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The Carbon Price Equivalent: A Metric for Comparing Climate Change Mitigation Efforts Across Jurisdictions
Get PDFClimate change presents a global commons problem: Emissions reductions on the scale needed to meet global targets do not pass a domestic cost-benefit test in most countries. To give national governments ample incentive to pursue deep decarbonization, mutual interstate coercion will be necessary. Many proposed tools of coercive climate diplomacy would require a one-dimensional metric for comparing the stringency of climate change mitigation policy packages across jurisdictions. This article proposes and defends such a metric: the carbon price equivalent. There is substantial variation in the set of climate change mitigation policy instruments implemented by different countries. Nonetheless, the consequences of any combination of these policies can be summarized in terms of aggregate emissions during a specified period. Given differences in geography, resource endowments, levels of development, demographics, and other boundary conditions, aggregate emissions do not lend themselves to meaningful direct comparisons of climate change mitigation efforts. However, there will always be some carbon price that, if implemented in an otherwise neutral policy environment, would have produced this observed level of aggregate emissions during a specified period. This is the carbon price equivalent of the package of policies that produced that level of aggregate emissions. The carbon price equivalent can also be thought of as the weighted average emissions allowance trading price that would have prevailed under a cap-and-trade system implemented in an otherwise neutral policy environment, with the cap set to match observed aggregate emissions over some period. The carbon price equivalent metric has several applications, including strategic emissions policies, strong trade linkage, and border adjustment of domestic emissions taxes and regulations. This article sets forth procedures for estimating national carbon price equivalents, including a specification of the otherwise neutral policy environment. Design issues and challenges involving currency conversions, production versus consumption emissions, spillover effects of domestic climate policies, use of a social cost of carbon to set regulatory policy, and greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide are analyzed and resolved. A normative case for the carbon price equivalent metric is advanced in terms of both justice and efficiency. Alternative metrics are considered and found inadequate
Amen Over All Men: The Supreme Court’s Preservation of Religious Rights and What That Means for Fulton v. City of Philadelphia
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Maybe Law Schools Do Not Oppress Minority Faculty Women: A Critique of Meera E. Deo’s “Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia” (Stanford University Press 2019)
Get PDFThis essay tests Professor Meera Deo’s unsettling assertion that “implicit bias” in law schools is holding minority female and, to a lesser extent minority male, faculty back. It then presents her second, and more provocative claim, that minority faculty can generally offer better training in “solving complex problems.”
Regarding the former claim, Deo explains that minority women are not hired according to fair standards, not welcomed when they are hired, and not fairly evaluated for promotion. In addition, she argues that minority women professors are abused by their students. Because Deo barely tries to substantiate the second claim, it is dealt with only briefly in this article.
The finding here is that the principal claim is not proven. Close analysis of its components, along with Deo’s own statistics, shows that in spite of our failure to secure equality for all, our overwhelmingly liberal law faculties offer far more equitable treatment than Deo acknowledges. Deo is to be commended for dealing with an issue close to the heart of academic life today and for reporting some data that do not support her cause. In pitting race and gender groups against one another, however, Deo does serious damage to the self-understanding and sense of community of Americans both inside and outside the academy
The Robber Wants to Be Punished
Get PDFIt is a commonly held intuition that increasing punishment leads to less crime. Let us move our glance from the punishment for the crime itself to the punishment for the attempt to commit a crime, or to the punishment for the threat to carry it out. We argue that the greater the punishment for the attempted robbery, i.e., for the threat, give me your money or else, the greater the number of robberies and threats there will be. The punishment for the threat makes the withdrawal from it more expensive for the criminal, making the relative cost of committing the crime lower. In other words, the punishment of the threat may turn an incredible threat into a credible one. Therefore, the robber has a strong interest in a legal system that increases the punishment of the threat
