A Count for Quality: Child Care Center Directors on Rating and Improvement Systems

Outlines the components and strategies of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems designed to enhance access to high-quality child care by rating programs, offering incentives and assistance for improvement, and educating and engaging parents

The Limits of Liability in Promoting Safe Geologic Sequestration of CO2

Deployment of new technologies is vital to climate change policy, but it invariably poses difficult tradeoffs. Carbon capture and storage (“CCS”), which involves the capture and permanent burial of CO2 emissions, exemplifies this problem. This article provides an overview of CCS in Part I, focusing on geologic sequestration, and analyzes the scientific work on the potential for releases of CO2 and brine from sequestrian reservoirs. Part II evaluates the comparative advantages of government regulation and common law liability. Part III examines the relative efficiencies of different doctrines of common law liability when applied to likely releases from sequestrian sites. The authors propose a hybrid legal framework in Part IV that combines a traditional regulatory regime with a novel two-tiered system of liability that is calibrated to objective site characteristics.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Risk Assessment of Bioaccumulation Substances. Part II: Description of a Model Framework

This report provides a proposal for a framework for risk assessment of bioaccumulative substances, either from produced water discharges or present as background contamination. The proposed framework is such that it is compatible to the current EIF risk assessment models that are used in the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry. The risk assessment approach selected for this framework is based on the use of critical body residues (CBR); i.e., body-tissue concentrations above which adverse effects are expected. A three-tiered risk assessment approach is distinguished: tier 1 for worst-case screening purposes; tier 2 based on probabilistic risk assessment using species sensitivity distributions and tier 3 focusing on population modelling for specific species. The latter tier is, because of its specific characteristics, not elaborated in detail. It is proposed to use a food-chain accumulation model to translate species sensitivity thresholds on the basis of CBR into external threshold concentrations, those external thresholds could then be used to either derive an ecosystem PNEC (tier I) or Species Sensitivity Distribution (tier II). This would provide a pragmatic approach to risk assessment of bioaccumulative substances in the context of the EIF modelling framework. Finally, an outline is provided for a research project in which the a risk assessment model for bioaccumulative substances is developed. This model will then be applied to two cases for purposes of demonstration and evaluation. An indication of workload and planning is provided