Are there Carbon Savings from US Biofuel Policies? Accounting for Leakage in Land and Fuel Markets

This paper applies the insights of the carbon leakage literature to study the emissions consequences of biofuel policies. We develop a simple analytic framework to decompose the intended emissions impacts of biofuel policy from four sources of carbon leakage: domestic fuel markets, domestic land markets, world land markets and world crude oil markets. A numerical simulation model illustrates the magnitude of each source of leakage for combinations of two current US biofuel policies: the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) and the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). In the presence of both land and fuel market leakage, current US biofuel policies are unlikely to reduce greenhouse gases. Four of the five policy scenarios we consider lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. That is, total leakage was greater than 100%. The single scenario that generates emissions savings, the removal of the VEETC in conjunction with a binding RFS, only does so because negative leakage in the domestic fuel market offset the remaining positive sources of leakage.Multi-market, carbon leakage, biofuels, greenhouse gases, Agricultural and Food Policy, Land Economics/Use, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q42, Q54, Q58,

Multiplex qPCR Discriminates Variants of Concern to Enhance Global Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2

With the emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants that may increase transmissibility and/or cause escape from immune responses, there is an urgent need for the targeted surveillance of circulating lineages. It was found that the B.1.1.7 (also 501Y.V1) variant, first detected in the United Kingdom, could be serendipitously detected by the Thermo Fisher TaqPath COVID-19 PCR assay because a key deletion in these viruses, spike Δ69-70, would cause a spike gene target failure (SGTF) result. However, a SGTF result is not definitive for B.1.1.7, and this assay cannot detect other variants of concern (VOC) that lack spike Δ69-70, such as B.1.351 (also 501Y.V2), detected in South Africa, and P.1 (also 501Y.V3), recently detected in Brazil. We identified a deletion in the ORF1a gene (ORF1a Δ3675-3677) in all 3 variants, which has not yet been widely detected in other SARS-CoV-2 lineages. Using ORF1a Δ3675-3677 as the primary target and spike Δ69-70 to differentiate, we designed and validated an open-source PCR assay to detect SARS-CoV-2 VOC. Our assay can be rapidly deployed in laboratories around the world to enhance surveillance for the local emergence and spread of B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1

Re-visiting Meltsner: Policy Advice Systems and the Multi-Dimensional Nature of Professional Policy Analysis

10.2139/ssrn.15462511-2

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

The seeds of divergence: the economy of French North America, 1688 to 1760

Generally, Canada has been ignored in the literature on the colonial origins of divergence with most of the attention going to the United States. Late nineteenth century estimates of income per capita show that Canada was relatively poorer than the United States and that within Canada, the French and Catholic population of Quebec was considerably poorer. Was this gap long standing? Some evidence has been advanced for earlier periods, but it is quite limited and not well-suited for comparison with other societies. This thesis aims to contribute both to Canadian economic history and to comparative work on inequality across nations during the early modern period. With the use of novel prices and wages from Quebec—which was then the largest settlement in Canada and under French rule—a price index, a series of real wages and a measurement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are constructed. They are used to shed light both on the course of economic development until the French were defeated by the British in 1760 and on standards of living in that colony relative to the mother country, France, as well as the American colonies. The work is divided into three components. The first component relates to the construction of a price index. The absence of such an index has been a thorn in the side of Canadian historians as it has limited the ability of historians to obtain real values of wages, output and living standards. This index shows that prices did not follow any trend and remained at a stable level. However, there were episodes of wide swings—mostly due to wars and the monetary experiment of playing card money. The creation of this index lays the foundation of the next component. The second component constructs a standardized real wage series in the form of welfare ratios (a consumption basket divided by nominal wage rate multiplied by length of work year) to compare Canada with France, England and Colonial America. Two measures are derived. The first relies on a “bare bones” definition of consumption with a large share of land-intensive goods. This measure indicates that Canada was poorer than England and Colonial America and not appreciably richer than France. However, this measure overestimates the relative position of Canada to the Old World because of the strong presence of land-intensive goods. A second measure is created using a “respectable” definition of consumption in which the basket includes a larger share of manufactured goods and capital-intensive goods. This second basket better reflects differences in living standards since the abundance of land in Canada (and Colonial America) made it easy to achieve bare subsistence, but the scarcity of capital and skilled labor made the consumption of luxuries and manufactured goods (clothing, lighting, imported goods) highly expensive. With this measure, the advantage of New France over France evaporates and turns slightly negative. In comparison with Britain and Colonial America, the gap widens appreciably. This element is the most important for future research. By showing a reversal because of a shift to a different type of basket, it shows that Old World and New World comparisons are very sensitive to how we measure the cost of living. Furthermore, there are no sustained improvements in living standards over the period regardless of the measure used. Gaps in living standards observed later in the nineteenth century existed as far back as the seventeenth century. In a wider American perspective that includes the Spanish colonies, Canada fares better. The third component computes a new series for Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is to avoid problems associated with using real wages in the form of welfare ratios which assume a constant labor supply. This assumption is hard to defend in the case of Colonial Canada as there were many signs of increasing industriousness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The GDP series suggest no long-run trend in living standards (from 1688 to circa 1765). The long peace era of 1713 to 1740 was marked by modest economic growth which offset a steady decline that had started in 1688, but by 1760 (as a result of constant warfare) living standards had sunk below their 1688 levels. These developments are accompanied by observations that suggest that other indicators of living standard declined. The flat-lining of incomes is accompanied by substantial increases in the amount of time worked, rising mortality and rising infant mortality. In addition, comparisons of incomes with the American colonies confirm the results obtained with wages— Canada was considerably poorer. At the end, a long conclusion is provides an exploratory discussion of why Canada would have diverged early on. In structural terms, it is argued that the French colony was plagued by the problem of a small population which prohibited the existence of scale effects. In combination with the fact that it was dispersed throughout the territory, the small population of New France limited the scope for specialization and economies of scale. However, this problem was in part created, and in part aggravated, by institutional factors like seigneurial tenure. The colonial origins of French America’s divergence from the rest of North America are thus partly institutional

Are there Carbon Savings from US Biofuel Policies? Accounting for Leakage in Land and Fuel Markets

This paper applies the insights of the carbon leakage literature to study the emissions consequences of biofuel policies. We develop a simple analytic framework to decompose the intended emissions impacts of biofuel policy from four sources of carbon leakage: domestic fuel markets, domestic land markets, world land markets and world crude oil markets. A numerical simulation model illustrates the magnitude of each source of leakage for combinations of two current US biofuel policies: the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) and the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). In the presence of both land and fuel market leakage, current US biofuel policies are unlikely to reduce greenhouse gases. Four of the five policy scenarios we consider lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. That is, total leakage was greater than 100%. The single scenario that generates emissions savings, the removal of the VEETC in conjunction with a binding RFS, only does so because negative leakage in the domestic fuel market offset the remaining positive sources of leakage

Economic Insights Required for Using Lifecycle Analysis for Policy Decisions

We develop an analytic and numerical model that integrates land, food and fuel markets and is linked with a sectoral emissions model to examine how the amount of biofuel in the economy impacts the lifecycle emissions of a biofuel under different policies. Our central finding is that the change in GHG emissions due to a unit expansion in biofuel will vary dramatically in the amount of biofuel in the economy and with the policy driving the expansion. The emissions from a unit expansion in corn ethanol due to a blend mandate fall from 12 gCO2e/MJ to 3 gCO2e/MJ, as the quantity of ethanol in the economy increases from 6 to 15 billion gallons. For an input subsidy, emissions due to a unit of ethanol increase from 15 gCO2e/MJ to 26 gCO2e/MJ over the same increase in ethanol. We discuss the implications of these results for lifecycle analysis