As the co-founder of Myanmar Recycles, a plastic recycling company cleaning up the dirtiest post-consumer plastic film in Myanmar, Mimi Wu (MPP ‘09) remains committed to inciting positive change in communities around the world.

Is it the “ostrich effect?” Misguided optimism? Ease of shopping during normal times? Or a distrust of government warnings?

Having skied and sailed in beautiful locales like Jackson, Wyoming; Newport, Rhode Island; and Puerto Rico, Jay Shimshack has loved nature ever since he can remember.

So when he turned that love into a career, it felt, well, completely natural.

Batten Professor Gerry Warburg discusses the extraordinary encyclical issued by Pope Francis this week and how it holds great promise for an issue that affects all life on our fragile planet.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to issue new federal regulations to limit drinking water concentrations of perchlorate, which occurs naturally and results from the combustion of rocket fuel. This article presents an upper-bound estimate of the potential benefits of alternative maximum contaminant levels for perchlorate in drinking water.

Environmental monitoring and enforcement are controversial and incompletely understood. This survey reviews what we do and do not know about the overall effectiveness, as well as the cost effectiveness, of pollution monitoring and enforcement. 

Forests can affect environmental conditions in ways that enhance their survival. This effect may contribute to a positive feedback whereby deforestation could degrade environmental conditions and inhibit forest re-establishment. 

Climate change policy analysis has focused almost exclusively on national policy and even on harmonizing climate policies across countries, implicitly assuming that the harmonization of climate policies at the subnational level would be mandated or guaranteed. We argue that the design and implementation of climate policy in a federal union will diverge in important ways from policy design in a unitary government. 

We use a set of economic experiments to test the effects of some novel features of California’s new controls on greenhouse gas emissions. The California cap and trade scheme imposes limits on allowance ownership, uses a tiered price containment reserve sale, and settles allowance auctions based on the lowest accepted bid.