scholarly journals Conservation cobenefits from air pollution regulation: Evidence from birds

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (49) ◽  
pp. 30900-30906 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanning Liang ◽  
Ivan Rudik ◽  
Eric Yongchen Zou ◽  
Alison Johnston ◽  
Amanda D. Rodewald ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bird Conservation ◽  
Bird Abundance ◽  
Bird Populations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pollution Regulation ◽  
Air Pollution Regulation

Massive wildlife losses over the past 50 y have brought new urgency to identifying both the drivers of population decline and potential solutions. We provide large-scale evidence that air pollution, specifically ozone, is associated with declines in bird abundance in the United States. We show that an air pollution regulation limiting ozone precursors emissions has delivered substantial benefits to bird conservation. Our estimates imply that air quality improvements over the past 4 decades have stemmed the decline in bird populations, averting the loss of 1.5 billion birds, ∼20% of current totals. Our results highlight that in addition to protecting human health, air pollution regulations have previously unrecognized and unquantified conservation cobenefits.

scholarly journals Conservation co-benefits from air pollution regulation: Evidence from birds

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanning Liang ◽  
Ivan Rudik ◽  
Eric Zou ◽  
Alison Johnston ◽  
Amanda Rodewald ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bird Conservation ◽  
Bird Abundance ◽  
Bird Populations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pollution Regulation ◽  
Air Pollution Regulation

Massive wildlife losses over the past 50 years have brought new urgency to identifying both the drivers of population decline and potential solutions. We provide the first large-scale evidence that air pollution, specifically ozone, is associated with declines in bird abundance in the United States. We show that an air pollution regulation limiting ozone precursors emissions has delivered substantial benefits to bird conservation. Our results imply that air quality improvements over the past four decades have stemmed the decline in bird populations, averting the loss of 1.5 billion birds, approximately 20 percent of current totals. Our results highlight that in addition to protecting human health, air pollution regulations have previously unrecognized and unquantified conservation co-benefits.

scholarly journals Policy Evolution under the Clean Air Act

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Schmalensee ◽  
Robert N. Stavins
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Pollution Control ◽  
Policy Instruments ◽  
Clean Air Act ◽  
The United States ◽  
Air Pollution Control ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
Air Pollution Regulation

The US Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 with strong bipartisan support, was the first environmental law to give the federal government a serious regulatory role, established the architecture of the US air pollution control system, and became a model for subsequent environmental laws in the United States and globally. We outline the act’s key provisions, as well as the main changes Congress has made to it over time. We assess the evolution of air pollution control policy under the Clean Air Act, with particular attention to the types of policy instruments used. We provide a generic assessment of the major types of policy instruments, and we trace and assess the historical evolution of the Environmental Protection Agency’s policy instrument use, with particular focus on the increased use of market-based policy instruments, beginning in the 1970s and culminating in the 1990s. Over the past 50 years, air pollution regulation has gradually become more complex, and over the past 20 years, policy debates have become increasingly partisan and polarized, to the point that it has become impossible to amend the act or pass other legislation to address the new threat of climate change.

scholarly journals Address of the President Sir Henry Dale, C.B.E., at the Anniversary Meeting, 1 December 1941

1942 ◽  
Vol 179 (978) ◽  
pp. 233-260 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Technical College ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Electrical Engineering ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pure Mathematics ◽  
Symbolic Structure ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

This is the first occasion on which I have had the great honour of addressing the Royal Society on this anniversary of its foundation. According to custom, I begin with brief mention of those whom death has taken from our Fellowship during the past year, and whose memories we honour. Alfred Young (1873-1940), distinguished for his contributions to pure mathematics, was half brother to another of our Fellows, Sydney Young, a chemist of eminence. Alfred Young had an insight into the symbolic structure and manipulation of algebra, which gave him a special place among his mathematical contemporaries. After a successful career at Cambridge he entered the Church, and passed his later years in the country rectory of Birdbrook, Essex. His devotion to mathematics continued, however, throughout his life, and he published a steady stream of work in the branch of algebra which he had invented, and named ‘quantitative substitutional analysis’. He lived to see his methods adopted by Weyl in his quantum mechanics and spectroscopy. He was elected to our Fellowship in 1934. With the death of Miles Walker (1868-1941) the Society loses a pioneer in large-scale electrical engineering. Walker was a man of wide interests. He was trained first for the law, and even followed its practice for a period. Later he studied electrical engineering under Sylvanus Thompson at the Finsbury Technical College and became his assistant for several years. Thereafter, encouraged by Thompson, he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, with a scholarship, and graduated with 1st Class Honours in both the Natural Sciences and the Engineering Tripos. Having entered the service of the British Westinghouse Company, he was sent by them to the United States of America to study electrical engineering with the parent company in Pittsburgh. On his return to England he became their leading designer of high-speed electrical generators

Since 1945: New Amenities, New Hazards

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
World History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Society ◽  
Service Employment

If the average citizen's surroundings defined the national climate, then the United States grew markedly warmer and drier in the postwar decades. Migration continued to carry the center of population west and began pulling it southward as well. The growth of what came to be called the Sunbelt at the "Snowbelt's" expense passed a landmark in the early 1960s when California replaced New York as the most populous state. Another landmark was established in the early 1990s when Texas moved ahead of New York. In popular discussion, it was taken for granted that finding a change of climate was one of the motives for relocating as well as one of the results. It was not until 1954, though, that an American social scientist first seriously considered the possibility. The twentieth-century flow of Americans to the West Coast, the geographer Edward L. Ullman observed in that year, had no precedent in world history. It could not be explained by the theories of settlement that had worked well in the past, for a substantial share of it represented something entirely new, "the first large-scale in-migration to be drawn by the lure of a pleasant climate." If it was the first of its kind, it was unlikely to be the last. For a set of changes in American society, Ullman suggested, had transformed the economic role of climate. The key changes included a growth in the numbers of pensioned retirees; an increase in trade and service employment, much more "footloose" than agriculture or manufacturing was; developments in technology making manufacturing itself more footloose; and a great increase in mobility brought about by the automobile and the highway. All in one way or another had weakened the bonds of place and made Americans far freer than before to choose where to live. Whatever qualities made life in any spot particularly pleasant thus attracted migration more than in the past. Ullman grouped such qualities together as "amenities." They ranged from mountains to beaches to cultural attractions, but climate appeared to be the most important, not least because it was key to the enjoyment of many of the rest. Ullman did not suppose that all Americans desired the same climate. For most people, in this as in other respects, "where one was born and lives is the best place in the world, no matter how forsaken a hole it may appear to an outsider."

Explaining the Unexpected: Political Science and the Surprises of 1989 and 2011

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Morjé Howard ◽  
Meir R. Walters
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Transformations

Political scientists have been caught by surprise by some of the world’s most dramatic political transformations. To assess how the discipline fared in explaining two of the most large-scale and unexpected developments of the past decades, we compare scholarship around the time of popular mobilization in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Arab world in 2011. We argue that while scholars cannot be expected topredictutterly extraordinary events such as revolutions and mass mobilization, in these two cases disciplinary trends left scholars ill-prepared toexplainthem. Political scientists used similar paradigms to study both regions, emphasizing their failure to develop politically and economically along the lines of Western Europe and the United States. Sovietologists tended to study the communist bloc as either anomalously totalitarian or modernizing towards “convergence” with the West. Likewise, political scientists studying the Arab world focused disproportionately on the prospects for democratization or the barriers to it, and they now risk treating the 2011 protest movements essentially as non-events if they are not clearly tied to institutional democratic reform. By broadening their research agendas beyond a focus on regime type, political scientists will be better prepared to understand future changes in the Middle East and elsewhere.

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