A price on warming with a supply chain directed market

Existing emissions trading system (ETS) designs inhibit emissions but do not constrain warming to any fxed level, preventing certainty of the global path of warming. Instead, they have the indirect objective of reducing emissions. They provide poor future price information. And they have high transaction costs for implementation, requiring treaties and laws. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel double-sided auction mechanism of emissions permits and sequestration contracts tied to temperature. This mechanism constrains warming for many (e.g., 150) years into the future and every auction would provide price information for this time range. In addition, this paper proposes a set of market rules and a bottom-up implementation path. A coalition of businesses begin implementation with jurisdictions joining as they are ready. The combination of the selected market rules and the proposed implementation path appear to incentivize participation. This design appears to be closer to "first best" with a lower cost of mitigation than any in the literature, while increasing the certainty of avoiding catastrophic warming. This design should also have a faster pathway to implementation. A numerical simulation shows surprising results, e.g., that static prices are wrong, prices should evolve over time in a way that contradicts other recent proposals, and "global warming potential" as used in existing ETSs are generally erroneous.Comment: 1 page, 0 figure

Conjoined Twins in Polynesia?

My arrival to Easter Island was on the Soren Larson, a two-masted square-rigged sailing ship. We sailed from Panama via the Galapagos and I spent a delightful week on Easter Island before flying on to Tahiti and New Zealand. Along the way, I became intrigued with carved figures and petroglyphs that seemed to depict joined human beings which I took as textbook illustrations of conjoined twins. That experience, plus a search of the literature, has led to this paper. My interest stems from the ethical considerations involved in the care of six sets of twins (Raffensperger 1997:249-255). I was, however, unaware of artistic representations of joined human figures until I observed a terracotta statuette from Mexico in the Museo de Colon, Gran Canaria.</p

Carney's triad: A 16-year follow-up

Abstract We report a female teenager who presented with a gastrointestinal stromal tumor of the stomach and a paraganglioneuroma. She later developed a pulmonary chondroma, fulfilling the requirements of Carney's triad. This patient demonstrates the course of the disease, which included severe emotional symptoms. She died, at 30 years of age, 16 years after the onset of disease, riddled with metastases. Many patients with Carney's triad survive for many years, but we can not predict the prognosis in any patient. During her lifetime, the patient had considerable emotional suffering, perhaps because of her disease

Insights into Medicine and Surgery/ by John Raffensperger.

This book explores aspects of medical history that are usually overlooked by medical historians. It begins with anthropologic literature and accounts of the early explorers which describe sophisticated medical treatments and wound care by Native Americans that were superior to European practices at the time. The book also shows that the Samhita Sushruta, an ancient Indian medical text, and one of Socrates' dialogues answer the age-old question of Hippocrates' dictum against abortion and operating for bladder stones. It then dwells at length on the University of Edinburgh, the shining center of.1 online resourc

Matching users' rights to available groundwater

The amount of available groundwater in a catchment changes quickly, and the amount of water that users can take sustainably depends on where and when it is taken. However, rights to water tend to be fixed, and obtaining rights to water incurs high transaction costs. As a result, water catchments are over-allocated worldwide. In this paper, I show how a catchment manager could match users' rights to the available water, in near real time, despite uncertain future inflows, while making effective use of all available hydrological data. The solution uses the framework of a smart market. A smart market is a periodic auction cleared with the help of an optimization model. In addition to market clearing, this model allows a convenient means to adjust initial rights, and the auction revenue reflects the available water relative to users' rights. When the auction is revenue neutral, the catchment may be viewed as allocated perfectly. I suggest several ways in which a catchment manager can find this revenue-neutral allocation, assuming the manager has authority to adjust initial rights.Auctions Smart markets Groundwater Water allocation Initial rights

Application of column splitting to the travelling salesman problem

Abstract In this paper, we apply column splitting to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), producing two different decompositions. The lower bounds on these models are at least as good as the standard Held-Karp lower bound, and we give examples with strictly better lower bounds. The bounds appear to be equivalent to the standard Dantzig, Fulkerson &amp; Johnson formulation, with all subtour breaking and 2-matching constraints added