Carbon Finance and Emission Trading in Mexico: Building Lessons from the CDM Experience and FOMECAR (Mexican Carbon Fund)

A more general lesson from the past decade is that climate policy and carbon initiatives such as ETS and carbon pricing are not static concepts, but are instead constantly evolving and building upon previous experiences. The vision of a single, top-down global trading system has shifted toward the reality of various single and regional trading system programmes. Building a national emission trading system in Mexico will surely pass through processes and experiences that the country has somehow undertaken from the Kyoto Protocol (KP) in 2005, particularly with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the Mexican Carbon Fund (FOMECAR) and their legacy. Additional design elements or provisions must be prepared under the new ETS in Mexico: regulation will possibly include definitions, scope, compliance obligation, legal procedures and other necessary provisions such as the allocation of permits. However, in order to start the process, important questions on financing the initiative and accompanying the development of an ETS will go through a finance support scenario. Thus, who is going to finance the starting process for allocating emissions, financing bonds and other design issues for the implementation of the Mexican ETS? Who will be financing and offering technical cooperation to follow up on eligible projects for the ETS and who will be supporting education and information activities about ETS implementation? Those and other questions will be addressed in this article, in the light of international and regional experiences.

Objectification and Domination

I resolve a tension between two prominent strands of feminist social critique. On the first, the domination of women consists largely in their objectification, and the objectifying character of such domination primarily explains why it is wrong. On the second, some salient forms of domination have a distinctively intersubjective dimension that makes them crucially unlike our standard modes of relating to objects. Yet in that case, how could characterizing these acts as objectifying capture why they are wrong? Focusing on domination that seeks recognition from the subordinate, I argue that each strand contains half the truth, weaving these together. The first is correct to point out that that the concept of objectification is necessary for capturing the wrong of recognition-seeking domination, and that acts can be objectifying and ‘subjectifying’ all at once. The second strand is right to insist that domination of this sort has an irreducibly subjectifying character in light of which the concept of objectification is insufficient for clarifying its wrongness. The general lesson is that an account of the wrong of recognition-seeking domination is adequate only if it does justice to both its objectifying and subjectifying aspects.

Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief

We live in a time in which spiritual and religious beliefs, ways of knowing and being in the world, are positioned as conflicting and radically incompatible. The purpose of this chapter is to lay out an in-depth rationale for what happens when we engage in religion-blind practices, as well as present general lesson ideas and examples of dialogue that help all of us consider how we come to know our world through belief and unbelief systems. Using musical chant as one way to introduce talking about religion in the classroom, this chapter introduces the reader to one way of opening spaces for discussion about how we come to know our world through belief and unbelief systems.

How Financial Economics Got Its Science

This chapter divides the scientific status of the discipline into two empirical questions concerning the degree to which finance is scientific and the kind of science financial economists pursue. Focusing on articles published in the Journal of Finance between 1950 and 2000, the chapter investigates the forms and practices financial economists came to rely on to communicate their results to one another. It also documents the ways in which financial economics changed as mathematics and statistics became dominant, and how mathematics and statistics changed the affective dispositions of financial economists. The chapter analyzes how financial scholars used specific communicative practices and inscription devices as a function of how they conceptualized expertise. It draws the more general lesson that techniques of quantitative analysis are no substitute for relationships of trust among knowledge producers, while pointing to the limited role numbers play in the construction of social knowledge when they are not backed by social relationships.

Selfless Assertions: Some Empirical Evidence

It is increasingly recognized that knowledge is the norm of assertion. As this view has gained popularity, it has also garnered criticism. One widely discussed criticism involves thought experiments about “selfless assertion.” Selfless assertions are said to be intuitively compelling examples where agents should assert propositions that they don’t even believe and, hence, don’t know. This result is then taken to show that knowledge is not the norm of assertion. This paper reports four experiments demonstrating that “selfless assertors” are viewed as both believing and knowing the propositions they assert: this is the natural and intuitive way of interpreting the case. Thought experiments about selfless assertions do not threaten the knowledge account and they do not motivate weaker alternative accounts. The discussion also highlights a general lesson for philosophers: thought experiments intended to probe for mental state attributions should not conflict with basic principles that guide social cognition.

Teaching Through Television: Experimental Evidence on Entrepreneurship Education in Tanzania

Can television be used to teach and foster entrepreneurship among youth in developing countries? We report from a randomized control field experiment of an edutainment show on entrepreneurship broadcasted over almost three months on national television in Tanzania. The field experiment involved more than 2,000 secondary school students, where the treatment group was incentivized to watch the edutainment show. We find some suggestive evidence of the edutainment show making the viewers more interested in entrepreneurship and business, particularly among females. However, our main finding is a negative effect: the edutainment show discouraged investment in schooling without convincingly replacing it with some other valuable activity. Administrative data show a strong negative treatment effect on school performance, and long-term survey data show that fewer treated students continue schooling, but we do not find much evidence of the edutainment show causing an increase in business ownership. The fact that an edutainment show for entrepreneurship caused the students to invest less in education carries a general lesson to the field experimental literature by showing the importance of taking a broad view of possible implications of a field intervention. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, behavioral economics.

Revival? Rebirth? Renaissance?

Drawing on personal experience, the author discusses the vicissitudes of Jewish identity formation in the last two decades of Communist Poland and the first two decades which followed. He addresses the role of religion in the Jewish revival which occurred in that period, and sets it against other models of Jewish identity – Zionist, Yiddishist and assimilationist - on one hand, and the twin pressures of anti- and philosemitism in Polish society at large. This discussion is placed within the broader framework of the Polish political transformation. He finally suggests that the survival and revival of the Jewish community in Poland offers a more general lesson for the continuation of Jewish peoplehood.

Fiction and indeterminate identity

In ‘Against fictional realism’ Anthony Everett argues that fictional realism leads to indeterminate identity. He concludes that we should reject fictional realism. Everett’s paper and much of the ensuing literature does not discuss what exactly fictional characters are. This is a mistake. I argue that some versions of abstract creationism about fictional characters lead to indeterminate identity, and that some versions of Platonism about fictional characters lead only to indeterminate reference. In doing so I show that Everett’s argument poses a more pressing problem for abstract creationism than for Platonism. The general lesson is that fictional realists should think more about the ontology of fictional characters in order to discern whether they are committed to indeterminate identity.

The value of giving autistic testimony a substantial role in the science of autism

Jaswal & Akhtar argue that taking seriously autistic testimony will help make the science of autism more humane, accurate, and useful. In this commentary, I pose two questions about autistic testimony's role(s) in a better science of autism and extract a general lesson about the value of autistic testimony from the authors’ arguments.

Fallibility for Infallibilists

Infallibilism is the view that knowledge requires conclusive grounds. Despite its intuitive appeal, most contemporary epistemology rejects Infallibilism; however, there is a strong minority tradition that embraces it. Showing that Infallibilism is viable requires showing that it is compatible with the undeniable fact that we can go wrong in pursuit of perceptual knowledge. In other words, we need an account of fallibility for Infallibilists. By critically examining John McDowell’s recent attempt at such an account, this paper articulates a very important general lesson for Infallibilists. The paper concludes by briefly discussing two ways to do justice to this lesson, and so, two possible approaches to fallibility for Infallibilists: first, at the level of experience; and second, at the level of judgment.