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Stellenausschreibung der Universität München. Deadline: 15. Januar 2024

by Hiwot Shaw In 1976, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishers Conservation and Management Act (MSA) became the primary law governing marine fishery management in U.S. federal waters. This significant policy aims to prevent overfishing, rebuild overfished stocks,Continue reading

December 27, 2019. A short list of environmental and energy law changes compared to recent years: Fisheries. As interest in shellfish aquaculture has increased, so have concerns about the impact of the rapidly evolving aquaculture industry on water recreation and navigation. Senate Bill 648 creates a new framework for management of aquaculture operations by […]

Martin Clough, Sellafield Ltd's head of environmental management at Sellafield, explains why the nuclear industry is the perfect choice for those looking for a career in environmental safety and protection.

UC Davis Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior: Post-doctoral Fellowship in Evaluation of Nitrogen Management Extension and Outreach

Position Description

The Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior and the Department of Water Resources organized a conference to connect researchers and practitioners working on the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in California. The conference was held on February 6th, 2018 at the University of California Davis and assembled 55 social science researchers as well as practitioners from in and out of the state.

January 4, 2023. By coincidence rather than design, two different approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the electric power sector have been under discussion by North Carolina agencies since 2021. This post will describe draft rules being considered by the N.C. Environmental Management Commission (EMC) in response to a petition for rulemaking submitted by […]

January 6, 2020. On December 23, 2019, the UNC Policy Collaboratory released a legislatively mandated report on nutrient pollution in Jordan Lake. The short version: A three year, multi-million dollar study has confirmed the science and policy underlying the 2009 Jordan Lake water quality rules. Background. In 2002, the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission (EMC) […]

It is time to create a multilateral Arctic fisheries management plan before a moratorium on fishing in Arctic high seas sunsets in 2037. Agreements can lead to economic and food security for partners; a lack of coordination will lead to conflict, environmental degradation, and overfishing. The clock is ticking.

Chris Edwards


The U.S. Department of Agriculture runs dozens of farm subsidy programs, which cost taxpayers more than $30 billion a year. The largest program is crop insurance, which costs about $10 billion a year. The program displaces private methods of managing risk and gives subsidies to farm businesses that do not need them.
Federal crop insurance for revenue and yield shortfalls is available for more than 100 crops, but corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton are the main ones. The policies are provided through 14 private insurance companies.
The USDA subsidizes insurance premiums, which costs taxpayers about $8 billion a year. The subsidies cover an average 62 percent of premiums, which results in most farmers making money on this so‐​called insurance. The Congressional Budget Office found that farmers received $65 billion more in claims than they paid in premiums between 2000 and 2016.
The USDA also pays about $2 billion a year to farm insurance companies to cover their administrative costs. With these subsidies and the inflated demand for policies, the 14 insurance companies appear to make above‐​normal profits, as suggested by the Government Accountability Office and other experts.
Here are some features of the USDA's crop insurance program.
Expansion in Scope. Federal crop insurance keeps growing in size and scope. The USDA reports that the number of crops insured has risen from 112 in 2000 to 134 today, while the number of insurance plans has risen from 20 in 2012 to 36 today. Expanding the scope of farm subsidies buttresses support for the logroll in Congress.
No Income Limits. There are no income limits for the crop insurance program, with the result that subsidies are tilted upwards. An AEI study found that "farms in the top 10 percent of the crop sales distribution received approximately 68 percent of all crop insurance premium subsidies." The Government Accountability Office reported that some billionaires receive crop insurance subsidies. It is often claimed that subsidies are needed to support family farms, but most farm subsidies go to the largest producers.
No Transparency. The recipients of crop insurance subsidies are a government secret. Billions of dollars in taxpayer‐​funded aid is laundered through private insurance companies to help hide the identities of the millionaire and billionaire recipients. Congress is spending our money, but we're not allowed to know who gets it.
Crowding Out. Instead of government subsidies, the USDA itself identified market‐​based ways for farmers to manage risks, including diversifying crops, building savings, using forward contracts, using specialized equipment, and diversifying income sources. Farmers can also diversify planting locations and keep a low debt load in case emergency borrowing is needed. Federal subsidies displace or crowd out private risk management solutions, including new solutions that would arise if subsidies were repealed.
Disaster Aid. Crop insurance subsidies have been expanded over the years under the premise that they would reduce pressure for Congress to pass emergency aid packages after disasters. But farmers have enjoyed huge emergency aid packages in recent years on top of all the regular aid. Since 2017, Congress has passed "an astounding $60 billion in ad‐​hoc disaster assistance" in a series of bills.
Environmental Effects. Economists Vincent Smith and Barry Goodwin argue, "There is an extensive body of research overwhelmingly reporting that subsidized crop insurance has encouraged farmers to shift production onto more fragile lands, thereby increasing soil erosion and, by implication, agriculture's carbon footprint."
Climate Change. The Environmental Working Group says that the federal crop insurance program "doesn't encourage or require farmers to adapt to or mitigate climate change because it often pays farmers for the same type of loss year after year, like multiple years of payments due to drought." That is a fascinating point—that subsidies undermine market adaptations to changing environmental conditions. The same is true, by the way, with federal flood insurance subsidies.
The best reform would be for Congress to repeal crop insurance subsidies, which would save taxpayers about $100 billion over the next decade. A more limited reform would be to impose an income limit for subsidy recipients, as economist Eric Belasco examines here. There is no reason why farm businesses cannot plan ahead by themselves to mitigate fluctuations in their earnings from drought and other contingencies.
More on farm subsidies here, here, and here. And see farm policy analyses from AEI, EWG, TCS, and Heritage.

Over the past decade, two, intertwined research agendas on international financial subordination (IFS) and subordinate financialization (SF) have proposed to identify how an increasingly finance-dominated global capitalism incorporates the (Semi-)Peripheries.
The IFS research agenda recognizes that a "subordinate" national currency comes with a risk premium increasing the costs of financing public debt – in other words, the current, US dollar-based currency hierarchy acts as a structural fiscal constraint in the Global South, limiting the scope for badly needed public investments. Foreign capital – in the form of foreign currency-denominated sovereign and private debt-, foreign aid, and foreign direct investment – is then touted as a solution to this artificial and unfair developmental constraint.
The SF agenda examines how this straightjacket on fiscal space has been further compounded with the liberalization of global capital mobility over the past forty years, diffusing credit-based accumulation strategies from the Core to the Peripheries: the financialization of (semi-)peripheral economies radically misallocates financial resources from socially and environmentally vital public goods and transformative industrial policies towards developmentally regressive strategies of accumulation driven by speculation and asset-price inflation.
Programmatic visions for liberating (semi-) peripheral economies from the dual constraints of a national fiscal space suffocated by the global currency hierarchy and globally mobile capital flows which deepen financialization are underdeveloped. Two scales of action are plausible: At the international level, de-dollarization is promoted by the BRICS bloc, but it remains uncertain what forms of international financial solidarity and collaboration, if any, will materialize under its aegis. The national level comprises an alternative scale as the State continues to be perceived as the most likely candidate for ringfencing domestic social, environmental, and developmental objectives from the pressures of global capital mobility and the structural constraints of the global currency hierarchy.
In a recent co-authored piece with Pınar E. Dönmez, we study the politics governing the management of money in Hungary and Turkey, two semi-peripheral economies where the executive has built a vast array of direct and indirect tools to intervene in monetary policy, retail banking and credit allocation to manage financial subordination [...]
The post Financial Statecraft and its Limits in the Semi-Periphery appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

We think this is a fascinating little piece of digging by the BBC: Welsh Water has admitted illegally spilling untreated sewage at dozens of treatment plants for years.The admission came after the BBC presented the water company with analysis of its own data.One of their worst performing plants is in Cardigan in west Wales.The company has been spilling untreated sewage there into an environmentally protected area near a rare dolphin habitat for at least a decade.Welsh Water says it is working to tackle the problems and does not dispute the analysis, Our word. Gosh. Because of course the English water companies have been subject to a barrage of complaints recently, no? As a result of Feargal Sharkey, Surfers Against Sewage and all water bills in England are to rise substantially to pay for the higher standards they desire. Well, OK, maybe that should happen - as we said. If we all want cleaner water then we've all got to pay for it. But then the other part of the general analysis recently has been that it is private, for profit, water companies to blame for all of this. The dividends taken by the capitalists are the cause. Which does rather run into a slight problem, which is that investment in water rose upon privatisation. As we've also pointed out. Cardigan was particularly bad, spilling for more than 200 days each year from 2019-2022.The data provided to Prof Hammond showed that Cardigan almost never treated the amount of sewage it was supposed to.According to its permit it has to treat 88 litres a second before spilling - but had illegally spilled untreated sewage for a cumulative total of 1,146 days from the start of 2018 to the end of May 2023."This is the worst sewage works I've come across in terms of illegal discharges," he said.Oh. Well, that deals with the Richard Murphy critique, which is that the English water companies are environmentally insolvent and therefore must be nationalised. Not for profit and state run companies are worse so what do we do with them? There is that third example, Scotland. But that's difficult as Scottish Water is so efficient it seems not to monitor sewage overflows at all. A tad hyperbolic perhaps, but certainly very little.Which does - or at least should, to the extent that anyone is willing to be rational here - bring us back to that basic discussion of state ownership and privatisation. Not, not at all, which is the best system in theory. Nor shriekings about capitalism, nor public goods to be publicly provided. But which is the most efficient system at delivering what we actually desire? Clean water from the taps, with the least sensible amount of environmental pollution, at the best price possible for those two? We've also run a natural experiment here. England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland got different ownership and management systems as a result of privatisation. The spectrum was from most capitalist to least. The best results have also been along that same spectrum - England, Wales, Scotland, NI.We have, in fact, gone and tested those theoretical speculations. Done it with the water systems of entire nations. And guess what? Capitalism works best. Sure, well regulated capitalism and all that. But capitalism all the same.Isn't that interesting?

The Office for Budget Responsibility is doing one thing right - using dynamic scoring. That is, employing the Lucas Critique. If you change the rules then people will change their behaviour. So, we must include changes of behaviour in our estimates of the effect of a change in policy. So far so good. Sadly, as Dr. Goodspeed of this parish (and also a former CEA Chair but that, of course, is trivial by comparison with a position here) tells us by email:Check out their fiscal multipliers. Small wonder there is such bias in the UK government toward transfers and public "investment" over marginal tax rate reductions. These multipliers are so far removed from the latest estimates that they're almost laughable. For public investment, one of the best experts out there is Valerie Ramey (UCSD, soon to be Hoover), who has a new paper on the macroeconomic effects of public infrastructure investment here. Her work is super accessible here, including this excellent JPE article on multipliers being less than unity regardless of slack.On taxes, Karel Mertens (Dallas Fed) and Morten Ravn (UCL) have made really important contributions to the study of the macroeconomic effects of tax shocks, including this AER article and this short study of the 2017 TCJA.For the UK specifically, James Cloyne has done excellent work, eg. here. Cloyne also contradicts HMT's claims about (corporate) tax cuts and inflation here, with additional insights on the effects of corporate tax cuts here and here.The changes in behaviour being claimed are wrong. As in, not true. One answer might be to change the assumptions being used to reflect reality. But that's to miss what the actual problem is. It is true that the OBR's assumptions all militate in favour of an activist government doin' stuff. That's what using multipliers that are too high means - that government doin' stuff is going to work and it's going to work great - and so on through their other errors as above. We of course don't agree and one of the reasons is that the assumptions are, when measured against reality, wrong.But the problem is larger than just the OBR. It's with the current style and structure of government - even the wider management of society. We have far too many organisations claiming to have a monopoly on the truth. Which they then impose upon everyone else. The OBR is used to measure what the Chancellor says - and what the OBR says is observed as being some neutral truth. Which, as above, it actually isn't. But far too much of life is being determined in exactly this manner. Natural England embeds into everything rather radical views about matters environmental - that's why it's run by Tony Juniper. The Climate Change Committee removes discussion of that subject from the front line and puts it into the backrooms of the cabal.We see this in wider form too. All those fact checkers of what can be determined to be "the truth" that can then be said out loud on social media. About any issue we like to mention too - trans issues, say, or as the current inquiry is showing, what could be said and what could not about covid. It becoming very clear indeed that often enough what could not be said was actually the truth.We are not about to claim that this is all a plot by Klaus and his Merry Elves from the WEF. We are micro-conspiracists, not macro. Once there is an organisation appointed to be the guardian of the truth then those with a vision for society will gravitate to it. The OBR will be run by the economics types who believe that government action is doin' good. Who, after all, else would be willing to work for a fairly boring govt dept other than they? Natural England is always going to be run by those with pretty extreme environmental views - like let's bring back the swamps with beavers just as climate change means the mosquitos will be back with malaria, dengue and Chagas. The CCC will always be the home of those who consider any price worth paying to prevent warming - like £15,000 fines for not selling an EV as is now being imposed upon car manufacturers. The factcheckers on the internet are always going to be those with views and dangnammit, everyone's got to acknowledge the truth of them. By force if necessary.By creating these positions with the power to determine that "truth" we have offered positions of power to every prodnose with a view they will insist upon imposing. Which isn't how a free and or liberal society works. Therefore we liberals and desirers of a free society need to kick back against these positions of power. It isn't enough to correct their errors. It's the positions themselves which are the fatal conceit. Therefore we must abolish the positions. The OBR, The CCC, Natural England, all similar and yes, all that factchecking of Facebook.That this will allow error is obviously true. But it will also prevent the embedding of error which is what is happening now. Not that this is an unlikely conclusion for us to reach around here - kill the bureaucracy has long been popular. But it is an important conclusion.

Russia has formally withdrawn from the Barents Euro-Arctic Council (BEAC), the latest blow to prospects for continued Arctic cooperation as relations between Moscow and Western capitals plummet to new lows 18 months into Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Under the current conditions, we are forced to announce the withdrawal of the Russian Federation from Barents Euro-Arctic Cooperation (BEAC)," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "Through the fault of the Western members (Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, the EU), the Council's activities have been effectively paralysed since March 2022. The Finnish presidency failed to confirm the transfer of the BEAC presidency to Russia, scheduled for October 2023, in violation of the principle of rotation thus disrupting the necessary preparations," the statement added. Russia was informally dismissed from the BEAC, which has done work in areas including environmental protection, rights of indigenous peoples, conservation, and the sustainable management of forest resources, in the opening stages of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A similar situation is playing out in the Arctic Council, whose seven other members — Canada, the United States, and the five Nordic states — announced in March 2022 that they will not convene under Russian chairmanship or work on projects involving Russia, the region's largest geographical stakeholder. The BEAC and Arctic Council, established in 1993 and 1996, respectively, reflected a uniquely optimistic moment in Russian-Western relations. With the Cold War in the rearview mirror at the end of 1991, there was an almost millenarian sense among former Cold War rivals that there was nothing stopping a fledgling Russian Federation from joining hands with the West to build a better world. Many of these multilateral institutions, established or expanded at a high point in Russian-Western relations, have seen their effectiveness diminished by decades of mounting tensions and were stretched to their breaking point following the Ukraine war. "Cooperation is based on values and on trust. And there is no trust today," said Finnish diplomat Jari Vilén, according to the Barents Observer. Western governments, in keeping with Vilén's line of reasoning, have tried to eject Russia from multilateral organizations and marginalize its role in any established frameworks for international cooperation as part of their maximum-pressure strategy against Russia. The problem is not just that Russia's sequestration has hobbled the BEAC and left the Arctic Council — an organization that pursues projects on a consensus basis — effectively paralyzed, but it is that, too. Work that cannot be conducted without Russian participation, including key environmental and climate monitoring initiatives, has been indefinitely suspended with all the varied consequences that entails. Yet there is an even more serious long-term cost to consider. Multilateral organizations can be especially useful in a low-trust or hostile environment, functioning as platforms for managing competition, filtering out destabilizing behaviors, and promoting dialogue on issues where limited cooperation can be mutually beneficial. The 1973 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which yielded a series of guiding principles articulated by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, was a substantive U.S. foreign policy achievement driven by a similar kind of gradualist institutional thinking. Moscow's membership in the BEAC and Arctic Council was, if nothing else, a way for the West to monitor Russian activities and keep them in check. Locking Russia into majority-western institutions, far from a liability, provided major strategic advantages. It established systems of regional cooperation that constrained Russia and benefited the west over the long term, incentivizing Moscow to act constructively toward Western states and institutions while diminishing opportunities for destabilizing behavior. Now, Russia's continued isolation from regional and other multilateral organizations is driving it to seek alternative arrangements that can harm Western interests in the arctic. Russia has responded to the Western embargo on Arctic cooperation by deepening its Arctic partnership with China, which is a void that Beijing has been all too happy to fill. Russia is proceeding with plans for a BRICS research station in the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard, reflecting Moscow's broader strategy to offset the effects of Western sanctions by deepening its cooperation with non-Western actors. More alarmingly, Moscow and Beijing have signed a memorandum in the northwestern Russian city of Murmansk for security cooperation in the Barents Sea and Arctic territories between Russian and Chinese coast guard units. Russia's isolation has opened the door for China to establish itself as a "near-Arctic state," an outcome that the Kremlin itself would have eyed warily prior to the new geopolitical realities that emerged after March 2022.Russia comprises around half of the Arctic, encompassing 53 percent of the Arctic Ocean coastline. Moscow's current isolation from regional organizations cannot change the fundamental reality that Russia is and will continue to be a key player in the High North. The NATO bids of Finland and Sweden, too, have contributed to Russia's increasingly securitized framing of its interests in the Arctic. There is growing evidence to suggest that Russia is gradually increasing its Arctic military presence, investing in radar bases, runways, and other infrastructure. These actions are being accompanied by an uptick in NATO movements, contributing to a cycle of militarization that will make the region's inhabitants less safe. The cumulative effect of these developments is as ominous as it is unambiguous: once held up as a sterling model of transnational cooperation for the rest of the world, the High North has been transformed over the past 18 months into yet another theater of great-power competition.

The UK nuclear strategy today is a muddle. After a brief description, this blog suggests what it should be. The Government claims that it ensures "that any new nuclear power station built in Great Britain meets high standards for:safetysecurityenvironmental protectionwaste management"The process is called the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) which is claimed to take four years, though insiders say the average is nearer six. But that is less than half the time taken to approve the National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) plans to connect up to 86 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2035. If one is building just one nuclear power plant every 20 years, these bureaucratic delays may not matter much, but the new small modular reactor (SMR) technology means, if we are to achieve net zero by 2050, building five a year over the next 20 years. No chance of that unless the bureaucrats mend their ways.The three stages of the GDA are: "Step 1 (initiation) which can take around 12 months. At its conclusion, ONR will publish a GDA Step 1 Statement setting out its regulatory position at this point. Step 2 (fundamental assessment) can take around 12 months, after which a GDA Step 2 Statement sets out ONR's regulatory position at this point. Step 3 (detailed assessment) can take around 24 months. ONR will then publish one or both GDA Step 3 Statement and Decision Document."If a developer requires a GDA for the building of an SMR at one site only in the UK then the process can be halted after the successful conclusion of Step 2 followed by a Site Licence application. If the deployment of a particular SMR design is envisaged for multiple sites in the UK then Step 3 needs to be successfully concluded.Although the four issues are supposed to be considered as an integrated whole, they can really be considered as two: safety determined by the Office for Nuclear Regulation and site approval determined by the Environment Agency.  Good progress was made on the former issue by the nuclear regulators in the US, Canada and UK agreeing that safety clearance in any one of the three would be regarded as approval by all three.  The two-way (and hopefully now three-way) transatlantic agreement to harmonise the licensing process has thus far only tackled the administrative landscape work that occupies much of the first 2 years. There are few safety aspects to Stage 1 which could be reduced to 4 months in all 3 countries if a standardised and transportable approach is agreed. Note that activities covered by the various steps and/or stages of the UK, US and Canadian systems do not match precisely at this stage, and some harmonisation is still required. Stage 3 is where the actual design is critically scrutinised and an iterative dialogue with design teams is established. This work can take around 12-18 months depending upon the lineage and degree of novelty in the reactor design. If the applicant has a well-resourced design team that can respond quickly to regulator questions and design modifications, it can proceed quickly. In the case of the AP1000, there were still almost 1,000 issues raised by the ONR that remained (and still remain) unresolved. This is where delays can become significant and where developers may be to blame. Trying to design and license a new reactor on a shoestring budget can result in developers complaining to their shareholders that the regulator is being unreasonable. Institutional shareholders then lobby politicians to influence regulators to be more accommodating of the newcomers.Terrapower has realised the importance of having an FOAK (First Of A Kind) site under development and adequate financial resources to quickly design, build and commission their first reactor. They are now putting pressure on the US NRC to bring the same urgency to their licensing application. There is one other point worth noting. The history of nuclear safety thus far, together with the accidents that have happened, have largely surrounded the use of water/steam as a coolant and transporter of heat energy from the reactor to where it is converted into mechanical and electrical energy. But when it comes to HTGRs and MSRs there is no high temperature and pressurised water in or around the reactor. These advanced SMRs have  much simpler and safer systems and this needs to be reflected in their design processing time.How should it work? We need to distinguish, as the current system does not, between the traditional gigawatt reactors such as proposed for Sizewell C and small or advanced modular reactors (SMRs) which are rapidly coming onto the market. But more importantly we need to distinguish between an FOAK reactor that has never been licensed before and an NOAK (Nth Of A Kind) reactor for which design approval has already been awarded in either the US or Canada, or indeed another country that meets the UK's exacting standards for nuclear licensing. With more than 20 SMR designs likely to make it to the licensing and construction stages in the next decade, the US, Canada and the UK can ill-afford to repeat the administrative and technical procedures given the time, staffing and financial constraints that each regulator is experiencing or is likely to experience once these designs are submitted. The US and Canadian regulators are already facing political pressure to speed up SMR design assessments and to be proportional given the size of these reactors when compared to giga scale reactors. The UK is limiting SMRs to a small number deemed most useful for the UK situation. However, adopting this line risks excluding exciting new technologies and applications from both the UK nuclear industry and the nation's effort to decarbonise industry and power generation.Of the possible new nuclear plants going through the mill in 2010, it was deemed necessary for their sile locations to be approved by 51 separate quangos. It was all a complete waste of time as in March 2011, Energy Secretary Huhne says Britain may back away from the use of nuclear energy because of safety fears and a potential rise in costs after the Fukushima disaster. No new nuclear plants were approved after  Sizewell B and Hinkley Point B in 1967. In other words, the process had become disapproval, not approval.Future strategy: NOAK for NuclearThe UK would be much better off if we abandoned trying to be first of a kind (FOAK) but aimed for Nth (NOAK). The advantages would be:The GDA process could be immensely streamlined as the environmental issues could mostly be taken from predecessor countries and, if Canada and/or the US had already given approval, the safety aspects could be eliminated altogether. Instead of starting from scratch, new GDAs should only have to look at environmental issues that differ from GDAs already approved.  For example, if the radioactive elements of SMRs were sited underground, approval of one should automatically apply to another similarly sited. Hinkley Point C is a glaring example of the risks and costs of trying to be first. The French utility EDF, which is developing Hinkley Point C, has reported a cost increase to £33 billion (30% higher than initial estimates) and potential delays in its start date.Construction and operating skills would have been developed elsewhere first. A Science Direct paper took NOAK build time to be 6 years versus 10 for FOAK.The market would have had time to grow, be competitive and both capital and running costs reduce."The average capital cost of SMR NOAK plants currently under development worldwide is approximately $5,130 per kilowatt electric (kWe), which is estimated to be 30% less than FOAK plants. However, it's essential to note that specific costs can vary based on factors such as design, location, and technology."From these comparisons, we should conclude that both for large Giga Watt reactors and SMRs, the UK should abandon its enthusiasm for being the world leader. NOAK is quicker, cheaper and more reliable. Nuclear skills can be the better learned from other countries as well as developing our own. The car industry has proved not just to be a UK success story, but a NOAK success story too.  Nuclear should learn from that.