Drastic Steps Research Articles

Life cycle assessment of natural gas combined cycle integrated with CO2 post combustion capture using chemical solvent

In light of global warming consequences and the need to take drastic steps to reduce its impact by capturing the CO2 from stationary sources, environmental performance assessment of CO2 capture processes is vital for deploying existing or innovative capture technologies. Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology was used in this study to evaluate the impacts associated with CO2 capture from a natural gas combined cycle power plant, by using a scientific approach of process design and sizing of important unit operations. The environmental assessment was conducted for 90% and 80% CO2 capture efficiencies, using conventional monoethanolamine (MEA) and advanced solvent (KS-1), at various CO2 compression configurations. The results show a major reduction in greenhouse gas emission (GHG) for both capture efficiencies. For the 90% CO2 capture efficiency with conventional MEA, a reduction of 76% in GHG emission was achieved for the entire compression configuration. The 80% CO2 capture efficiency with conventional MEA, on the other hand, showed a 65% reduction in GHG emission. Using the KS-1 solvent resulted in a 78% reduction in GHG emission due to reduction in energy required for CO2 regeneration.However, the assessment shows that CO2 capture operations has led to an increase in other environmental impacts such as human toxicity potential, abiotic depletion, marine eutrophication potential, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity, marine aquatic ecotoxicity, acidification, terrestrial ecotoxicity and photochemical oxidant formation potential. These impacts are mainly due to the additional energy required for the CO2 capture, infrastructures and chemical solvent used. The advantage of using the novel solvent (KS-1) is clear at 90% CO2 capture compared to the conventional MEA solvent.

On climate change and catastrophe

Climate change, and what is to be done about it, is a matter of enormous importance and urgency, on which every educated citizen in a democracy ought to try to make up her mind. It is strongly urged that holders of opposed views on the matter should not be too ready to dismiss one another as knaves or fools. It is concluded, with some regret, that alarmists, who hold that we are headed for catastrophe unless we take drastic steps, have made a better case than have their opponents.

We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell (review)

Reviewed by: We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell Russ Castronovo (bio) We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States. Richard Bell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 332 pp. Even though suicide seems an intensely personal action that emerges from the depths of despair, it resounds with more public meanings about the proper balance between individual will and collective social feelings in US democracy. Richard Bell makes this argument in We Shall Be No More by refusing to psychologize—and hence privatize—the forlorn souls who took drastic steps toward self-murder. Instead, Bell reads the suicide’s final act as an elusive political expression, one that combines and confuses protest with resignation, ultimate defiance with submission, and severe autonomy with oversensitivity to cultural influence. Tracking these themes from the days of Puritan settlement to the crisis over slavery and secession, Bell covers a large swath of national history by exploring how suicide became a heated flash point in debates over novel reading, philanthropy, capital punishment, religious salvation, and resistance to slavery. This survey depends on a careful scouring of newspapers, pamphlets, and other print culture artifacts that Bell sets amid a rich backdrop of historical crisis. Many of these crises, such as the worries surrounding excessive sentimentalism or the distrust of Universalism, Bell argues, erupt from the unprecedented and ever-increasing availability of printed material in America. If suicide was an epidemic, as alarmed social observers frequently claimed, then newspaper columns often seemed to be foremost in spreading the contagion. The earliest instance of what Bell calls “suicide politics” involves a 1690 item in Boston’s Public Occurrences about a recent widower, who, deranged [End Page 771] by grief, listened to the devil and took his own life (249). Within a hundred years, such events would accrue heightened cultural significance, as American revolutionaries often found it completely understandable why cowardly Loyalists would commit suicide. The partisan view of such tragedies suggests to Bell “the connection between suicide and the disintegration of social authority” (12). Political readings of suicide are not an American invention, however. Lucretia’s act of self-murder, after being raped by Tarquin, is said to have provided the impetus for the founding of the Roman Republic. Joseph Addison’s Cato (1712), a favorite among eighteenth-century American republicans, exemplified for George Washington and other Whigs of his class just how far men of virtue were willing to go to withstand tyranny. Bell does not examine what attracted Americans to these classical topoi of suicide and the meanings they might have wrested from these myths of self-sacrifice, which befits a study that is more thematic than theoretical or critical. And precisely because he does not dwell on a few texts, he is able to range across the diverse geographies of popular print culture, from the pietistic heights of religious sermons to the sensational accounts of murder-suicides. As he sagely observes, the proliferation of newspapers in the early Republic, which increased more than tenfold between 1760 and 1814, occasioned a dramatic increase in the reporting of suicides in ways that both interested and anguished readers during this era. The danger that print could unhinge readers, especially young men and women attracted to suffering and self-consumed heroes, often centered on one particular novel in America, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Bell begins his first case study by tracking how ministers, medical doctors, and elders fretted over the influence that Goethe’s lachrymose tale of thwarted love exercised over impressionable minds. While these complaints against novels will be familiar to literary critics and book historians, Bell’s contribution lies in connecting this perceived danger to transatlantic publishing. The simile he employs to suggest the dimensions of this epidemic of novel reading—“suicide spread through the pages of fashionable fiction like yellow fever”—fits with the late eighteenth-century landscape, where cities such as Philadelphia and New York were decimated by hemorrhagic disease (60). Bell might also have spoken of a flood of teary fiction that inundated the reading public with sentimental excess, since the next chapter examines the many lifesaving and...

Austerity measures in crisis countries — results and impact on mid-term development

Since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, the crisis-stricken countries in Europe have been pushed to take drastic steps to consolidate their finances and reduce their budget deficits. Despite strong public opposition and largely damaging short-run effects, the countries have undertaken many of the internationally recommended/mandated reforms and spending cuts. In this Forum, authors from Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal report on the fiscal consolidation achieved in their respective countries — and the sacrifices that have made it possible. Furthermore, the authors detail what remains to be done to resolve the crisis.

Regularized Latent Semantic Indexing

Topic modeling provides a powerful way to analyze the content of a collection of documents. It has become a popular tool in many research areas, such as text mining, information retrieval, natural language processing, and other related fields. In real-world applications, however, the usefulness of topic modeling is limited due to scalability issues. Scaling to larger document collections via parallelization is an active area of research, but most solutions require drastic steps, such as vastly reducing input vocabulary. In this article we introduce Regularized Latent Semantic Indexing (RLSI)---including a batch version and an online version, referred to as batch RLSI and online RLSI, respectively---to scale up topic modeling. Batch RLSI and online RLSI are as effective as existing topic modeling techniques and can scale to larger datasets without reducing input vocabulary. Moreover, online RLSI can be applied to stream data and can capture the dynamic evolution of topics. Both versions of RLSI formalize topic modeling as a problem of minimizing a quadratic loss function regularized by ℓ1 and/or ℓ2 norm. This formulation allows the learning process to be decomposed into multiple suboptimization problems which can be optimized in parallel, for example, via MapReduce. We particularly propose adopting ℓ1 norm on topics and ℓ2 norm on document representations to create a model with compact and readable topics and which is useful for retrieval. In learning, batch RLSI processes all the documents in the collection as a whole, while online RLSI processes the documents in the collection one by one. We also prove the convergence of the learning of online RLSI. Relevance ranking experiments on three TREC datasets show that batch RLSI and online RLSI perform better than LSI, PLSI, LDA, and NMF, and the improvements are sometimes statistically significant. Experiments on a Web dataset containing about 1.6 million documents and 7 million terms, demonstrate a similar boost in performance.

Biotech Firms Slash Payrolls

Facing financial problems and development setbacks, six biotech companies are taking drastic steps. A new board at Canada’s QLT hopes to fix a “precarious financial position.” In 2011, the firm lost $30 million, despite revenues of $42 million. To align spending and headcount, the board has cut 146 jobs. The remaining 68 employees will focus on the firm’s oral retinoid program. Advisers will determine whether to sell or spin off QLT’s punctal plug drug delivery technology and possibly partner or sell its Visudyne eye drug. The firm expects to break even in 2012. Another Canadian firm, Cardiome Pharma, is cutting 85% of its workforce after Merck & Co. stopped work on an oral form of Cardiome’s heart drug vernakalant. The cutbacks will eliminate internal research. Cardiome interim CEO William Hunter wants to preserve cash and focus on intravenous vernakalant with Merck. Chelsea Therapeutics is facing a delay in the approval ...

The Reproductive Cycle of the Brown Anole ( Anolis sagrei ), an Introduced Lizard Species in Taiwan

During two collection periods, of 13 and 15 months respectively, seven hundred and forty-three brown anoles ( Anolis sagrei ) were collected from Santzepu, Sheishan District, Chiayi County (23°25’51’’ N 120°28’30’’ E). The lizards were measured and dissected to determine the reproductive cycle of this invasive species in Taiwan. The smallest female showing sexual maturity had a snout-vent length of 34 mm, while that of the smallest male was 30 mm. Reproduction was seasonal, and ovigerous females were maximal from April to September and declined to zero in January, while in the males, the mean testis mass and volume was maximal from April to June, and minimal from October to December. The majority of the males collected in the period from February to August were in a stage of spermiogenesis, while from September to January spermatogenesis appeared to be minimal. Males with spermatozoa, which could mate, were present throughout both study periods. This study demonstrated that the reproductive cycle of the Anolis sagrei population in Taiwan is long and cyclic, and that it is very similar to that of conspecific populations in Belize, Cuba, Florida, and Hawaii. In view of the potential for A. sagrei taking over new territories, drastic steps are merited to prevent future introductions of this species.

In search for the ways out of nowhere: The critical state of the Serbian economy and the alternatives before us

The dire state of the Serbian economy is a diagnostic finding which no one questions. Conspicuous signs of faltering in the process of growth, unprecedented unemployment volume and rate, persistent and disturbingly large deficits in the balance of current transactions, equally large and unsustainable fiscal deficits, and the highest rate of inflation in the region ranking also among the highest in all of Europe - clearly indicate that the economy is facing grave difficulties without reliable means or coherent strategies of overcoming them. A number of determinants of such a dramatic constellation is identified and discussed in the paper. Significant extraordinary inflows stemming from privatization, increase in foreign indebtedness, external donations and even remittances from abroad have almost exclusively been channeled into current consumption, raising it to irreversibly high levels and thus eliminating savings and undercutting the economy's growth potential. Foreign direct investment has largely crowded out domestic undertakings. The strategy of privatization was directed towards retaining the unsustainable economic tissue inherited from the socialist past. That amounted to preventing the needed radical reallocation of resources by imposing on the buyers in the process of privatization the obligation to preserve more jobs than it was economically warranted. Huge and heavily bureaucratized government, with accompanying unbearable fiscal burden, drastically reduced the profitability of businesses and forced many of them to exit. The financially exhausted economy faces grave difficulties in meeting its financial obligations, the arrears are mounting, and the system as a whole seems to be heading towards a breakdown. Like in the Greek tragedy, there are alternatives but none of them leads to a satisfactory resolution of the crisis. Drastic steps will have to be taken, but political determination and strength appear to be so far lacking to venture them.

Die invloed van die herkenning van hoëfrekwensiewoorde op die leesvaardighede van Graad 2-leerders in die Grondslagfase

It is of utmost importance for learners to master language in order to learn effectively at school. Many learners are initially taught in school to read and write. Learners should later be able to use acquired reading skills to learn, and acquired writing skills must be applied to reproduce that which has been learnt. If learners do not master the foregoing skills, their progress at school will be seriously handicapped. In spite of the implementation of the National Curriculum Statement Grade R-9 (Schools) and Grade 10-12 (Schools) as well as the Foundations for Learning-campaign, illiteracy is still a serious problem in South Africa. Because the basis of all reading and writing skills are laid in the Foundation Phase, it is necessary for drastic steps to be taken to ensure that learners will be able to read with comprehension in their first years at school. This research is aimed at proving the significant relationship between high frequency words and reading skills (measured by word recognition and reading comprehension) and also to prove that the teaching of high frequency words can lead to the improvement of the above mentioned reading skills. The gathering/collection of data is characterised by the use of standardised tests. In addition, use was made of descriptive statistics; Pearson’s product moment correlations and Cohen’s r-values; t-tests and Cohen’s d-values; as well as one sample t-tests to analyse and interpret data.Keywords: sight-words, high frequency words, reading skills, Dolch words, foundation phase, fluency, reading comprehension, kindergartenSleutelbegrippe: sigwoorde, hoëfrekwensiewoorde, leesvaardighede, Dolch woorde, grondslagfase, leesvlotheid, leesbegrip, kindergartenThe article is in Afrikaans.

Year 2 of the “Great Recession”: Surviving the Present by Building the Future

ABSTRACT During Fiscal Year 2008–2009 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) surveyed its 123 members on the impact of the worldwide contraction and reported the results (see http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ala09/index.shtml). The findings indicate the emergence of drastic steps needed to “right size” budgets that were reduced to meet institutional loss of income from a variety of sources, particularly tax support and endowment earnings. The impact of the 1st year of the downturn was taken primarily from operations and staff with large efforts to protect acquisitions. Every indicator pointed to this trend not being sustainable for the next fiscal period. A 2nd survey, conducted in the fall of 2009, indicated that the crisis has grown worse for Fiscal Year 2009–2010. It is anticipated that the steep decline in institutional revenues will continue throughout the year with repeated reductions and cyclical need to constrain expenditures. The necessary budget cutbacks are having an impact on all segments of ARL member library budgets—operations, staff, and acquisitions. It is clear that the elements of recovery being seen worldwide will have no positive impact for higher education in North America for the current fiscal year and likely beyond. Primary income sources have not recovered—state tax revenues are down, endowment expenditures are being eliminated in hopes of growing capital, and tuition is increases are being restrained. The depth of the recession has accelerated a process in the research library community that has been underway for some years. This process is aimed at fundamentally reshaping the mission of the research library to meet transformational changes eventuating from the higher education and scholarly communication environments.

Fixing a grant system in crisis

Facing a flood of applications from researchers, a UK funding agency is taking drastic steps — and partners around the world are watching how it plays out. Richard Van Noorden and Geoff Brumfiel report.

Academic managerialism in the art and design school

As the United States (US) financial sector experienced 'meltdown' in 2008, a different but not unrelated 'meltdown' continued its decades-long impact on art and design education in the US. Seemingly hanging in the balance has been culture itself, rationed so that it becomes a source of conformity, not critical dissent. Symptoms of ongoing 'meltdown' in US art and design education at the tertiary level are many. Rising costs have continued to threaten access. This has come just as the recent economic reshuffle, largely manufactured in the US, has led to a decrease in student bursaries and student employment opportunities used to defray cost. Delayed progress towards degrees and diplomas--if not complete cessation--has followed. Also, central administration's talk of 'financial exigency' has hung in the air along with the possibility that 'shock' treatment--as Naomi Klein (2007) might describe it--will follow. This 'shock' has included academic management unilaterally taking drastic steps, like abolishing tenure, increasing teaching loads and institutional service requirements, all while actually and effectively cutting pay, hiring contingent faculty to do what tenured or tenure-track academics once did, and feverishly introducing new online courses (even in art and design schools) in the name of 'efficiency'. That these challenges confront students and faculty at US art and design schools should not be surprising. Managerial changes in US higher education fall well within what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed the 'essence of neoliberalism' (1998) operating at a global level, where managerial 'flexibility' underlies managerial decision-making. This 'flexibility' helps to constitute a rationale in which the basis of 'quality' in teaching, research and production can be quantified via almighty 'metrics'. The trend towards managerial flexibility in US art and design schools has included a heightened vigour for translating for-profit sector management techniques into not-for-profit higher education. Responsibility-centered management (RCM, sometimes referred to as responsibility-centered budgeting (RCB)) is one technique from the for-profit sector now at home in not-for-profit tertiary education in general, including even art and design schools. (On RCM, see Nelson & Watt 1999: 221-224.) RCM, as its proponents argue, permits more alignment between authority and responsibility. In terms of authority, administrative units receive more (but not ultimate) day-to-day control of their own affairs. It is basically a kind of devolution, in which the day-to-day running of an administrative unit, like an academic department, nominally reverts back to that unit. Power supposedly moves from a central source, like a central administrative structure, to a site closer to the actual administration of 'product', like a department of writing or visual communications. (RCM managers actually use this 'product' terminology, along with 'entrepreneurial', 'enterprise', 'investment', 'market', 'value', while designating students as 'clients'.) While academic units closest to the delivery of 'product' receive more authority, they also become more responsible for their own resource disposition. For example, an academic unit like a photography department assumes responsibility for the generation of its own resources. These resources come in the form of, for example, grants and fellowships as well as the generation of student credit hours (which translates into revenue via student tuition and fees), all of which largely means more cash for that academic unit. There is, in short, a reward for 'creating value' that funders want, or that art history or ceramics students want and for which they pay tuition and fees. For permanent academic staff this theoretically means higher pay, more funding to pour metal casts, release time from teaching, more support staff, travel funds, new equipment, or a better desk or studio space. There is a catch: if an academic unit earns its keep, and then some, it keeps the booty. …

Creativity and workplace attractiveness in professional employment

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the notion of attractive workplaces in the specific context of creative professional employment.Design/methodology/approachBased on observations and interview data at knowledge‐based firms in the UK, the paper looks at the extent to which employees are “rewarded” with the offer of creative work and the degree to which this offer really involves greater benefits for employees in terms of professional prestige and the confirmation of their identities as professional workers in the creative industries.FindingsThe paper finds that creative needs remain important components of the attractive workplace, but increasingly also of importance are the extrinsic rewards of an acceptable work‐life balance as the age profile of the technology worker changes and technology stagnates.Research limitations/implicationsThis research focused on one group of workers within one specific country. Whilst it was found that work in the software sector is becoming less creative, this may not be the case across all contexts.Practical implicationsThere is clearly a problem, of developing young technology specialists within Scotland. In order to maintain the “Smart, Successful Scotland” propounded by the Scottish Government, drastic steps need to be taken to educate the IT workers and indeed, entrepreneurs of the future.Originality/valueThis paper is new as there has been little recent research undertaken examining the IT sector in Scotland. More generally, there is a scarcity of work focusing on workplace attractiveness for IT specialists.

Comments: Help Wanted

From Canada to Scotland to west Texas, there are reports of labor shortages when oil prices and demand forecasts suggest the need for an acceleration of E&P activity. This may be just short-term fluctuations in the job market, or it may be that the predictions of a dwindling supply of skilled professionals in the oil and gas industry are finally coming true. Of all the challenges the industry faces—geopolitical tension limiting opportunities, lack of decent prospects, poor public opinion, outdated rigs and equipment—some find forecasts of a skilled worker shortage the most foreboding. No matter how technologically savvy the industry has become, you cannot produce a sufficient amount of oil and gas, or at least not as much as the Intl. Energy Agency believes the world will need over the next several decades, without good workers. And human resources take time to develop, so companies may be fighting over the pool of available workers in the meantime. And in some regions, there are just fewer workers than there used to be, which is affecting numerous professions. The U.K. has 1 million fewer people in their twenties than a decade ago. That means the competition for skilled workers across all industry sectors will be fierce. The worker shortage in the oil industry goes back to the mid-1980s’ oil price crash. Layoffs were widespread, and people were discouraged from joining the industry. The consolidation of the workforce continued through the 1990s amid the wave of mergers and acquisitions, and younger people looked elsewhere for careers. The industry’s poor public image in some countries and the boom-and-bust nature of the business has not helped. Neither have predictions about whether global oil production has peaked or plateaued and has nowhere to go but down, regardless of whether those predictions are true. Even in regions where the industry is held in high esteem, who wants to join an industry that may be on its way out, particularly when so many other professions look so promising? There have been more than 1.1 million layoffs in the oil and gas industry since 1981, according to oil consultancy John S. Herold, and a severe personnel crunch will occur unless the industry takes drastic steps to reverse the “brain drain” occurring as older workers retire. Employment at 25 of the largest companies, including majors and independents, fell 4% last year, the 20th annual decline in the past 23 years, the consultancy says. Since 1999, the industry has eliminated 120,000 positions. Some of this represents efficiency. Private oil firms have been paying more attention to Wall Street, which favors lean companies. Last month at the biennial Offshore Europe conference, the Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce issued a report that contends that a shortage of key skills is the most important strategic threat to the industry’s future. “As an industry, we are beginning to feel the skills constraint,” Kieron McFadyen, Shell Exploration and Production Technical Vice President, said at the report’s release. “Industry costs are increasing and our workforce is being asked to cope with an ever demanding workload driven by increased activity levels.” The Chamber reported earlier this year that 80% of producers said they recently have attempted to hire staff, with two-thirds reporting difficulties in finding the right workers. Shortages are occurring across the industry, including managerial and technical positions, and specifically in the drilling, subsea, and reservoir sectors. But progress in meeting this obstacle is being made. SPE has embarked on programs to encourage young professionals and educate the public about energy, which will only improve the industry’s image. Several companies are generously supporting initiatives to strengthen ties with universities and enhance worker competency and knowledge. With global demand for hydrocarbons showing no signs of slowing down, the human resource challenge may rival any technical challenge the industry faces in the years ahead.

Bush, Kerry Take Stand On Key Mental Health Issues

Bush, Kerry Take Stand On Key Mental Health Issues

Assessing Latin American Neoliberalism: Introduction to a Debate

The present set of Research Notes, which were first presented at a forum on Latin America's market reforms held at the 2003 Latin American Studies Association Congress, investigates the economic and social repercussions of the neoliberal wave that swept across the region during the 1990s. Have market reforms brought greater economic stability and stimulated growth ? How have they affected crucial social issues, such as unemployment, poverty, and inequality? After Weyland's introductory explication of these questions, the Research Notes by Evelyne Huber and Fred Solt and by Michael Walton advance divergent assessments of neoliberalism's successes and failures. Huber and Solt argue that overall, Latin America's market reforms have yielded disappointing results in terms of economic stability and growth, social equity, and the quality of democracy. In particular, countries that enacted more radical reforms or that took especially drastic steps towards change performed less well than nations that proceeded more cautiously and gradually. By contrast, Walton argues that market reforms have increased growth while not significantly exacerbating economic instability and social inequality. And to the extent that neoliberalism fell short of expectations, the problem did not emerge from market reforms as such, but from deficiencies in the institutional context in which these reforms were enacted.

An unsettled conquest: the British campaign against the peoples of Acadia

The former French colony of Acadia-permanently renamed Nova Scotia by the British when they began an ambitious occupation of the territory in 1710-witnessed one of the bitterest struggles in the British empire. Whereas in its other North American colonies Britain assumed it could garner the sympathies of fellow Europeans against the native peoples, in Nova Scotia nothing was further from the truth. The Mi'kmaq, the native local population, and the Acadians, descendants of the original French settlers, had coexisted for more than a hundred years prior to the British conquest, and their friendships, family ties, common Catholic religion, and commercial relationships proved resistant to British-enforced change. Unable to seize satisfactory political control over the region, despite numerous efforts at separating the Acadians and Mi'kmaq, the authorities took drastic steps in the 1750s, forcibly deporting the Acadians to other British colonies and systematically decimating the remaining native population. The story of the removal of the Acadians, some of whose descendants are the Cajuns of Louisiana, and the subsequent oppression of the Mi'kmaq has never been completely told. In this first comprehensive history of the events leading up to the ultimate break-up of Nova Scotian society, Geoffrey Plank skillfully unravels the complex relationships of all of the groups involved, establishing the strong bonds between the Mi'kmaq and Acadians as well as the frustration of the British administrators that led to the Acadian removal, culminating in one of the most infamous events in North American history.

The seven deadly curs’d sins … Ire

The seven deadly curs’d sins … Ire

’n Teologies-etiese perspektief op bevolkingsontploffíng en gesinsbeplanning

The issue addressed in this article is that of population explosion as seen in the light of Reformed theological ethics. God blessed Adam and Eve and commanded them to be fruitful, to increase in number and to fill the earth. Since then the world population has multiplied and increased to 5.5 billion in 1994. During the last 25 years only the population has increased by 2 billion. The result is that several countries have become over-populated a situation which caused several negative results like insufficient food supply and starvation. In South Africa over­ population can also create a situation which might be difficult and even impossible to handle. These problem areas lead to the conclusion that God's command in the beginning regarding the multiplication of human beings has now been fulfilled and that drastic steps have to be taken to prevent the earth from becoming over-populated. Such steps have to be reconcilable with Scripture, and should not have the nature of the preventative steps applied in China, for example.

Tackling global warming won't hurt economy

More than 2,000 economists have signed a statement declaring that the U.S. can pursue some policies to curtail greenhouse gas emissions without harming the economy. The economists want to influence the policies the U.S. will pursue this December during international negotiations in Kyoto, Japan, says Stephen DeCanio, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who organized the effort. In Kyoto, representatives of the world's nations will hammer out an agreement to address the threat of global warming. At first glance, it appears that the economists' statement favors bold action to avert climate change. But, in reality, it is carefully crafted to encompass views ranging from those advocating drastic steps to reduce emissions levels in the near term to those advocating only those steps that would be economically justifiable even if there were no threat of climate change. The economists' statement is disappointingly lacking in specific information, and, consequently, is subject...