Backyard Politics, National Policies: Understanding the Opportunity Costs of National Fracking Bans

Some local communities in the United States, particularly in the Northeast, are scrambling to oppose natural gas production enabled by hydraulic fracturing (or fracing, fracking, or hydrofracking) in shale formations. Local opposition to the impacts of fracking is understandable, but recent proposals for national bans ignore a key, more potent threat. Due to a mismatch between the benefits and costs of fracking, on the one hand, and the distribution of political and legal influence, on the other, the voices of those opposed to extraction may drown out the more distant voices of those suffering from the widespread future effects of coal—the primary fossil alternative to gas. Energy policy processes must recognize the opportunity costs of banning gas, including the consequences of continuing to rely on coal as our primary electricity source. The negative environmental impacts of natural gas extraction must be addressed, and our focus on gas ought not to divert attention from the need to develop more sustainable energy alternatives. However, policymakers should not adopt the myopic view advocated by some anti-fracking activists. Rather, policymakers should formulate energy policies that fully weigh the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action and consider the interests of those under-represented in the policy process.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Electricity Markets $64,000 Question

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Designing Institutional Infrastructure for E-Science

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more dependent upon access to, and sharing of digital research data. Thus, the U.S. NSF Directorate committed in 2005 to a major research funding initiative, “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery”. These investments are aimed at enhancement of computer and network technologies, and the training of researchers. Animated by much the same view, the UK e-Science Core Programme has preceded the NSF effort in funding development of an array of open standard middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research. This proceeds from the sceptical view that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science—through the collaborative activities supported by the "cyberinfrastructure," if it is to be achieved, will be the result of a nexus of interrelated social, legal, and technical transformations.e-science, cyberinfrastructure, information sharing, research

TOWARDS INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR E-SCIENCE: The Scope of the Challenge

The three-fold purpose of this Report to the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Research Councils (UK) is to: • articulate the nature and significance of the non-technological issues that will bear on the practical effectiveness of the hardware and software infrastructures that are being created to enable collaborations in e- Science; • characterise succinctly the fundamental sources of the organisational and institutional challenges that need to be addressed in regard to defining terms, rights and responsibilities of the collaborating parties, and to illustrate these by reference to the limited experience gained to date in regard to intellectual property, liability, privacy, and security and competition policy issues affecting scientific research organisations; and • propose approaches for arriving at institutional mechanisms whose establishment would generate workable, specific arrangements facilitating collaboration in e-Science; and, that also might serve to meet similar needs in other spheres such as e- Learning, e-Government, e-Commerce, e-Healthcare. In carrying out these tasks, the report examines developments in enhanced computer-mediated telecommunication networks and digital information technologies, and recent advances in technologies of collaboration. It considers the economic and legal aspects of scientific collaboration, with attention to interactions between formal contracting and 'private ordering' arrangements that rest upon research community norms. It offers definitions of e-Science, virtual laboratories, collaboratories, and develops a taxonomy of collaborative e-Science activities which is implemented to classify British e-Science pilot projects and contrast these with US collaboratory projects funded during the 1990s. The approach to facilitating inter-organizational participation in collaborative projects rests upon the development of a modular structure of contractual clauses that permit flexibility and experience-based learning.

Cameron needs to convince both the member states and the EU institutions before his own side

The renegotiation of the UK’s membership has left many baffled as to what exactly Prime Minister David Cameron’s strategy really was. As David Spence argues, Cameron has faced a large and diverse number of negotiating partners in both the EU and the UK. One way of understanding what he and the many other negotiating partners hoped to achieve is by using an approach British civil servants have long been taught about negotiations: to think of the ideal, realistic and fall-back positions for the negotiation abroad and to reflect on these same three positions in terms of each of the UK’s negotiation partners, including in the ‘nested games’ at home

The Administration Goes It Alone on Energy Policy

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Administrative Law and Agency Policy-Making: Rethinking the Positive Theory of Political Control

In the last decade, positive political theory (PPT) models of agency policy-making have emphasized the tools politicians can use to control or influence agency decisions. These models are, in part, a reaction to earlier economic and other models of agency policy-making which emphasized the agency losses attendant to the delegation of decision-making authority to agencies by politicians. The more recent PPT works contend that politicians use the tools of ex post and ex ante control to overcome some of the agency problems associated with delegation (such as the inability to foresee the issues the agency will face), in part by enlisting interest groups in the battle to control agencies. These recent PPT models of political control do a good job of illustrating how and why politicians try to influence agency policymaking; but they overstate politicians\u27 ability to do so, for two reasons. First, commonly-employed methodological assumptions in positive models tend to obscure the most important impediments to political control. Second, the antecedents to the current PPT literature posed a false dichotomy between agency autonomy and good government, one which some positive theorists seem to continue to accept, at least implicitly. This article examines these positive and normative biases in the PPT literature on the political control of agencies, and argues that PPT policy models which abandon these assumptions will do a better job of (1) describing the agency policy-making process and (2) accommodating the fact of agency autonomy in the policy process