Taxing Power Delegation for Better Environmental Regulation: A Proposl on Federal Carbon Tax Policymaking

In view of the stalled situation in climate change lawmaking, transferring the focus from direct congressional lawmaking to the possibility of delegated lawmaking by agencies may provide a new perspective to break the gridlock of federal carbon tax legislation. Taxes, however, in practice are generally less delegable than environmental and other regulations. Specifically, the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury are not permitted to determine tax rates. This is also the case for environmental taxes in the Internal Revenue Code. Though some environmental statutes seem to provide some implied and untested delegation of power to regulate by taxation, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not yet imposed any environmental taxes under such delegation. This Article argues for expanding the delegation of environmental taxes to realize their regulatory purposes, and proposes to delegate the EPA the power to determine and adjust carbon tax rates. A comparative study shows that Chinese legislature has considered the regulatory purpose in expanding the delegation of tax rates and tax base in the new Environmental Protection Tax Law, which provides a valuable reference to the U.S. Delegating the power to determine carbon taxes rates advances the EPA’s regulatory mission due to its comparative advantages of expertise in environmental policymaking, flexibility to the uncertainty and volatility of the climate change issue, as well as coordination of environmental policy instruments. The regulatory nature of environmental taxes also weakens the distributional and transfer-of-property concern and thus justifies the legitimacy of environmental tax delegation. Moreover, the EPA is likely to be more responsible than Congress in producing urgently needed but politically unpopular carbon tax. This article concludes that the proposal to delegate carbon tax rates is also likely to pass the constitutional muster based on the Origination Clause and the Non-Delegation Doctrine, as well as potential non-tax-delegation doctrines

A Scientometric Review of System Dynamics Applications in Construction Management Research

Construction management can be regarded as a complex and dynamic system. In recent years, system dynamics (SD) has been widely applied to solve the complex and dynamic problems in the construction management. However, there is a lack of a scientometric analysis to investigate SD applications in construction management from an objective perspective. To fill out this research gap, this study retrieved a total of 222 relevant articles from the Scopus database. Then, VOSviewer was employed to analyze the collected literature from five aspects (i.e., co-authorship, published journals, co-occurring keywords, article citations, and regions). Based on the analysis results, four mainstream research themes were identified and discussed, including “risk management”, “waste management”, “energy management”, and “construction productivity”. In addition, future research directions, such as “construction risk allocation in PPP projects”, “evaluating the economic feasibility of construction waste landfilling centers”, “identifying the variables affecting lighting infrastructure energy consumption”, and “assessing construction productivity for technology-intensive activities”, were proposed. The contribution of this study lies in that it helps both scholars and practitioners to solve the complex and dynamic problems in construction management

Hollow spherical SiO2 micro-container encapsulation of LiCl for high-performance simultaneous heat reallocation and seawater desalination

Energy & fresh water have both become scarce resources in the modern era of human society. Sorption-based technology is environmentally friendly and energy-efficient and can be driven by low-grade energy to transfer energy and produce fresh water. Here, we report a solid sorbent fabricated by encapsulating a hygroscopic salt, lithium chloride (LiCl), inside micro-sized hollow-structured SiO2. This composite sorbent (LiCl@HS) exhibits 6 times faster water vapor sorption kinetics than pure LiCl and a water vapor sorption capacity of 1.7 kg kg-1 at a relative humidity (RH) of 50%, which is the highest ever reported for any solid sorbent in the literature. The low regeneration temperature (<80 °C) and good cycling stability ensure the feasibility of the composite sorbent for use in practical applications. The thermodynamic calculations reveal that the sorbent is able to continuously supply 20 °C temperature lift with a maximum coefficient of performance (COP) for cooling of 0.97 and COP for heating of 1.89 while simultaneously producing 9.05 kg potable water per kilogram sorbent daily using seawater as the source water and solar energy as the sole energy source. A homemade system is developed and its practical performance in providing seasonally switchable heating and cooling along with clean water production from source water with an impaired quality is successfully verified, indicating its great potential

Scan-based Attacks on Linear Feedback Shift Register Based Stream Ciphers

In this paper, we present an attack on stream cipher implementations by determining the scan chain structure of the linear feedback shift registers in their implementations. Although scan Design-for-Test (DFT) is a powerful testing scheme, we show that it can be used to retrieve the information stored in a crypto chip thus compromising its theoretically proven security

Scan Based Side Channel Attack on Data Encryption Standard

Scan based test is a double edged sword. On one hand, it is a powerful test technique. On the other hand, it is an equally powerful attack tool. In this paper we show that scan chains can be used as a side channel to recover secret keys from a hardware implementation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES). By loading pairs of known plaintexts with one-bit difference in the normal mode and then scanning out the internal state in the test mode, we first determine the position of all scan elements in the scan chain. Then, based on a systematic analysis of the structure of the non-linear substitution boxes, and using three additional plaintexts we discover the DES secret key. Finally, some assumptions in the attack are discussed

Twisted Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition Promotes Progression of Surviving Bladder Cancer T24 Cells with hTERT-Dysfunction

Human cancer cells maintain telomeres to protect cells from senescence through telomerase activity (TA) or alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT) in different cell types. Moreover, cellular senescence can be bypassed by Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) during cancer progression in diverse solid tumors. However, it has not been elucidated the characteristics of telomere maintenance and progression ability after long-term culture in bladder cancer T24 cells with hTERT dysfunction.In this study, by using a dominant negative mutant human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) vector to inhibit TA in bladder cancer T24 cells, we observed the appearance of long phenotype of telomere length and the ALT-associated PML body (APB) complex after the 27(th) passage, indicating the occurrence of ALT-like pathway in surviving T24/DN868A cells with telomerase inhibition. Meanwhile, telomerase inhibition resulted in significant EMT as shown by change in cellular morphology concomitant with variation of EMT markers. Consistently, the surviving T24/DN868A cells showed increased progression ability in vitro and in vivo. In addition, we found Twist was activated to mediate EMT in surviving T24/DN868A samples.Taken together, our findings indicate that bladder cancer T24 cells may undergo the telomerase-to-ALT-like conversion and promote cancer progression at advanced stages through promoting EMT, thus providing novel possible insight into the mechanism of resistance to telomerase inhibitors in cancer treatment

Securing Hardware Accelerators: A New Challenge for High-Level Synthesis

High-level synthesis (HLS) tools have made significant progress in the past few years, improving the design productivity for hardware accelerators and becoming mainstream in industry to create specialized system-on-chip architectures. Increasing the level of security of these heterogeneous architectures is becoming critical. However, state-of-the-art security countermeasures are still applied only to the code executing on the processor cores or manually implemented into the generated components, leading to suboptimal and sometimes even insecure designs. This letter discusses extensions to HLS tools for creating secure heterogeneous architectures

IFRS9 Expected Credit Loss Estimation: Advanced Models for Estimating Portfolio Loss and Weighting Scenario Losses

Estimation of portfolio expected credit loss is required for IFRS9 regulatory purposes. It starts with the estimation of scenario loss at loan level, and then aggregated and summed up by scenario probability weights to obtain portfolio expected loss. This estimated loss can vary significantly, depending on the levels of loss severity generated by the IFSR9 models, and the probability weights chosen. There is a need for a quantitative approach for determining the weights for scenario losses. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate the expected portfolio losses brought by recession risk, and a quantitative approach for determining the scenario weights. The model and approach are validated by an empirical example, where we stress portfolio expected loss by recession risk, and calculate the scenario weights accordingly