Ballot-Box Environmentalism across the Golden State: How Geography Influences California Voters’ Demand for Environmental Public Goods

In California, voters frequently face ballot propositions dealing directly or indirectly with environmental protection. Records of these votes provide powerful evidence of the character of voters’ demand and willingness-to-pay for environmental public goods (e.g., air quality, watershed ecosystem services, parks and recreation), and have been used in past environmental econometrics research to produce aggregated income and price effect estimates. Using neighborhood-level voting records on seven environmental-related ballot propositions in California between 2002 and 2010, this econometric study investigates the nature of voters’ demand for environmental public goods, focusing on the effect of household income on pro-environment voting. Unlike previous studies, this study uses geographically weighted regression (GWR) to determine how estimates vary across the historically, culturally, and politically diverse state of California. Preliminary statewide results from an ordinary least-squares regression model suggest that demand decreases with voter income, and that this negative income effect is strongest among lower-income households. However, GWR results suggest that the magnitude, and even the sign, of income effects varies regionally. The San Francisco Bay Area, in particular, stands out as anomalous from the statewide model estimates: in this region, wealthier households are more likely than lower-income households to support environmental propositions, ceteris paribus. This finding is consistent across all propositions studied, which include water bonds, State Parks funding, and the California High-Speed Rail program, among others. GWR results suggest that political geography and regional culture determines the way in which income (as well as education and other factors) affects voters’ support of environmental propositions

Marine Genetic Resources in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction

Areas beyond national jurisdiction are the largest environment on earth and marine genetic resources are its new, and perhaps final, frontier. It is no wonder, then, that the scope and protection of marine genetic resources in this oceanic space have been hotly contested and that a new doctrine for ocean governance has been coined in this context: mare geneticum. This chapter examines different definitions of marine genetic resources debated in the ongoing treaty negotiations over areas beyond national jurisdiction (the BBNJ), the conflicting interests involved, and how the law-science relationship has figured in these debates. Ultimately, many of the debates do not challenge the extractivist mindset, which s, decontextualizes, and recontextualizes ocean life into resources and benefits and that journey from data into information. Drawing on the details of the law-science debate about the scope of marine genetic resources, this chapter calls upon the community of ocean experts, both legal and scientific, to seize the precious opportunity of crafting a new treaty for areas beyond national jurisdiction to challenge the extractivist mindset and to consider an alternative mode of relating to ocean lifeworlds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1436/thumbnail.jp

Online discussion forums with embedded streamed videos on distance courses

Existing literature on education and technology has frequently highlighted the usefulness of online discussion forums for distance courses; however, the majority of such investigations have focused their attention only on text-based forums. The objective of this paper is to determine if the embedding of streamed videos in online discussion forums generates educational dialogue and consequently the feedback that students need in a Management Accounting Course. The findings suggest some interesting issues, such as: students prefer text answers except in complex questions, and videos never replace text commentaries and explanations, but rather complement themPeer Reviewe

Regional Supply Chains: Strengthening Urban-Rural Connections Around the Benefits from Natural Areas

Report of the 2017 Berkley Workshop Held at the Inn at Shelburne Farms, Shelburne, VT - June 201

New Mexico cancer plan 2020>2024 : a document to guide collaborative cancer control efforts throughout the state

Published by the New Mexico Department of Health, in partnership with the New Mexico Cancer Council, 2020, with funding provided through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Cancer Prevention and Control \u2013Cooperative Agreement Number NU58DP006280Publication date from document properties.new-mexico-ccc-plan-508.pdfooperative Agreement Number NU58DP00628

Big data, big risks, big power shifts: Evaluating the General Data Protection Regulation as an instrument of risk control and power redistribution in the context of big data

The GDPR aims to control the risks associated with the processing of personal data. It requires measures to minimise these risks and gives data subjects certain powers, such as the rights to be informed and to be forgotten. Big data is a relatively new technology, giving the controllers of data the power to permanently observe the users of digital services. Therefore this thesis answers the question whether the GDPR is suited to avert the risks and power shifts associated with big data. To answer this question, the GDPR is compared to earlier EU legislation associated with technological risks and power shifts. Additionally, the suitability of the GDPR’s anti-discrimination provisions are evaluated for the prevention of algorithmic discrimination. Results: The GDPR is not based on any discernible analysis of the risks of big data. Methods from EU environmental protection law and consumer protection law, aimed at technological risks and power shifts, were not applied. This can make evaluation of the GDPR’s effectiveness more difficult and could stand in the way of developing a coherent body of case law. The conclusion proposes a number of guidelines for the decision of court cases and points for evaluating the GDPR. Effective Protection of Fundamental Rights in a pluralist worl

Disparate Lives, Fractured Mineral: Toxic Displacement in the Global Economy of Asbestos

The established scientific reality of asbestos is that (a) asbestos is toxic at a minuscule dose, and (b) exposure should be avoided whenever possible, with the evidence expanding almost exponentially over the past century. The purpose of this research is to explore the historical and global socio-natural entanglements of the economy of asbestos and the resulting mechanisms at play to occlude and marginalise the toxicity and emphasise profitability. Therefore, the aims are threefold. First, the work will uncover and critically examine (utilising critical discourse analysis) asbestos product advertisements and related documents, specifically a selection of Eternit (asbestos-cement) variants from Skandinaviska Eternit AB in Sweden. A secondary goal is to compare the often antithetical stance, evidenced by their marketing strategies, of the asbestos-cement industry with those exposed victims confronted with the toxic realities frst hand. Thirdly, the research will evince the global reach and attendant forms of environmental, toxic, and entropic displacement of the economy of asbestos vis-à-vis the omnipresent yet prosaic use of its products. Finally, these three attritional types of displacement are posited as prototypical instances of slow violence, extrapolating from an ecological Marxist framework in dialogue with perspectives in environmental public health and post-humanism

Vernon Briggs: Real-World Labor Economist

[Excerpt] Vernon Briggs stepped into a wastebasket and launched my career as a labor economist. In the spring of 1969, I was sleepwalking through the undergraduate economics program at the University of Texas and sitting in Dr. Briggs’s labor economics class. He was vigorously making a point when his misstep off the small classroom stage produced a roar of laughter but did not break his train of thought. He woke me up; I thought, “Man, I want to be as passionate about my life’s work as this guy

Andean States and the Resource Curse

This volume explores institutional change and performance in the resource-rich Andean countries during the last resource boom and in the early post-boom years. The latest global commodity boom has profoundly marked the face of the resource-rich Andean region, significantly contributing to economic growth and notable reductions of poverty and income inequality. The boom also constituted a period of important institutional change, with these new institutions sharing the potential of preventing or mitigating the maladies extractive economies tend to suffer from, generally denominated as the “resource curse”. This volume explores these institutional changes in the Andean region to identify the factors that have shaped their emergence and to assess their performance. The interdisciplinary and comparative perspective of the chapters in this book provide fine-grained analyses of different new institutions introduced in the Andean countries and discusses their findings in the light of the resource curse approach. They argue that institutional change and performance depend upon a much larger set of factors than those generally identified by the resource curse literature. Different, domestic and external, economic, political and cultural factors such as ideological positions of decision-makers, international pressure or informal practices have shaped institutional dynamics in the region. Altogether, these findings emphasize the importance of nuanced and contextualized analysis to better understand institutional dynamics in the context of extractive economies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the extractive industries, natural resource management, political economics, Latin American studies and sustainable development