Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Three Essays On Climate Change Adaptation In Rural African Communities, Hannah Patnaik

Dissertations - ALL

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the present era, bringing new risks and exacerbating existing vulnerabilities across the world. While there is a broad recognition that solutions around climate change will require coordination and support across borders and governments, a large body of scholarship has focused on the local-level realities of climate change and the disproportionate impacts on the most vulnerable populations. The climate vulnerable poor do not have the privilege of waiting for global policy and commitment to emission reduction targets. They need planned and proactive adaptation support to build resilience to the changing climate and …

Three Essays On Climate Change Adaptation In Rural African Communities, Hannah Patnaik

Dissertations - ALL

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the present era, bringing new risks and exacerbating existing vulnerabilities across the world. While there is a broad recognition that solutions around climate change will require coordination and support across borders and governments, a large body of scholarship has focused on the local-level realities of climate change and the disproportionate impacts on the most vulnerable populations. The climate vulnerable poor do not have the privilege of waiting for global policy and commitment to emission reduction targets. They need planned and proactive adaptation support to build resilience to the changing climate and …

Faith-Based Organizations In Disaster Relief: Locally-Based Strategies For A Higher Demand Future, Zach Goldberg

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Due to the effects of climate change, natural disasters are beginning to occur more frequently and are causing greater destruction. The American disaster relief system currently relies on a nationally focused, top-down approach. As resources become more and more limited, it is expected that disaster relief fatigue will occur, required local communities to take a larger role in their disaster relief processes. Right now, major player in both local and national disaster relief are Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs), who provide many crucial services before and after disasters

This paper develops an economic model of the rebuilding stage of disaster relief in …

Comparing Newspaper Coverage Of Climate Change During Election Campaigns In The United States, Canada And Australia, Dan Rowe

Mass Communications - Dissertations

This study compares newspaper coverage of climate change and global warming during the national elections in Australia, Canada and the U.S. during 2007 and 2008. Using a census of newspaper coverage and in-depth interviews with reporters, editors and columnists in the three countries, the study confirmed the findings of earlier studies that the political agenda shapes the news agenda when it comes to climate change coverage. However, the study did find that coverage of general climate change stories continued during the election campaign periods in the three countries. Reporters who cover either politics or environmental issues or both found it …

The Missing Instrument: Dirty Input Limits, David M. Driesen, Amy Sinden

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article evaluates an environmental protection instrument that the literature has hitherto largely overlooked, Dirty Input Limits (DILs), quantitative limits on the inputs that cause pollution. DILs provide an alternative to cumbersome output-based emissions trading and performance standards. DILs have played a role in some of the world's most prominent environmental success stories. They have also begun to influence climate change policy, because of the impossibility of imposing an output-based cap on transport emissions. We evaluate DILs' administrative advantages, efficiency, dynamic properties, and capacity to better integrate environmental protection efforts. DILs, we show, not only have significant advantages that make …

Capping Carbon, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the problem of how to set caps for a cap-and-trade program, a key problem in pending legislation addressing global climate disruption. Previous scholarship on emissions trading programs focuses overwhelmingly on trading’s advantages and sometimes wrongly portrays environmental improvement as an automatic byproduct of adopting a cap-and-trade approach. A trading program’s success, however, depends critically upon timely and effective cap setting.

This article shows that often regulators have employed a best available technology (BAT) approach to cap setting for trading programs, i.e., setting the cap at a level that regulated polluters can achieve with government-identified technology. This descriptive …

Neoliberal Instrument Choice, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter reviews the influence on economic thought about instrument choice and its influence upon United States climate change policy. It shows that the theory of instrument choice made a positive contribution to the United States policy arsenal by emphasizing the cost effectiveness advantages of emissions trading. But because of an ideological climate uncritically supportive of free markets prevailed during the period of U.S. failure to address climate change, the United States favored overly broad trading programs, both in terms of geography and scope. This posture had a large influence on the Kyoto Protocol, leading the world to adopt …

Toward Sustainable Technology, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers suggestions for climate change policies advancing technological changes necessary for sustainable development. It first explains why relentless pursuit of cost effectiveness through broad environmental benefit trading does not maximize long term technological advancement and explores options for narrowing trading's design. It then explores two alternatives to Kyoto style trading to show how a goal of creating a positive long term economic dynamic

Renewable Energy Under The Kyoto Protocol: The Case For Mixing Instruments, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper suggests that a mixture of measures may be needed to encourage renewable energy under the Kyoto Protocol. It explains that the goal of maximizing short term cost effectiveness tends to conflict with the goal of encouraging the long-term technological development that the world will need to move away from fossil fuels. Because of this tension, policy-makers should not, and generally have not, regarded global emissions trading as a panacea. The paper discusses how novel economic incentive measures and careful attention to design of emissions trading can help policy-makers use short term goals to lay the ground work for …

Sustainable Development And Market Liberalism's Shotgun Wedding: Emissions Trading Under The Kyoto Protocol, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes the international emissions trading regime at the heart of the world's effort to address global warming as a means of exploring broader international governance issues. The trading regime seeks to marry two models of global governance, market liberalism, which embraces markets as the model of global governance, and sustainable development, which seeks to change development patterns to protect future generations.

This article explores a previously unacknowledged tension between market liberalism's goal of maximizing short term cost effectiveness and sustainable development's goal of catalyzing technological change for the benefit of future generations. This article presents new data and …

Free Lunch Or Cheap Fix?: The Emissions Trading Idea And The Climate Change Convention, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Emissions trading has become a key component of U.S. environmental legal regimes. The U.S. has successfully lobbied to make international environmental benefit trading, an expanded form of emissions trading, a part of international efforts to address the threat of global climate change through the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol to that Convention. Legal scholars have lauded emissions trading as a "free lunch" that will encourage innovation, enhance democratic accountability, and reduce the cost of environmental cleanup. This article argues that emissions trading functions as a cheap fix, reducing short-term costs while tending to lessen innovation and …