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Environmental principles: from political slogans to legal rules Nicolas de Sadeleer 3 Resenhas Oxford University Press, 2002 - 433 páginas Environmental law has always responded to risks posed by industrial society but the new generation of risks have required a new set of environmental principles, emerging from a combination of public fears, science, ethics and established legal practice. This book shows how three of the most important principles of modern environmental law grew out of this new age of ecological risk: the polluter pays principle, the preventive principle and the precautionary principle. The author examines the legal force of these principles and in the process offers a novel theory of norm formation in environmental law by unearthing new grounds of legality.

My company, Intellectual Ventures, is misunderstood. We have been reviled as a patent troll-a renegade outfit that buys up patents and then uses them to hold up innocent companies. What we're really trying to do is create a capital market for inventions akin to the venture capital market that supports start-ups and the private equity market that revitalizes inefficient companies. Our goal is to make applied research a profitable activity that attracts vastly more private investment than it does today so that the number of inventions generated soars. "That's preposterous," some might say. "Inventing can't be a business in its own right. It's too risky, and inventions are too intangible to generate sufficient profits by themselves. Inventing and inventions can't be separated from the companies that turn the ideas into actual products. And the notion of creating a liquid market for inventions is absurd." I couldn't disagree more. In the 1970s, people said the same thing about another type of intangible intellectual property: software. Back then, everyone in the computer industry believed that software was valuable only because it helped to sell mainframes or minicomputers and that you could never sell software by itself. As a result, software engineers worked for computer manufacturers or for companies that used computers. Very few independent software vendors existed, and those that did were barely profitable. As a business, software was hopeless. Everyone said so. Everyone was wrong, of course. Over the next three decades, software became one of the most profitable businesses in history. I know because, as a manager and ultimately the chief technology officer at Microsoft, I had a ringside seat to this amazing success story. Software owes its ascent largely to two crucial developments. First, software vendors gradually persuaded software users-through both education and lawsuits-to respect intellectual property rights and pay for somethi

672. Steven Shavell, The Corrective Tax versus Liability As Solutions to the Problem of Harmful Externalities, 7/10. Abstract: Although the corrective tax has long been viewed by economists as a theoretically desirable remedy for the problem of harmful externalities, its actual use has been limited, mainly to the domain of pollution. Liability, in contrast, has great importance in controlling harmful externalities. I compare the tax and liability here in theory and suggest that the conclusions help to explain the observed predominance of liability over taxation, except in the area of pollution. The following factors are emphasized in the analysis: inefficiency of incentives under taxes when, as would be typical, it would be impractical for the state to incorporate into taxes all of the variables that significantly affect expected harm; efficiency of incentives under strict liability, which requires only that actual harms be measured; efficiency of incentives to exercise precautions under the negligence rule; administrative cost advantages of liability deriving from its being applied only when harm occurs; and dilution of incentives under liability when suit would be unlikely or injurers would not be able to pay fully for harms caused.

Does The Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Mean That The U.S. Is Headed For Gas Lines, Higher Food Prices And A Broken Economy? The Economic Collapse June 23, 2010 As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis enters a third month, the economic impact of this environmental nightmare is starting to become clearer.  The truth is that the "oil volcano" spewing massive amounts of oil into the Gulf has absolutely decimated the seafood, tourism and real estate industries along the Gulf coast.  Not only that, but energy industry insiders are now warning that the chilling effect that this crisis will have on offshore drilling could precipitate a new 1970s-style energy crisis.  Considering the fact that the U.S. economy was already on incredibly shaky ground even before the oil leak, the last thing we needed was a disaster of this magnitude.  But it has happened, and the reality is that the long-term effects of this crisis are potentially going to reverberate for decades.  The American people certainly have a negative view on the impact that this oil spill will have on the economy.  According to a new poll, about eight out of every 10 Americans expect the oil spill to damage the U.S. economy and drive up the cost of gas and food. But is a new 1970s-style energy crisis really a possibility? Could we actually soon be headed for blackouts and gas lines? Well, former Shell executive John Hofmeister believes that is exactly what we are headed for…. "Within a decade I predict the energy abyss looks like brownouts, blackouts and gas lines."  In fact, Hofmeister claims that some of his fellow energy industry insiders expect things to be even worse than he is projecting in the years ahead. Why? Hofmeister says that the problem is the U.S. government…. "Our federal government, when it comes to energy and the environment, is dysfunctional, it's broken, and it's unfixable in its current form." Without a doubt, the oil spill will have a chilling effect

India is the first country to introduce environmental legislation in the constitution but because of lengthy legal procedures, it is very difficult to control environmental deterioration. There are many factors responsible for this deterioration. Coal mining is one such activity where deterioration is very severe and the present communication aims this aspect. Coal is the one of the most essential mineral having large reserves in India. It's mining and beneficiation produce a variety of pollutants. The main pollutants emitted during the processing of coal are green house gases, coal dust and acid mine drainage. Many reports on different aspects of coal mining are available including reports on emission of different pollutants but the present work is probably only of it's kind in which the authors have tried to determine environment liability directly in terms of economy. It was found that greenhouse liabilities, coal dust liability and sulphur liability are accounted for 12.07, 5.0 and 101.97 US$, making an overall 2.4% of the total economic gains due to coal mining. During the calculations approximate number of total workers and other parameters have been taken into consideration. Who pays for this irreversible damage is a question

Socializing Risk: The New Energy Economics May 27, 2010frankackermanLeave a commentGo to comments from Frank Ackerman Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department's Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames and then sink, causing oil to gush out uncontrollably and befoul the oceans. The odds seemed low, and still do: Aren't there lots of drilling rigs in use, year after year? Twenty years ago, your elected representatives thought that you'd be happy to have them adopt a very low cap on industry's liability for oil spill damages.  Nuclear power was never quite free of fears; it was too clearly a spin-off of nuclear weapons to ignore the risk of a very big bang. Yet as its advocates point out, we have had hundreds of reactor-years of experience, with only a few accidents. (And someday when Nevada's politicians aren't looking, maybe we can slip all of our nuclear waste into a cave in the desert.) Again, the risks are so low that you'd be happy to learn about a law limiting industry's liability for accidents, wouldn't you?  Environmentalists have long warned that the world could run out of energy and resources, from the "limits to growth" theories of the 1970s to the more recently popular notion of "peak oil." The response from economists has been that prices for energy and raw materials are still moderate, and declined over the course of the 20th century; if we are running out of something, why doesn't its price skyrocket? The problem is that what we're running out of is low-risk conventional energy supplies. Because our economy conceals and socializes energy risks, prices remain deceptively low for an increasingly risky energy supply. The market wasn't supposed to work this way. In the

he United States and other nations are facing large-scale risks at an accelerating pace. In 2005, three major hurricanes-Katrina, Rita, and Wilma-made landfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast within an eight-week period. The damage caused by these storms led to insurance reimbursements and federal disaster relief of more than $180 billion-a record sum. Today we are more vulnerable to catastrophic losses because of the increasing concentration of population and activities in high-risk coastal regions of the country. The question is not whether but when future catastrophes will strike. Who should pay the costs associated with catastrophic losses suffered by homeowners in hazard-prone areas? In At War with the Weather, Howard Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-Kerjan and their colleagues deliver a groundbreaking analysis of how we currently mitigate, insure against, and finance recovery from natural disasters in the United States. They offer innovative, long-term solutions for reducing losses and providing financial support for disaster victims that define a coherent strategy to assure sustainable recovery from future large-scale disasters. The amount of data collected and analyzed and innovations proposed make this the most comprehensive book written on these critical issues in the past thirty years.