Essays in Environmental Economics

This dissertation comprises four essays on the topic of environmental economics and industrial organization. In the first essay, we develop a two-country world differential game model with a polluting firm in each country to investigate the equilibrium of the game between firms when they decide to trade or not and to see under which conditions social welfare coincides with the market equilibrium. In the second essay, we built a model where firms strategically choose whether to participate in an auction/lottery to attain pollution permits, or instead invest in green R&D, to show that, somewhat counterintuitively, a desirable side effect of the auction is in fact that of fostering environmental R&D in an admissible range of the model parameters. The third essay investigates a second-best trade agreement between two countries when pollution spillovers are asymmetric to examine the strategic behavior of governments in using pollution taxes and tariffs under trade liberalization. The fouth essay studies the profitability of exogenous output constraint in a differential game model with price dynamics under the feedback strategies.

A trait-based approach for predicting species responses to environmental change from sparse data : how well might terrestrial mammals track climate change?

Funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) CEH projects. Grant Numbers: NEC05264, NEC05100 Natural Environment Research Council UK. Grant Number: NE/J008001/1 © 2016 The Authors. Global Change Biology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Environmental costs and benefits of growing Miscanthus for bioenergy in the UK

Funded by BBSRC. Grant Number: LK0863 Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Carbo-BioCrop project. Grant Number: NE/H01067X/1 MAGLUE project

Remaking Movie Making: The Environmental Impacts of the Film Industry in Southern California

The film and television industry is integral to the economics and culture of the Southern California region. It is also a major contributing factor to the environmental problems in the region. Currently the Motion Picture, Television, and Commercial Industries Act of 1984 is the only regulation written specifically for the entertainment industry. This regulation was created with the purpose of streamlining the film permitting process to prevent run-away production, taking production out of state, and encourage growth. A change in this regulation is needed since studios routinely fail to meet environmental standards or work towards improvement during on-location filming. Amendments to this regulation requiring permits to contain environmental conditions would improve environmental conditions and stay true to the original purpose of the act.

Planning water supply : cost-rate differentials and plumbing permits /

Mode of access: Internet.

Hazardous waste : a guide for obtaining permits and authorization for state programs.

Mode of access: Internet.

Building along America's coasts : 20 years of building permits, 1970-1989 /

"August 1992."

Illinois Environmental Protection Agency responsiveness summary for : Sugar Creek Impoundment : Section 401 water quality certification for the construction of a water supply reservoir for the city of Marion.

The city of Marion has applied to the Illinois EPA for Section 401 water quality certification to construct a 1,172 surface acre, raw water impoundment reservoir on Sugar Creek, southeast of Creal Springs, Williamson County, Illinois. This proposal and the impacts are described in the Final EIS, DSI, and DSII. The proposed project will involve the construction of a reservoir on Sugar Creek and the mitigation for affected wetlands and jurisdictional waters of the United States.

Siting new coal-fired power plants in Illinois : a guide to permits and economic incentives /

Summary: On June 22, 2001, the groundwork was laid for the construction of new electric generation in the state of Illinois when the Illinois Resource Development and Energy Act was signed. Overwhelmingly approved by the Illinois General Assembly, this broad-based $3.5 billion package is designed to reinvigorate the Illinois coal industry and to strengthen the state's ability to provide electricity to its citizens. The legislation (Public Act 92-0012) provides tax incentives and financial assistance to builders of new electric plants generating in excess of 400 megawatts that create Illinois coal-mining jobs, new and expanding coal mines, and natural gas-fired baseload electric plants with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts. The legislation also directs the the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to explore the need for a state-level, multi-pollutant strategy to reduce emissions from coal-fired electric generating plants.

The Evolution of Male-Biased Dispersal under the Joint Selective Forces of Inbreeding Load and Demographic and Environmental Stochasticity

Peer reviewed

Selection of a network of large lakes and reservoirs suitable for global environmental change analysis using Earth Observation

The GloboLakes project, a global observatory of lake responses to environmental change, aims to exploit current satellite missions and long remote-sensing archives to synoptically study multiple lake ecosystems, assess their current condition, reconstruct past trends to system trajectories, and assess lake sensitivity to multiple drivers of change. Here we describe the selection protocol for including lakes in the global observatory based upon remote-sensing techniques and an initial pool of the largest 3721 lakes and reservoirs in the world, as listed in the Global Lakes and Wetlands Database. An 18-year-long archive of satellite data was used to create spatial and temporal filters for the identification of waterbodies that are appropriate for remote-sensing methods. Further criteria were applied and tested to ensure the candidate sites span a wide range of ecological settings and characteristics; a total 960 lakes, lagoons, and reservoirs were selected. The methodology proposed here is applicable to new generation satellites, such as the European Space Agency Sentinel-series.

The Kinome of Pacific Oyster Crassostrea gigas, Its Expression during Development and in Response to Environmental Factors

Oysters play an important role in estuarine and coastal marine habitats, where the majority of humans live. In these ecosystems, environmental degradation is substantial, and oysters must cope with highly dynamic and stressful environmental constraints during their lives in the intertidal zone. The availability of the genome sequence of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas represents a unique opportunity for a comprehensive assessment of the signal transduction pathways that the species has developed to deal with this unique habitat. We performed an in silico analysis to identify, annotate and classify protein kinases in C. gigas, according to their kinase domain taxonomy classification, and compared with kinome already described in other animal species. The C. gigas kinome consists of 371 protein kinases, making it closely related to the sea urchin kinome, which has 353 protein kinases. The absence of gene redundancy in some groups of the C. gigas kinome may simplify functional studies of protein kinases. Through data mining of transcriptomes in C. gigas, we identified part of the kinome which may be central during development and may play a role in response to various environmental factors. Overall, this work contributes to a better understanding of key sensing pathways that may be central for adaptation to a highly dynamic marine environment.

Incentive based policies on climate change: taxes and tradable emssions permits

The reduction of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) plays a central role in the environmental policies considered by countries for implementation not only at its own level but also at supranational levels. This thesis is dedicated to investigate some aspects of two of the most relevant climate change policies. The first part is dedicated to emission permit markets and the second part to optimal carbon taxes. On emission permit markets we explore the strategic behavior of oligopolistic firms operating in polluting industrial sectors that are regulated by cap and trade systems. Our aim is to identify how market power influences the main results obtained under perfect competition assumptions and to understand how actions taken in one market affects the outcome of the other related market. A partial equilibrium model is developed for this purpose with specific abatement cost functions. In Chapter 2 we use the model to explain some of the most relevant literature results. In Chapter 3 the model is used to analyze different oligopolistic structures in the product market under the assumption of competitive permits market. There are two significant findings. Firstly, under the assumption of a Stackelberg oligopoly, firms have no incentives for lobbying in order to manipulate permit prices up, as they have under Cournot competition...