Accurate Economics to Protect Endangered Species and their Critical Habitats

Federal agencies currently use a methodology that finds negligible benefits of protecting critical habitat for endangered species, despite the prime real estate that is often involved. The Endangered Species Act already calls for economic analysis, but agencies currently treat it as a meaningless hoop to jump through. Agencies justify this hollow exercise by pointing to the difficulty in quantifying the increment of added protection that comes with critical habitat designation. However, the increment of added protection for critical habitat can be measured using methods already employed by agencies in other environmental analyses. Although the central benefits of critical habitat are improvements to the condition of listed species, accurate economic analysis should also consider the broad benefits of ecosystem services that flow from protected areas to human populations. I propose that agencies use a methodology that weighs the estimated burdens on regulated parties against the estimated benefits of designating lands as critical habitat. My proposed—more accurate—analysis can lead to more effective implementation of the Endangered Species Act by allowing agencies to target limited resources to projects that offer high net conservation benefits. I use a recent cost-benefit analysis for loggerhead turtles to demonstrate that the benefits of conserving habitat include increased protection of the species as well as a larger flow of ecosystem services amounting to at least $106 million per year in benefits, not the$0 estimate that federal agencies have arrived at. Accurate economic analysis provides useful information to agencies and the public in a way that can improve discussions that are often one-sided because of an emphasis on regulatory costs with little discussion of regulatory benefits

Protecting the Innocent with a Premium for Child Safety Regulations

Federal agencies regulate many products and activities that impact the safety of children. Agencies should put a premium on saving the lives of children when analyzing the costs and benefits of proposed regulations. This note uses original evidence from the infant car seat market to determine that a child-specific benefit measure should be one and a half to two times that of an adult. A child premium will encourage more regulations that protect the safety of our society\u27s most precious and innocent members

Antibiotic Resistance and Substrate Utilization by Bacteria Affi liated with Cave Streams at Diff erent Levels of Mammoth Cave

Located in south-central Kentucky, Mammoth Cave is one of the most unique National Parks in the United States. The surface landscape includes complex relationships between the flora and fauna along with human influences. However, the primary ecological focus is concealed below ground. Over four-hundred miles of cave passages, created by fl owing groundwater over millions of years, host a variety of macro and micro organisms. The Green River has cut into the limestone formation over geologic time, creating a complex network of passages that are stacked, one below the other, with the newer levels of cave lying near the bottom. Palmer (2007, 1987) describes 4 main levels of cave passages in the Mammoth Cave system. A detailed discussion of the geology and conditions that formed the cave levels can be found in several reports (Palmer, 1987; Palmer 1989; White and White, 1989; Granger, et al, 2001). Precipitation continues to provide water that traverses from the surface, through the unsaturated vadose levels of the cave, and down to the water table in the lower level. Water enters the cave system through direct recharge at sinkholes and through diff use percolation. The rapid infiltration of stormwater often exceeds the carrying capacity of the upper cave passages and excess water is pushed into void pore-spaces near the top of bedrock. This stored water is slowly released and provides base-fl ow to cave streams that replenish the pools and streams in the lowest level of the cave (Ryan and Meimen, 1996). These perennial cave streams carry many of the organic compounds that provide energy to the cave ecosystem (Barr, 1976)

Potential for modulation of the hydrophobic effect inside chaperonins

Despite the spontaneity of some in vitro protein folding reactions, native folding in vivo often requires the participation of barrel-shaped multimeric complexes known as chaperonins. Although it has long been known that chaperonin substrates fold upon sequestration inside the chaperonin barrel, the precise mechanism by which confinement within this space facilitates folding remains unknown. In this study, we examine the possibility that the chaperonin mediates a favorable reorganization of the solvent for the folding reaction. We begin by discussing the effect of electrostatic charge on solvent-mediated hydrophobic forces in an aqueous environment. Based on these initial physical arguments, we construct a simple, phenomenological theory for the thermodynamics of density and hydrogen bond order fluctuations in liquid water. Within the framework of this model, we investigate the effect of confinement within a chaperonin-like cavity on the configurational free energy of water by calculating solvent free energies for cavities corresponding to the different conformational states in the ATP- driven catalytic cycle of the prokaryotic chaperonin GroEL. Our findings suggest that one function of chaperonins may be to trap unfolded proteins and subsequently expose them to a micro-environment in which the hydrophobic effect, a crucial thermodynamic driving force for folding, is enhanced

Conserving a Place for Renewable Power

28 pagesPromoting renewable power and conserving land are often conflicting goals because renewable power requires a lot of land. The conflict is becoming an important issue on lands encumbered by conservation easements. I argue that the current legal rule allowing oil and gas development, but not wind and solar development, on conserved land does not make sense in light of the threats of climate change. The best way to encourage renewable power while respecting the intent of landowners is to have the Internal Revenue Service promulgate rules that explicitly allow renewable power going forward and interpret existing easements with a set of tools that match development parameters to conservation easements’ stated purposes

Three Barriers to Effective Programs with Payment for Ecosystem Services: Behavioral Responses in a Computer-Based Experiment

Financial incentives in the form of payment for ecosystem services (PES) can encourage participation in voluntary conservation programs, but real-world experience with PES is limited for services such as the provision of endangered species habitats. A computer-based laboratory experiment with 139 US college students as subjects suggests there are three barriers to effective PES programs: (1) financial rewards can crowd out altruism—low-level PES in the experiment was less effective than the same program without PES; (2) landowners may assuage guilt over destroying habitats by making contributions to ineffective conservation programs—participants often paired destruction of habitat with token contributions to conservation efforts; and (3) landowners may strategically exit conservation agreements in ways that are detrimental to wildlife—a large proportion of participants chose to leave agreements and destroy habitats when the PESs were structured without credible deterrence of an early exit. Fortunately, the results of the experiment also suggest research to overcome these barriers by ensuring that PES financial incentives are scaled and structured to effectively promote conservation. The lessons from this study—though they issue from the particular context of this experiment—provide suggestions about how to structure benefit sharing schemes that could be used to promote conservation in a range of settings

Exploration of Public Perceptions of the Credibility of Attorney Class-Action Lawsuit Advertising

Attorneys often advertise for class action clients, including in cases involving pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices. There is a recent push to regulate the content of these advertisements because medical professionals fear that citizens are receiving misleading or false information from attorneys using hyperbolic statements about the dangers of certain drugs. Although these advertisements often include dramatic risk information, they may also help disseminate helpful information about drug side effects. To better understand how people perceive these attorney advertisements and the ways they are regulated, we conducted a national survey of 1,292 participants to gather information about how people feel about credibility of these advertisements and how regulation of the advertisements affects those perceptions of credibility. We find that Democrats are generally in favor of more federal regulation of these ads, as are non-Trump supporting Republicans. Trump voters would find federal regulation of these advertisements less credible, perhaps indicating a general distrust in government bureaucracy and regulation. Our results indicate that a slight majority of participants would feel less confident in the credibility of these advertisements if the federal government were to regulate them. Given the importance of this issue, more research is needed to understand the factors that affect a citizen\u27s confidence in government regulation in order to strike the right balance to encourage the market to provide credible information to consumers