Mark Jaccard, Professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, VancouverAbstractThere are obvious reasons why for three decades most jurisdictions have failPublic surveys and observation of real-world GHG reduction successes suggest that explicit carbon pricing (carbon tax and perhaps cap-and-trade) can be substantially more politically difficult than certain regulatory policies for shifting the energy system on to a deep decarbonization trajectory. Nonetheless, some people have argued that carbon pricing is an essential GHG reduction policy, suggesting that sincere politicians must do carbon pricing no matter how politically difficult. But the claim that carbon pricing is essential is factually incorrect. Deep decarbonization can be achieved entirely with regulations. Regulatory policies are unlikely to be as economically efficient as carbon pricing. But not all regulations perform identically when it comes to the economic-efficiency criterion. Flexible regulations have some attributes that make them low cost relative to regulations that require adoption of specific technologies.This talk provides evidence that assesses both the relative economic efficiency of policies and their relative political acceptability. The findings reported here suggest that some kinds of flexible regulations can perform significantly better than explicit carbon pricing in terms of relative political cost per tonne reduced while performing only marginally worse in terms of economic cost per tonne reduced. Presumably, this type of trade-off information could be of value to politicians who sincerely want deep decarbonization but would also like to be rewarded with re-election so that they and competing politicians see the value in ambitious and sustained GHG reduction efforts.

Food Ethics, vol. 9 Abstract It has been argued that livestock farming is necessary to feed a growing population, that it enables efficient use of land and biomass that would otherwise be lost from the

2011. Physica A 390:3996-4001. The graph-navigability problem concerns how one can find as short paths as possible between a pair of vertices, given an incomplete picture of a graph. We study the navigab

Do you ever donate money to a charitable cause? If you do, how do you choose what cause to favour? The Scottish philosopher William MacAskill says that we are generally quite bad at regarding donation

Scientific Reports 14 Abstract Trust encourages members of communities to cooperate and provide public goods. However, the literature has yet to fully investigate how high and low trusting communities de

How can we in a systematic way understand what is causing better health in people? And how can we most efficiently use the resources of the public sector to turn around the development towards greater

H. Orri Stefánssonis Associate Professor (Docent) of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and Researcher and Advisor at

What is the point of private offsetting?

H. Orri Stefánsson is Associate Professor (Docent) of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and Researcher and Advisor a

Richard Bellamy, Professor of Political Science, UCL and Director of the Max Weber Programme, EUI. Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter. Abstract The muted popular support for, and certain faiI dispute this analysis. I argue that the EU’s role consists of supporting the democratic institutions of the member states, not least by enabling them to regulate their mutual interactions in non-dominating ways. From this perspective, the standard solution to the EU’s democratic deficit would create a domestic democratic deficit within each of the member states, one I contend democracy at the EU level would be unable to compensate for. Indeed, the current rise in Euro scepticism can be regarded as a product of this situation. By contrast, I suggest we conceive the EU as an association of democratic states, the decisions of which are under their joint and equal control. Drawing on the book, the talk will cover why such an arrangement is necessary, the norms that govern it, and the institutional framework required for it to work effectively and efficiently as well as equitably.

Visualizing information is a way to communicate scientific results efficiently and in an appealing way. This is particularly important if scientists want to communicate their results not only to their