act. Part II discusses the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, the EME Homer City Generation decision, and prospects for future regulation in detail. This Comment concludes that the EPA should appeal the decision to the Supreme Court and it should be overturned. If the decision is allowed to stand, amendment of the Clean Air Act is necessary to allow regulation of interstate air pollution that is effective and not unnecessarily burdensome.Item Introduction: Envisioning Legal and Policy Pathways for Energy Innovation(Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, 2014-02-20) Osofky, Hari M.Introduction to special symposium edition (Issue 15.1) of the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, which emerged from the conference Legal and Policy Pathways for Energy Innovation organized by the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences at the University of Minnesota on April 24–25, 2013. The conference brought together leading scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and business people to discuss how to make critical progress on energy law and policy. The issue contains contributions from several conference participants, who highlight the complexity of energy transition and possibilities for creative, practical solutions.Item Inventory and Supply Chain Management with Carbon Emissions(2014-07) Chen, XiAlthough the literature on carbon emissions, from fields such as environmental economics, public policy, and industrial ecology among others, is quite extensive, the literature in supply chain management is relatively limited. Moreover, in addressing concerns about carbon emissions, much of the focus has been on technological fixes (e.g., more carbon-efficient technologies and alternative sources of energy). Much less attention has been paid to the potential of reducing carbon emissions via adjustments in supply chain design and operation. This research, utilizing optimization, game theory, deterministic and stochastic modeling, and mechanism design, aims to bridge this gap. The first part of the study, using the economic order quantity (EOQ) model framework, suggests that it is possible to reduce emissions by modifying order quantities, and provides conditions under which the relative reduction in emissions is greater than the relative increase in cost. The second part examines the extent to which penalizing the emission of harmful pollutants can successfully reduce overall emissions in decentralized supply chains, and shows that requiring each firm to pay for the emissions for which it is directly responsible can paradoxically lead to higher overall supply chain emissions and for this emission to increase in the price of emissions. The third part includes preliminary results including the impact of price variability as well as consumers' preferences for low emission products on the ways firms manage their inventory and the corresponding emissions.Item Mitigating the Impacts of the Renewable Energy Gold Rush(Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, 2014-02-20) Morris, Amy Wilson; Owley, JessicaThis Article questions where the push for utility-scale solar energy development in the California desert leaves endangered species preservation. We begin in Part I by providing some general context for the boom in renewable energy projects and outlining the main mechanisms for expediting endangered species permitting. Part II details offsite mitigation requirements for recently approved projects. Finally, in Part III, we draw some conclusions about the challenges posed by the current strategies for balancing renewable energy development and endangered species protection, and we make recommendations for strengthening mitigation outcomes. Our research highlights general concerns with perpetual off-site mitigation and the lack of oversight and information about mitigation projects. Through examining the development of two specific solar power facilities in the California desert (Ivanpah and Genesis), we demonstrate the mitigation choices, the time lag between project approval and developed mitigation plans, and the roles scientific uncertainty plays in making project decisions. Overall, the picture we paint is a disturbing one where decisions regarding desert development are made without full consideration or understanding of the mitigation measures. The urge to approve projects and get them operational quickly increases this problem. In such an uncertain realm, infusing concepts of reevaluation and adaptive management can provide routes to incorporate new information and alter mitigation or development plans as necessary. Current efforts at consolidated landscape-level planning may help ameliorate some of these concerns, but a better solution may be to slow down the pace of project approval to enable better understanding of the desert ecosystem and full evaluation of mitigation prior to plant construction.