The Geographical Scope of the EU's Climate Change Responsibilities

It is increasingly common for the EU to include extraterritorial GHG emissions within controversial and on more than one occasion the EU has been forced to back down. With this in mind, this paper asks how far the EU’s climate change responsibilities ought to extend geographically. In answering this question, the paper draws a distinction between first-order and second-order climate responsibilities, acknowledges the importance of the internationally agreed ‘system boundary’ guidelines adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and seeks to learn lessons from the consequentialist approach that was favoured by the EU in giving broad geographical scope to its decision to include extraterritorial aviation emissions within the scope of its emissions trading scheme

Implementation experiences of NASTRAN on CDC CYBER 74 SCOPE 3.4 operating system

The implementation of the NASTRAN system on the CDC CYBER 74 SCOPE 3.4 Operating System is described. The flexibility of the NASTRAN system made it possible to accomplish the change with no major problems. Various sizes of benchmark and test problems, ranging from two hours to less than one minute CP time were run on the CDC CYBER SCOPE 3.3, Univac EXEC-8, and CDC CYBER SCOPE 3.4. The NASTRAN installation deck is provided

Accounting for Risk: Conceptualizing a Robust Greenhouse Gas Inventory for Financial Institutions

Outlines objectives, options, and challenges for financial firms and stakeholders in accounting for greenhouse gas emissions from their investments and services as part of climate change risk management. Discusses methods, scope, reporting, and use

Climate Change Policy

Having risen from relative obscurity as few as ten years ago, climate change now looms large among environmental policy issues. Its scope is global; the potential environmental and economic impacts are ubiquitous; the potential restrictions on human choices touch the most basic goals of people in all nations; and the sheer scope of the potential response—a significant shift away from using fossil fuels as the primary energy source in the modern economy—is daunting. In this paper, we explore the economics of climate change policy. We examine the risks that climate change poses for society, the benefits of protection against the effects of climate change, and the costs of alternative protection policies. We organize our discussion around three broad themes: why costs and benefits matter in assessing climate change policies, as does the uncertainty surrounding them; why well-designed, cost-effective climate policies are essential in addressing the threat of climate change; and why a coherent architecture of international agreements is key to successful policy implementation. We conclude the paper with a summary of key policy lessons and gaps in knowledge.

Enhancement and suppression effects resulting from information structuring in sentences

Information structuring through the use of cleft sentences increases the processing efficiency of references to elements within the scope of focus. Furthermore, there is evidence that putting certain types of emphasis on individual words not only enhances their subsequent processing, but also protects these words from becoming suppressed in the wake of subsequent information, suggesting mechanisms of enhancement and suppression. In Experiment 1, we showed that clefted constructions facilitate the integration of subsequent sentences that make reference to elements within the scope of focus, and that they decrease the efficiency with reference to elements outside of the scope of focus. In Experiment 2, using an auditory text-change-detection paradigm, we showed that focus has similar effects on the strength of memory representations. These results add to the evidence for enhancement and suppression as mechanisms of sentence processing and clarify that the effects occur within sentences having a marked focus structure

BROADACRE FARM PRODUCTIVITY AND PROFITABILITY IN SOUTH WESTERN AUSTRALIA

This paper examines broadacre farm performance in south-western Australia. This region has experienced pronounced climate variability and volatile commodity prices over the last decade or so. Relationships between productivity and profitability are explored using panel data from 50 farms in the study region. The data are analysed using non-parametric methods. Components of farm productivity and profitability are measured over the period 1998 to 2008. Economies of scale and scope are shown often to be positive contributors to productivity and profitability. However, the main finding is that technical change, much more so than technical efficiency, has supplied over 68 percent of the improvement in total factor productivity for farms in the different climatic zones of the region from 1998 to 2008. In addition, growth in total factor productivity is the main contributor to farm profitability. By implication, technical change, often accompanied by scale and mix efficiencies, is the main driver of farm profitability. These findings indicate a vital role for innovation and R,D&E to deliver technologies and practices that bolster farm profitability, as well as a continuing role for scale and scope economies. The products and knowledge that come from innovation and R,D&E are the springboard for technical change. Through technical change and scale and scope efficiencies farmers in this study have achieved higher profits.Productivity, Profitability, Technical change, Farm businesses, Farm Management, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Strategy Workshops and Strategic Change

Despite the attention that strategic change as a topic of research has received, there remain considerable difficulties in conceptualizing the actual sources of strategic change. Strategy workshops represent one obvious and explicit research site since organizations often use such events as a means of effecting or initiating strategic change. This paper examines empirical data from ninety-nine strategy workshops in ten separate organizations to address the research question: Do strategy workshops produce strategic change? The paper concludes that workshops can produce change but that one-off workshops are much less effective than a series of workshops. The data presented indicates that the elapsed duration of the entire series of workshops, the frequency of workshops, the scope and autonomy of the unit concerned, and the seniority of participants have an impact on the success or failure of the venture

CONTINGENT VALUATION OF RURAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT WITH TESTS OF SCOPE AND MODE STABILITY

Contingent valuation is used to measure the social impacts of tourism in rural Oregon communities. Impacts are substantial, for example, annual household willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce traffic congestion is $186. Study features include tests of sensitivity to a change in scope, tests of stability across survey mode, and a thorough system of “no” –vote follow-up questions in a referendum format. While there is no evidence of scope effects (at the 0.05 level), results indicate that conclusions regarding sensitivity to scope may be dependent on the test used. WTP estimates are substantially less with the mail versus telephone survey mode.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Electricity Intensities of the OECD and South Africa: A Comparison

Improving a country’s electricity efficiency is considered one of the important ways to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and to meet its commitments concerning climate change mitigation. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis between South Africa and OECD members’ total and sectoral electricity intensities. This is done to establish a sense of South Africa’s relative performance in this regard, to ascertain the possible scope for improvement and, if such scope exists, to determine in which of the industrial sectors