This paper is a study to determine whether the Title V program, as implemented in Texas, fulfills one of the goals of the Clean Air Act. That goal is to provide an effective compliance tool for particular sources (major sources of air contaminants). The study will include a description of elements that are a direct or indirect result of the Title V program including regulations, programs, permit and related documents, enforcement cases and violation data, etc. that will result in measurements or logical arguments to support the claim that the program is an effective compliance tool as compared to any system in place before it. I discuss Title V program elements that appear to detract from the compliance effectiveness, and explore the impact of these elements on compliance determination. / text

Σκοπός της εργασίας είναι να παρουσιαστεί ένα μεθοδολογικό σχέδιο που αποτελείται από την φασματική ανάλυση CLEAN και την παραγοντική ανάλύση έτσι ώστε να καταδειχθεί ότι η ανάπλαση υδροχημικών χρονοσειρών αναδεικνύει σημαντικές πληροφορίες όσον αφορά τη χρονική διακύμανση των κυρίαρχων διεργασιών που επηρεάζουν την ποιότητα νερού τριών ποταμών της Βόρειας Ελλάδας (Στρυμόνα, Αξιό, Αλιάκμονα). / -

The study is set to assess private actors participation in the global climate governance through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) adopted during the Kyoto Climate Conference of 1997 in Japan. The general aim of this thesis is to understand why there are so few CDM projects in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). The study is based on literature review of selected academic and policy documents, statistical analysis of CDM project distribution, and a questionnaire distributed to four respondents that include Tricorona, EcoSecurities, Vattenfall and Swedish Energy Agency to acquire relevant data. The data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics and the CDM project pipeline. The main conclusions of the study are: (1) the Kyoto Protocol did not place a binding commitment on industrialized countries as to how they should channel CDM investment in developing countries and; (2) the market incentive placed within the CDM did not take into consideration the historical and socioeconomic issues of poverty, poor infrastructural and institutional problems of Sub Saharan African countries in order to avoid the unequal distribution of projects. The study concludes with the recommendation that the post-2012 CDM era should create a new framework that will assist Sub Saharan African Countries in developing alternative energy, and in promoting green technology. The thesis equally recommends that the market mechanism should be enforced by a new political mechanism that will help to promote good governance, as well as upgrade the existing political institutions and infrastructural development in SSA.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol has been hailed as the grand compromise of the North-South divide over climate change mitigation for its ability to reconcile the economic demands of the North with the developmental needs of the South. Having been primarily analyzed from isolated economic, environmental, or developmental perspectives, the CDM’s efficacy in bridging the North-South divide remains poorly understood. This research evaluates the CDM against three qualitative criteria focused on issues affecting Southern nations’ participation in international agreements. An examination of distributive and procedural issues characterizing the CDM shows that significant trade-offs exist between Northern and Southern interests under the CDM and suggests that the interests of the South are often sacrificed. On this basis, conclusions are drawn which point to the need for increased attention to and accommodation of Southern interests in the CDM specifically, and global climate change efforts more broadly.

This study investigates the impact of nutrient management regulations on pig farms in Ontario, Canada. Using mathematical programming, small, medium and large farrow to finish and finishing pig farms are examined using uniform and crop requirement based manure application. The model scenarios characterize the cost of compliance when nutrient application standards are applied from the Nutrient Management Act and a previously proposed standard from the Clean Water Act. Compliance costs for scenarios with uniform manure application are ≤6.47%; while compliance costs for scenarios with crop requirement based manure application are ≤0.25%. The Nutrient Management Act has two calculations for nutrient application standards, producers must comply with the less binding calculation. Compliance costs for producers under the less binding standard following a uniform manure application strategy are ≤1.53%; while producers following a crop requirement based manure application strategy have no compliance costs. The proposed Clean Water Act standard is more restrictive than the Nutrient Management Act standards. / Ontario Pork, OMAFRA

This study examines the compliance cost of current and proposed environmental and species regulations on Ontario beef cattle farms. A mathematical programming model was used to simulate regulatory scenarios under the Ontario Nutrient Management Act (2002), the Ontario Clean Water Act (2007) and the Ontario Endangered Species Act (2007). Both the feedlot and cow-calf models are examined using a uniform manure application and optimal nutrient management strategy in each scenario. Under the Nutrient Management Act, feedlot operations using a uniform application strategy face compliance costs of up to 3.09%, but can eliminate compliance costs altogether by switching to an optimal nutrient application strategy. Compliance costs for cow-calf farmers are up to 9.57% under a land reduction scenario and 8.68% with a previously proposed land restriction. The Endangered Species Act scenario causes cow-calf farmers to face compliance costs of up to 6.60% due to restricted use of alfalfa and pasture land. / OMAFRA

Preliminary NMR data indicate that a new platinum compound, assigned (TpyO)PtMe (TpyO = 2,6-bis-(2’pyridyl)-4-pyridonate), can be synthesized by the addition of impure trans-(DMSO)2PtMeCl to impure 2,6-bis(2’-pyridyl)-4-hydroxypyridine (TpyOH) in the presence of NEt3 in about 10% yield. It is likely that the yield could be increased by using purified TpyOH and (DMSO)2PtMeCl. The metalation step of the synthesis was also attempted using (COD)PtMeCl but was unsuccessful with either Na2CO3 or NEt3 as bases, most likely due to the chelate effect of the bidentate COD. Future work with (TpyO)PtMe will include the addition of H+/D+ to generate the platinum (IV) complex, [(TpyO)Pt(Me)(H)]+, and/or the σ-complex [(TpyO)Pt(Me-H)]+ in order to examine the kinetic, isotope, and thermodynamic effects of the resulting reductive elimination reaction.

Environmental regulatory policy in the U.S. is a mixture of federal, state, and local activity and impacts. This is true of air quality regulations, which are governed at the federal level by the Clean Air Act. This dissertation analyzes both the political economy of federal environmental regulations and the empirical effects of ozone regulations under the Clean Air Act.A political economy model is developed that offers a motivation for political support of national environmental policy that regulates strictly local pollution. Altering local environmental policies in other jurisdictions will cause capital migration, which may increase local welfare. Thus, individuals have an incentive to influence local policies in other jurisdictions. National environmental policy then becomes a potential tool for inter-jurisdictional competition.The empirical impacts of ground-level ozone regulations under the Clean Air Act are also analyzed. The Clean Air Act established minimum air quality standards; localities failing to meet the established standards are classified as nonattainment areas and are subject to additional environmental regulations. These new regulations have a direct impact on polluting industries, and therefore also an indirect impact on the revenues and expenditures of local governments.First, nonattainment status is seen to alter regional industrial geography. Overall economic activity declines in both nonattainment areas and the surrounding jurisdictions. Gaining attainment status partially mitigates these impacts, although to some extent theeconomic impacts in both nonattainment areas and the surrounding jurisdictions do permanently persist. I also find evidence that manufacturing activity relocates from nonattainment areas to surrounding areas that face more lenient air quality regulations.Ozone nonattainment status is also seen to produce fiscal effects for local governments as changes in industrial geography alter local tax bases. Revenues and expenditures decline in regulated population centers, while they increase in surrounding areas. These increases diminish with distance from the urban center. Also, the fiscal impacts persist even after attainment status has been gained.

The competitive federalist system facilitated state leadership and the diffusion of innovative policies that addressed climate change and energy issues in the absence of comprehensive federal action at the start of the twenty-first century. In a competitive federalist system state governments and their politicians challenge one another horizontally and the federal government vertically for legislative credit and functional authority on relevant policy issues. What drove state-level climate and clean energy leadership from 2001 to 2012? This dissertation develops three competitive federalism-based hypotheses for analysis: (H1) A national, bipartisan network of ambitious, entrepreneurial governors drove climate and clean energy policy innovation from 2001 to 2012; (H2) the State Energy Program Recovery Act resources reduced the policy adoption gap between early enactors and laggards in clean energy financing and regulation; (H3) and justification for climate and clean energy activities in the states shifted from environmental to economic rationales from 2001 to 2012 (Figure ES1). While competitive federalism theory has centered on both fiscal and ideological considerations driving innovation in the policy environment, the experience of climate change policymaking and clean energy actions at the state level during the period under consideration reveals a clear partisan divide in policymaking within this domain.

This dissertation contains two essays on the analysis of market imperfections. In the first essay, I empirically test whether in a three-level hierarchy with asymmetries of information, more competition among intermediaries leads to more deception against the principal. In this setting, intermediaries supervise agents by delegation of the principal, and compete among themselves to provide supervision services to the agents. They cannot be perfectly monitored, therefore allowing them to manipulate supervision results in favor of the agents, and potentially leading to less than optimal outcomes for the principal. Using inspection-level data from the vehicular inspection program in Atlanta, I test for the existence of inspection deception (false positives), and whether this incidence is a function of the number of local competitors by station. I estimate the incidence of the most common form of false positives (clean piping) to be 9% of the passing inspections during the sample period. Moreover, the incidence of clean piping -- passing results of a different vehicle fraudulently applied to a failing vehicle -- per station increases by 0.7% with one more competitor within a 0.5 mile radius. These results are consistent with the presence of more competitors exacerbating the perverse incentives introduced by competition under this setting. In the second essay, we test whether electricity consumption by industrial and commercial customers responds to real-time prices after these firms sign-up for prices linked to the electricity wholesale market price. In principle, time-varying prices (TVP) can mitigate market power in wholesale markets and promote the integration of intermittent generation sources such as wind and solar power. However, little is known about the prevalence of TVP, especially in deregulated retail markets where customers can choose whether to adopt TVP, and how these firms change their consumption after signing up for this type of tariff. We study firm-level data on commercial and industrial customers in Texas, and estimate the magnitude of demand responsiveness using demand equations that consider the restrictions imposed by the microeconomic theory. We find a meaningful level of take-up of TVP ? in some sectors more than one-quarter of customers signed up for TVP. Nevertheless, the estimated price responsiveness of consumption is still small. Estimations by size and by type of industry show that own price elasticities are in most cases below 0.01 in absolute value. In the only cases that own price elasticities reach 0.02 in absolute value, the magnitude of demand response compared to the aggregate demand is negligible.