Ethical Emissions Trading and the Law

The idea of permit trading in the United States can be traced as far back as the 1970s, but emissions trading has really only became a popular and exportable idea with the more recent demands that environmental protection acknowledge economic pressures through such ideas as sustainable development. Now the idea of emissions trading has caught on in South America, China and Europe as well. Yet in the eagerness of governments and industry to work out the technical details and legal mechanics of the emissions trading tool, insufficient attention has been paid to its underlying legal and ethical assumptions. In this article, it is emphasized that emissions trading is a part of compliance with environmental law, not a market alternative to compliance. The difference between the two greatly effects and is affected by theories of rights. As part of the scheme of rights and accompanying duties, the author questions whether an implicit right to pollute has been created through emissions trading, as exemplified by the comparison of the systems in the U.S., China and Europe

"Expectation"

Previously in Futures, I discussed a word that we use to form an abstract futures concept: “millennium” [1]. In its most common current usage, “millennium” is an example of a word that provides, and one might even say controls, a future orientation for us. In the present essay, I am taking a different approach to the role of the word that I will be discussing. This word is not an example of a future-orientation; rather it is more of an example of language about future-orientation. The word is “expectation”. To make this distinction clearer, it may help to borrow some of the terminological distinctions made by the American logician, C.S. Peirce. First of all, for Peirce, and indeed for my present purposes, signs include words. More specifically, in a paper dated 1867, May 14th, and published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science (Boston), VII (1868) [2] Peirce divided signs into three categories based upon their relationship to their object—Icons, Indices, and Symbols. (Peirce himself used the convention of capitalising the words.) He defined “Icon” as a sign determined by its object “by virtue of its own internal nature”. In comparison, he defined “Index” as a sign determined by its object “by virtue of being in real relation to it”, such as when smoke is a sign of fire. A Symbol, according to Peirce, is a sign determined by its object “only in the sense that it will be so interpreted”. A Symbol thus depends upon conventions or habits

Conventional Wisdom, De-emption, and Uncooperative Federalism in International Environmental Agreements

What powers do to several states of the United States have individually to enter into environmental agreements with other sovereign nations? In this article, the author reviews the power that states may have generally and then specifically regarding environmental agreements. Several traditional tools of analysis have historically been used including the constitutional doctrine of pre-emption, cooperative federalism and the foreign affairs doctrine. Some newer tools of analysis are also offered including the revival of the treaty-compact and the author's own concept of "de-emption". The United States Senate's explicit refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, coupled with the consequent state initiatives to control greenhouse gasses - especially the documents concluded between New Jersey and the Netherlands, provide rich examples of these tools in contemporary action

A method motion simulator design based on modeling characteristics of the human operator

A design criteria is obtained to compare two simulators and evaluate their equivalence or credibility. In the subsequent analysis the comparison of two simulators can be considered as the same problem as the comparison of a real world situation and a simulation's representation of this real world situation. The design criteria developed involves modeling of the human operator and defining simple parameters to describe his behavior in the simulator and in the real world situation. In the process of obtaining human operator parameters to define characteristics to evaluate simulators, measures are also obtained on these human operator characteristics which can be used to describe the human as an information processor and controller. First, a study is conducted on the simulator design problem in such a manner that this modeling approach can be used to develop a criteria for the comparison of two simulators

Use of the tilt cue in a simulated heading tracking task

The task was performed with subjects using visual-only cues and combined visual and roll-axis motion cues. Half of the experimental trials were conducted with the simulator rotating about the horizontal axis; to suppress the tilt cue, the remaining trials were conducted with the simulator cab tilted 90 deg so that roll-axis motions were about earth vertical. The presence of the tilt cue allowed a substantial and statistically significant reduction in performance scores. When the tilt cue was suppressed, the availability of motion cues did not result in significant performance improvement. These effects were accounted for by the optimal-control pilot/vehicle model, wherein the presence or absence of various motion cues was represented by appropriate definition of the perceptual quantities assumed to be used by the human operator

Using model order tests to determine sensory inputs in a motion study

In the study of motion effects on tracking performance, a problem of interest is the determination of what sensory inputs a human uses in controlling his tracking task. In the approach presented here a simple canonical model (FID or a proportional, integral, derivative structure) is used to model the human's input-output time series. A study of significant changes in reduction of the output error loss functional is conducted as different permutations of parameters are considered. Since this canonical model includes parameters which are related to inputs to the human (such as the error signal, its derivatives and integration), the study of model order is equivalent to the study of which sensory inputs are being used by the tracker. The parameters are obtained which have the greatest effect on reducing the loss function significantly. In this manner the identification procedure converts the problem of testing for model order into the problem of determining sensory inputs

Use of the optimal control model in the design of motion cue experiments

An experiment is presented in which the effects of roll motions on human operator performance were investigated. The motion cues considered were the result of commanded vehicle motion and vehicle disturbances. An optimal control pilot-vehicle model was used in the design of the experiment and to predict system performance prior to executing the experiment. The model predictions and experimental results are compared. Seventy-eight per cent of the model predictions are within one standard deviation of the means of the experimental results. The high correlation between model predictions and system performance indicate the usefulness of the predictive model for experimental design and for prediction of pilot performance influenced by motion cues

A model for the pilot's use of motion cues in roll-axis tracking tasks

Simulated target-following and disturbance-regulation tasks were explored with subjects using visual-only and combined visual and motion cues. The effects of motion cues on task performance and pilot response behavior were appreciably different for the two task configurations and were consistent with data reported in earlier studies for similar task configurations. The optimal-control model for pilot/vehicle systems provided a task-independent framework for accounting for the pilot's use of motion cues. Specifically, the availability of motion cues was modeled by augmenting the set of perceptual variables to include position, rate, acceleration, and accleration-rate of the motion simulator, and results were consistent with the hypothesis of attention-sharing between visual and motion variables. This straightforward informational model allowed accurate model predictions of the effects of motion cues on a variety of response measures for both the target-following and disturbance-regulation tasks

Constitution

In looking toward the futures of Europe, the focal point of the legal and governmental aspects of European life has recently become the Treaty Establishing a Constitution of Europe - or just the "Constitution" as it has become colloquially known. That socio-linguistic act of referring to a document as a constitution is a mammoth move. First, it ignores all of the concerns and handwringing around the idea of producing a legal document called a constitution that might immediately be thought of as a sovereign-building document, such as the German constitution of the Irish constitution. Second, it suggests that the people of Europe are in some way similarly situated as together to constitute something. In this article, the author continues a series of reflections on words regarding futures, and takes an extensive look at the use, misuse and power of the word "constitution"