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Empowering Theories in Management Studies

4 March 2010, 5.30-6.30pm

Professor Pasquale Gagliardi, Secretary-General, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Professor of Sociology of Organization at the Faculty of Political Sciences, Catholic University, Milan.

In his lecture Professor Pasquale analysed the relationship between thinking and experience in the production of knowledge.  He then went on to hypothsise the distinctive traits of an ‘empowering theory’. More information

E P Abraham Lecture Theatre, Green Templeton College.

Oxford green: Event promotes Oxford’s low carbon potential

Oxford companies are being invited to a major summit on making businesses more sustainable.

The half-day event on March 3 will highlight the opportunities that climate change is creating for companies, notably low carbon developments in transport and energy.

Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and Oxfordshire County Council are co-hosting the conference, being held at the Smith School in George Street, central Oxford.

The event, ‘Developing the clean tech economy in Oxfordshire: a low carbon future for a world-class economy’ is free to attend and is aimed at company directors, senior managers and the county’s leading politicians.

Smith School Director, Sir David King, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government from 2000 to 2007, and Trevor Graham, who is central to a sustainable development project in Malmo, Sweden will be among those giving presentations. These will be followed by discussions between business leaders and politicians.

The event will run from 2.30-5.30pm. For details, contact the Smith School on 01865 614961, email events@smithschool.ox.ac.uk or register at www.eventelephant.com/cleantechoxford.

US nuclear subsidies should be part of a bigger energy-climate plan

Providing more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to build the first American nuclear power plant in three decades is one way to jumpstart the industry, but this sort of indirect subsidy leaves a lot to be desired from an economist’s point of view.

Indeed, while we’re ready to be convinced that nuclear power’s virtues (zero greenhouse emissions) outweigh its vices (cost and waste disposal), we’d like any incentives to produce more nuclear power to be part of a coherent energy-climate change strategy.

What passes for energy policy is a Rube Goldberg construction, a machine powered by direct subsidies, tax breaks and mandates that is going in no particular direction. Is ethanol worth the cost in lost taxes and higher food prices?

If General Motor’s heavily subsidised plug-in electric car catches on, will there be enough electricity to keep them on the road on a hot summer afternoon? Don’t ask Congress or the White House – they don’t have a clue.

Of course, the energy bell has already been rung a zillion times and we can’t start all over again.

We could, however, try to make sense of where we are and where we should be going by applying some straightforward economic principles, in particular, that while markets aren’t perfect in deciding how much energy to use and in what form, they can do better than the alternatives.

The key is to get prices right – to calculate the external costs and benefits of energy sources in terms of climate change risk, localised pollution and maybe national security, then offset them with a system of taxes or tradable emissions’ rights.

An impossible dream? Sure. But it’s a good place to begin thinking about what’s wrong with current energy policy and what might make it a bit better.

Robert Hahn is a Smith School senior visiting fellow and Peter Passell is editor of the Milken Review. They recently co-founded regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.

This blog was first published by the New York Times.

What Do Environmental Lawyers Do?

Eloise Scotford is a Career Development Fellow in Environmental Law in the Oxford Law Faculty and an Associate of the Smith School. eloise.scotford [at] law.ox.ac.uk

Environmental lawyers are often asked: ‘What is environmental law?’  or ‘What do environmental lawyers do?’.  These questions are even asked by lawyers, and reflect the relative youth of the subject, as well as the significant challenges, including methodological challenges, faced in the study of environmental law.

Simply put, environmental lawyers deal with legal problems that relate to the environment.  Perhaps disappointingly, they do not have legal answers to environmental problems.  Equally, environmental lawyers do not merely act as ‘transactional lawyers’ to make environmental policy deals happen.  Rather, environmental lawyers are primarily concerned with identifying and addressing the range of, often very complicated, legal issues that arise in relation to environmental issues, whether these concern pollution, climate change, water quality, biodiversity, urban planning, use of chemicals, waste, sustainable development, or GMOs.

Considering that environmental problems are not necessarily constrained by state boundaries, are not confined (or able to be confined) by discrete sets of legal rules such as those of contract or tort, and can involve difficult and contested facts, environmental lawyers need to be versatile.

They need to be as versatile as lawyers, since environmental problems can touch on a wide range of legal questions, from those of planning law, property law, tort law and regulatory crime, to issues of EU law, international law, and comparative study of other legal systems.

Even as lawyers, doctrinal analysis of law is only part of the story: the social construction and implementation of environmental regulation is the subject of detailed, and often empirical, study by socio-legal scholars.  In order to answer these many legal questions, however, lawyers also need to be able to interact with other (often scientific) disciplines, at the very least in order to understand environmental problems sufficiently to ask relevant legal questions.

In our current series of seminars at the Smith School, the Environmental Law Discussion Group is addressing a wide range of topics, revealing the breadth of issues addressed by environmental lawyers.

We have already considered whether there is an international right to water and how this might be relevant for individuals in states sharing watercourses with other states, and how an ‘integration principle’ – a popular concept in international policy and law concerning sustainable development – has a distinct legal identity in EU law.

In the coming weeks, we will consider the legal issues and uncertainties involved in implementing carbon capture and storage projects, and how the UK contaminated land regime deals with waste buried after the production of energy.  Finally, an academic panel will round off by considering, from a scholarly perspective, the headline question posed above: what do environmental lawyers do?  Please come and join us, or otherwise do be in touch with any views on what environmental lawyers are doing.

Better air traffic control will cut emissions

The quickest way of cutting aviation emissions is to improve air traffic control, the Smith School’s Dr Chris Carey tells BBC Oxford.

Chris Carey on BBC Radio Oxford

Air traffic control is key to cutting aviation emissions

The quickest way of cutting aviation emissions is to improve air traffic control, a Smith School study has found.

Biofuels could reduce pollution and better technology boost efficiency but neither will have the global impact that improved flight management could achieve, the new report says.

“If you reduced the time aircraft spent waiting to land and taxi, allowed planes to use more direct flight paths and approach routes, and introduced a common air traffic control system, you could cut emissions from aviation by a significant amount,” Dr Chris Carey, the Smith School’s aviation expert believes.

“The inaccuracy of current control systems means planes must be given a wide berth to avoid collisions.

“If that was improved, landing and take offs could be quicker, stacking would be reduced and planes could fly closer together by taking advantage of prevailing winds, just as Concorde did.”

The Smith School study says a range of measures including better air traffic control could cut aviation emissions by up to 95 per cent in the long term.

Reducing drag will play a large part, but the lifetime of aircraft means it will be decades before planes with relocated engines, for example, are operating.

“You could also improve efficiency by smoothing aircraft surfaces, much like racing cyclists shave their legs,” Dr Carey said.

“But none of those measures can be introduced quickly and most new technology is not retrofitable. These are all long-term innovations that we won’t see for at least 30 years.”

Test flights with biofuels, notably a Virgin Atlantic flight in 2008, have taken place but the report warns that biofuels are controversial because farmland or carbon-storing forests have been sacrificed to grow fuel crops such as palm oil.

Algae have more potential because cultivation does not use arable land but while fuel production from algae works well in the lab, the yield outside is reduced because of contamination by other algae and dirt.

Similarly, the potential of synthetic fuels, made from coal for example, will be of “minimal” benefit because “the process is heavily carbon intensive,” the Smith School report says.

And safety concerns largely rule out nuclear. “As the issue of ground-based nuclear power for electricity generation faces considerable opposition in the public sphere, one can only postulate on the level of opposition to nuclear powered aircraft…Nuclear power in aviation is unlikely in the foreseeable future.”

Aviation uses 13 per cent of transport fuel worldwide and is responsible for between 2% and 3% of global CO2 emissions. The IPCC says this figure will rise to between 5% and 15% per cent in 2050 or even higher if other sectors cut their emissions.

Furthermore, aircraft do 2-4 times more damage than those figures suggest because of the effect of altitude.

“The most obvious target for improving efficiency in aviation is engines, the source of emissions,” Dr Carey says. “But major technological innovations are a massive financial risk because you could be making a plane that no-one’s going to buy.

“On the other hand, improving airport access and flight management would work much sooner because fleet lifetime wouldn’t be a problem.

“These are the low-hanging fruit compared to technology improvements and existing biofuels, and are measures that governments could make a condition of using their airspace.

“They should be implemented as soon as possible if we are serious about cutting aviation emissions.”

  • The most promising improvement in aircraft technology is the introduction of the blended wing body, where the entire aircraft acts as a wing, significantly reducing drag. On such a plane, passengers would have little access to windows but emissions would be reduced by 30% from drag reduction alone. Where this design was combined with other developments such as sustainable biofuels and improved air traffic management, emissions per aircraft could be reduced by between 60% and 95% over today’s technology.
  • GE (General Electric), Rolls Royce and Pratt and Witney are the major manufacturers of new aircraft engines; Boeing and Airbus are the major manufacturers of planes.
  • The IPCC has estimated that the total climate impact of aviation is between two and four times that of its CO2 emissions, but this excludes the effect of cirrus clouds created by aircraft at altitude.
  • Water vapour is the second largest emission from jet engines (by weight) after CO2. Its presence in the upper atmosphere affects the climate.
  • Nitrogen oxide is also emitted from the burning of fossil fuels. Its release is thought to produce ozone – causing a heating effect – and break down methane, another greenhouse gas – giving a cooling effect. The increase in ozone outweighs the break down of methane, however, leaving an overall temperature rise.
  • Sulphate and carbon particulates are generated from fossil fuel combustion creating vapour trails and clouds. The clouds reflect sunlight away from the earth but also create a blanket around the earth by trapping insulating infra-red radiation. The effect of the latter is far greater than that of the former, causing warming.
  • New, more efficient aircraft are slow to reach the market. It takes around 10 years to design and complete a new aircraft but, because of the lifetime of aircraft, it could be another 30 years before planes flying today are replaced.
  • The aviation study is part of the Smith School’s Future of Mobility Roadmap report, an assessment of the potential for low-carbon air, land and sea.

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