Global Climate Policy Architecture and Political Feasibility: Specific Formulas and Emission Targets to Attain 460 ppm CO2 Concentrations

Three gaps in the Kyoto Protocol most badly need to be filled: the absence of emission targets extending far into the future, the absence of participation by the United States, China, and other developing countries, and the absence of reason to think that members will abide by commitments. To be politically acceptable, any new treaty that fills these gaps must, we believe, obey certain constraints regarding country-by-country economic costs. We offer a framework of formulas that assign quantitative allocations of emissions, across countries, one budget period at a time. The two-part plan: (i) China and other developing countries accept targets at BAU in the coming budget period, the same period in which the US first agrees to cuts below BAU; and (ii) all countries are asked in the future to make further cuts in accordance with a formula which sums up a Progressive Reductions Factor, a Latecomer Catch-up Factor, and a Gradual Equalization Factor. An earlier proposal for specific parameter values in the formulas – Frankel (2009), as analyzed by Bosetti, et al (2009) – achieved the environmental goal that concentrations of CO2 plateau at 500 ppm by 2100. It succeeded in obeying our political constraints, such as keeping the economic cost for every country below the thresholds of Y=1% of income in Present Discounted Value, and X=5% of income in the worst period. In pursuit of more aggressive environmental goals, we now advance the dates at which some countries are asked to begin cutting below BAU, within our framework. We also tinker with the values for the parameters in the formulas. The resulting target paths for emissions are run through the WITCH model to find their economic and environmental effects. We find that it is not possible to attain a 380 ppm CO2 goal (roughly in line with the 2°C target) without violating our political constraints. We were however, able to attain a concentration goal of 460 ppm CO2 with looser political constraints. The most important result is that we had to raise the threshold of costs above which a country drops out, to as high as Y =3.4% of income in PDV terms, or X =12 % in the worst budget period. Some may conclude from these results that the more aggressive environmental goals are not attainable in practice, and that our earlier proposal for how to attain 500 ppm CO2 is the better plan. We take no position on which environmental goal is best overall. Rather, we submit that, whatever the goal, our approach will give targets that are more practical economically and politically than approaches that have been proposed by others.International Climate Agreements

Cosmopolitanism and inclusive education through 21st - century Disney films

COSMOPOLITISMO Y EDUCACIÓN INCLUSIVA A TRAVÉS DE LAS PELÍCULAS DE DISNEY DEL SIGLO XXIAl destacar los vínculos entre el cosmopolitismo y la educación inclusiva, esta tesis explora el potencial de las películas de Disney del siglo XXI para abordar problemas sociales y culturales contemporáneos con el fin de promover valores inclusivos. Esta tesis propone que el vínculo entre ambas áreas de estudio es la educación cosmopolita, que aglutina los valores y teorías del cosmopolitismo y la educación inclusiva. En particular, examina tres películas de animación de Disney del siglo XXI bajo una lente cosmopolita, para explorar la manera en que ayudan a construir y reflejar problemas actuales como son las fronteras geográficas y culturales, las ciudades globales y el cambio climático. Los estudios de caso han sido elegidos de acuerdo con ciertas secciones del Index for Inclusion: A Guide to School Development Led by Inclusive Values (Booth y Ainscow 2016), un documento que tiene como objetivo proporcionar una nueva forma de currículo escolar adaptado a las necesidades sociales del siglo XXI. El Index contiene una lista de dieciséis valores inclusivos, que ayudan a determinar el potencial inclusivo de las películas. Los valores inclusivos explorados en cada uno de los análisis fueron ¿comunidad¿ en Campanilla y El Secreto de las Hadas (capítulo dos), ¿respeto por la diversidad¿ en Zootrópolis (capítulo tres) y ¿sostenibilidad¿ en WALL-E (capítulo cuatro). Esta tesis utiliza el análisis textual para explorar cómo estas tres películas pueden utilizarse para explorar y promover cuestiones cosmopolitas como son los roles y significados de las fronteras (capítulo dos), la ciudad global (capítulo tres) y la ecología (capítulo cuatro) en el aula.<br /

Remedies and the Psychology of Ownership

It is surprising that there are cases like Boomer v. Atlantic Cement Co.I The plaintiffs in Boomer were eight homeowners seeking injunctive relief against the dust and noise produced by a neighboring cement plant, the Atlantic Cement Company. The trial court declared Atlantic Cement a nuisance, but refused to enjoin the plant\u27s operations. Instead, the court awarded monetary damages to the plaintiffs for the loss in value to their property attributable to the defendant\u27s activities. The dissatisfied plaintiffs appealed, but ultimately New York\u27s highest court declared that they were not entitled to injunctive relief. That the plaintiffs sued the plant is not surprising; Atlantic Cement\u27s operations produced a tremendous amount of noise and dust. The striking aspect of the case is that the plaintiffs spent the time and money to appeal the type of remedy, even though they had won the right to substantial damages. Clearly an injunction had special value for the Boomer plaintiffs-but why? This Article presents evidence that people do not regard rights protected by damages remedies as being owned in the same way as rights protected by injunctive relief. The former can be taken by another without the right holder\u27s permission, whereas the latter cannot be taken without the right holder\u27s permission. The power to refuse to sell a right is a critical psychological component of ownership, and damages remedies do not include this power. When the trial court refused to grant the Boomer plaintiffs an injunction, it took away their power to refuse to sell their rights to Atlantic Cement, thereby undermining their status as owners. Law and economics has an alternative account of the Boomer plaintiffs\u27 motives. Application of the Coase Theorem suggests that the plaintiffs were hoping to use an injunction to extract a large settlement from the defendant. According to Coase, parties regularly trade their legal rights, and so the homeowners might have been hoping to improve their bargaining position before ultimately selling their rights to Atlantic Cement. The right to shut down Atlantic Cement\u27s plant would have been a valuable right, indeed, as the plant had cost $45 million to build and supported a payroll of 300 employees. The eight homeowners could conceivably have demanded a size- able portion of Atlantic Cement\u27s future revenue stream in exchange for allowing the company to continue operating. Furthermore, the homeowners had reason to be dissatisfied with the size of the damages remedy that the lower court provided. The Boomer plaintiffs, like most homeowners, probably valued their property at an amount greater than the market-price damages that the courts used as a measure of compensation. The present owner of a right is likely to be the party who most values it (or else they would likely have sold it). This suggests that the market-price damages would have undercompensated the plaintiffs. In this view, the plaintiffs were using the leverage that an injunction would provide either to extort Atlantic Cement or to recover the subjective value they had for their homes

Becoming economic: a political phenomenology of car purchases

"The point of this dissertation is to revisit the most ambiguous and perhaps most controversial aspect of Karl Polanyi's embeddedness thesis, namely the implication that socially disembedded economic action (i.e. action guided by a purely calculative disposition, ontologically separate from considerations of sociality) is ""always embedded"" (Block, 2003: 294) nonetheless. I aim, that is, to trouble and interrogate what it means to say that economic action is either embedded or disembedded. Yet what follows is less a re-evaluation of these ideas than a 'reboot,' given that Polanyi is rarely mentioned herein- less still Mark Granovetter, embeddedness' more recent champion. I call instead upon an altogether different set of protagonists: Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who in 2002 and -5 squared off in a fruitful debate on the nature of economy. The analysis here adopts their terminology - entanglement versus disentanglement - as well as Miller's ethnographic sensibility, specifically of car purchases. Via semi-structured interviews with car buyers (N=39), I have sought to ascertain the determinants of the car-buying calculus and in doing so, to lay bare the socio-technical dynamics of automobile transactions. Putatively disentangled decision-making and -taking is entangled, I argue, with market/power, a neo-Foucauldian neologism emphasizing ways by which the buyer's sense of inferiority acts a focal point of market experience and subjectivity. Becoming economic in the context of an automobile acquisition (or any other major life purchase for that matter) is hence less a matter of optimally formatting one's calculative competencies than of reasonably justifying one's inferiority; of learning, that is, the crucial injunction to stop calculating. Another way of putting it, the market asymmetry that counts most is not the one between the buyer and seller, but rather the buyer and herself.

Local Knowledge Adaptations for Landslide Disasters Risk Reduction in Rural Mountain Communities

国立大学法人長岡技術科学大学博士（工学）Articledoctoral thesi

Motivations for Corporate Social Reporting and Non-Reporting in Malaysia: An Exploratory Study From a Public Relations Perspective

Corporate social reporting, embracing the triple bottom line reporting concept, entails the reporting of economic, social and environmental performance as opposed to the more narrow focus on conventional financial reporting. Many corporations are now engaging in environmental and social reporting in an effort to communicate the social and environmental effects of organisations‟ operations to particular interest groups within society. The main objective of this thesis is to examine corporate motivations and hesitations to undertake social reporting in Malaysia. Most studies have so far applied quantitative method on themes identification to determine rationales for corporate social reporting. Little attention has been given to in-depth primary and secondary data to understand rationales for corporate social reporting in a national context. In addition to motivation, this study fills the gap in the literature by investigating corporate reluctance for social reporting. A qualitative approach was adopted for this study. A mixed method of data collection, consisting of both semi-structured interviews and corporate social reports, was used. A total of 20 interviews were conducted with representatives of six reporting and six non-reporting corporations, and eight non-corporate respondents representing the Malaysian political and social sectors. In addition to primary data, corporate social information in annual reports and corporate websites of six reporting corporations was also collected to support the interviews. Thematic analysis was applied to identify salient themes to explain both corporate motivation and hesitation for social reporting. The analysis was divided into two levels: corporation and society. At the corporate level, results identify public relations as the central motivation for social reporting. More specifically, the concepts of image and identity, issues management, two-way symmetrical and asymmetrical communication, autocommunication, and publicity are used to explain the adoption of social reporting. Image and identity and issues management were also among the concepts applied to explain corporate hesitation for social reporting. However, the results also support stockholder theory and reveal the lack of public relations understanding to be the cause of the low acceptance of social reporting. In-depth analysis revealed organisational legitimacy as the main reason to explain both motivation and hesitation for social reporting. Corporations require stakeholder support for their continual existence. At the societal level analysis, the concept of political economy was applied to explain the limited social reporting practice in the Malaysian context. Finally, the implications for both practising as well as neglecting social reporting are discussed using the concept of the risk society

The journalism of Neil Munro: fiction, criticism and cultural comment

In a period of over thirty years from the mid 1890s, Neil Munro occupied a unique position in Scotland’s literary and social scenes. Although perhaps now best known as a novelist, short-story writer or essayist Munro was primarily a journalist, mainly with Glasgow’s Evening News and later in life with the Daily Record, and in this role he cast a wide and critical eye over Scottish life and letters. This research focuses primarily on Neil Munro’s journalistic output in the (Glasgow) Evening News and seeks to determine his views on literature, his literary and artistic peers and contemporary and current affairs in two specific periods gathered from prime records (from 22nd August 1895 to 27th January 1898 and at the resumption of the columns after the Great War, 19th June 1919 to 28th June 1920) and from published compilations of articles gathered throughout his career until 1927. In compiling two weekly columns in the Evening News, The Looker-On on the Monday and Views and Reviews on the Thursday, Munro influenced the opinions and reading habits of a large section of the population of the west of Scotland. In Views and Reviews he set out his views on the meaning of art and literature, nationally and internationally; in The Looker-On Munro sketched the world around him, whether local or national or international, through his eclectic choice of topics and his personable and endearing style. The thesis is structured in three main parts, each one dealing, in short, focussed episodes, on topics arising from the journalism. Part One deals mainly with material before the First World War; Part Two with issues which straddle the pre- and post-War periods; Part Three considers the episodic fiction found in The Looker-On columns. Rather than adopt a general, over-arching argument, this approach allows us to take shorter, sharper assessments of Munro’s views of particular aspects of the culture that was his context. These then gradually accumulate to allow us to draw general conclusions only after we have allowed each one its particular value and place. This consideration of a range of subjects builds up a picture of a journalist with strong views on the state of literature, of Scotland, of all the arts. His opinions are founded on Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities, in the sense that he is open to the working of arts and science in society as a whole, and the romantic tradition, in that he engages emotionally as well as intellectually with his subjects, seeking passion in the work of others rather than intellectual rigour. Crucial to the structure of the thesis is the argument that by considering these two periods of his journalism, pre-War (1895 – 98) and post-War (1919 – 1927), two different aspects of Munro’s character can be understood more profoundly. Pre-war, his journalism expresses his healthy curiosity in human nature, his comfort in tradition and the effect of scientific and social progress and a creeping globalism on the citizens of his adopted city. Post-war, acknowledging the changes caused by the Great War, he seems to become paralysed, trying to respond to new literary and social structures, rejecting the experimentalism of modernism and seeing no need or value in an organised “Scottish Renaissance”. And yet, as the research for this thesis should make clear, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sensibility that is evident in Munro’s journalism does in fact carry him forward into the context of the modern world in his three series of episodic fiction, Erchie (1902-1926), Para Handy (1905-1924) and Jimmy Swan (1911-1917 and then 1923-1926). In conclusion, I will suggest that the essential literary value and popularity of these stories lies in their emergence from the pre-War sensibility and their characters’ humble sympathy for the pre-War world