Juliann Emmons Allison

Encouraging distributed generation of power that improves air quality: can we have our cake and eat it too?

The goal of electric power deregulation in the United States is to lower electricity costs through market competition and greater consumer choice. This goal raises important questions: exactly what kinds of distributed generation (DG) should energy and environmental policy favor? What level of government is best-suited and/or most capable of governing DG? And what is the range of regulations that would most easily facilitate the competitive success of DG? In response, this article provides a comparative analysis of the electricity generation process with heat recovery created to assess the level of polluting emissions associated with a range of technologies and fuel types. Given the results of this analysis, we evaluate the governance structure responsible for regulating energy and environmental policy in the United States, and outline a regulatory approach that would ensure the use of the DG technologies and fuel sources that would be most beneficial to the environment and public health. Our analysis suggests that only the lowest emitting DG with significant waste heat recovery is even marginally competitive with combined cycle power production when air pollution issues are considered. Thus, we advocate technology-forcing in the specific form of manufacturer-based regulation, which would require, over time, the reduction of emissions from DG units at the point of manufacture as a means of ensuring greater air quality.

Democracy and state environmental commitment to international environmental treaties

One of the current research endeavors in international environmental politics is understanding the link between democracy and international environmental protection. Scholars in the field seek to identify the international and domestic factors that increase state commitment to international environmental treaties and agreements. Counter to the traditional literature on international environmental commitment, this paper reconceptualizes both traditional and alternative theories in order to identify domestic institutional factors that may increase state cooperation with international environmental agreements. In particular, this study posits that democratic governments in comparison to authoritarian governments increase state compliance with international environmental agreements; however, there may be domestic environmental conditions, such as limited access to clean water that may constrain democracies in participating in international environmental agreements. This study presents a quantitative analysis measuring the effects of democracy on state compliance behaviors with international environmental agreements. The results of the study provide support for an alternative bottom-up theoretical framework focusing on domestic environmental politics in addressing international environmental agreements.

Energy Justice, Climate Change, and the Challenge of Global Energy Governance

The most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fueled warnings worldwide that humanity has nearly run out of time to reduce the worst effects of global warming, including the extreme weather, food shortages, and power losses that make everyday life unnecessarily challenging for billions of the Earth’s inhabitants. The magnitude of these impacts for the poorest among us supports the claim that global warming represents the greatest ethical issue of our time. In particular, ensuring reliable access to clean and affordable modern energy is critical for economic growth and the provision of health care, education, and other social services. Deep socioeconomic inequalities within as well as among nations underscore the justice dimensions of energy access in a global political economy constrained by climate change. Moreover, if peoples’ propensity to modify their behavior in the common interest is contingent on their sense that the underlying distribution of costs and benefits is fair, energy justice may prove essential to the success of climate mitigation policy at all levels of governance. Despite marked differences in purpose, the three volumes reviewed here provide significant insights with respect to the alleviation of energy poverty. They discuss ways to address lack of access to modern energy sources by institutionalizing energy justice locally, within nations, and globally. Injustice is inherent to

Jacques, Peter J. 2009. Environmental Skepticism: Ecology, Power, and Public Life. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

outside the bureaucratic fence-line seems underplayed. Nevertheless, patterns do emerge across the cases. With the exception of the sluggish IMO Secretariat and the “strait-jacketed” climate secretariat, all the bureaucracies studied here generate signiacant amounts of cognitive inouence, through processes of knowledge creation, knowledge synthesizing, and knowledge dissemination. There is also evidence in some cases of autonomous inouence on rulemaking. As the volume’s conclusion suggests, there is much less evidence of “executive” inouence, in the sense of enhancing state capacity, beyond the substantial inouence of the disproportionately-endowed World Bank. To explain variation in inouence, the authors and that while problem structure matters, much of the explanatory power resides in the bureaucracies’ people and procedures, as well as the “polity” or contextual framework created by states. With regard to the latter, resource endowments and formal/legal institutional frameworks are found to be poor predictors of inouence; more important is the way in which the bureaucracy is embedded in larger institutional/ organizational frameworks. The andings with regard to people and procedures reproduce some broad patterns in the wider literature: expertise is power, as are oexible hierarchies with strong leadership. As the authors suggest, the stakes here are high, for global problemsolving, for democratic practice in the international spaces of political life, and for anding a path through the mineaeld of “institutional reform” in global environmental governance. Managers of Global Change provides a welcome return to careful attention to the possibilities and patterns of organizational agency.

Peace among Friends: A Feminist Interpretation of the “Democratic Peace”

That democracies, though just as belligerent as non-democracies, are unlikely to fight one another is practically law in the study of international relations. Yet prevailing liberal explanations for this democratic peace, which focus primarily on democratic political institutions and culture, remain incomplete. Most importantly, these explanations emphasize a rights-based ethic, which has significantly limited our comprehension of the link between domestic politics and international relations to empirical generalizations. International relationships, however, are intrinsically interdependent and therefore thoroughly knowable only in the context in which they occur and are experienced. In this article I interpret the “democratic peace” as a single thread, albeit a highly visible and important one, in the dense fabric of international relations. More specifically, I enlarge the context in which domestic politics is connected to international relations to include the politics of care—itself a practice that is usually understood to be private, i.e., particular, often emotional, and contextually moral. The result is a more refined understanding of the conditions for peace among all nations—democratic or not.

Barriers to Latino Warehouse Workers’ Health Care: Survey Results from Inland Southern California and Policy Implications

ABSTRACT This article uses original survey data to explore the barriers to health care access among Latinos who are low-wage warehouse workers, providing a window on health care vulnerabilities of workers of low wages that are especially acute among undocumented immigrants and contingent workers. About one third of respondents had visited a doctor in the past year, whereas about two thirds lacked health insurance. Results from our logistic regression analysis show that, controlling for other factors, unemployed workers, direct hires, and those with health insurance had significantly greater odds than those without these characteristics to have visited a doctor in the past year. Along with changes in immigration and health care policies, reducing employers’ reliance on temporary staffing agencies is imperative for improving these and other low-wage workers’ health care access.

ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW: Information, Regulation, and Networks: A Tale of Distributed Generation to Improve Air Quality

One important result of electric power deregulation in the United States has been a growing potential for small, distributed sources of electrical power that may serve a single home, neighborhood, business, or business complex more efficiently and reliably than centrally located power plants, and at lower cost. The expectation that distributed generation (DG) can provide reliable electrical power more efficiently and less expensively than conventional power plants is complicated, however, by the high levels of air pollution and low efficiency generally associated with the most affordable and accessible DG technologies. Therefore, the prospect of greater reliance on distributed sources of electrical power raises a number of important questions, among them, these: (1) How can a states energy and environmental regulatory system best encourage the economic success of clean and efficient DG? (2) Exactly which DG technologies are the cleanest and most efficient? (3) What kind of policy is most likely to yield the most favorable level of DG usage in a given state? In answer to these questions, we present the development of DG policy in California as a study in establishing and deepening a network of state agencies, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and individuals committed to the integration of clean, efficient DG into the states electric utility system. More specifically, the California Energy Commission, the California Air Resources Board and most local air districts, the California Public Utilities Commission, environmental and professional organizations, DG manufacturers and other businesses, and interested individuals have responded to the rising demand for electricity in the state by advocating clean and efficient DG. Although the many agencies, organizations, and individuals involved in the “clean DG” network have not been overtly identified as such, we argue that administering the currently favored technology-forcing, clean DG policy will require ongoing and pervasive coordination among the members of this nascent network.