The Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) database provides information about the carbon dioxide emissions, electricity production, corporate ownership, and location of more than 60,000 power plants in over 200 countries. Originally launched in 2007, CARMA is provided freely to the public at www.carma.org and remains the only comprehensive data source of its kind. This paper documents the methodology underpinning CARMA v3.0, released in July, 2012. Comparison of CARMA model output with reported data highlights the general difficulty of precisely predicting annual electricity generation for a given plant and year. Estimating the rate at which a plant emits CO2 (per unit of electricity generated) generally faces fewer obstacles. Ultimately, greater disclosure of plant-specific data is needed to overcome these limitations, particularly in major emitting countries like China, Russia, and Japan. For any given plant in CARMA v3.0, it is estimated that the reported value is within 20 percent of the actual value in 85 percent of cases for CO2 intensity, 75 percent for annual CO2 emissions, and 45 percent for annual electricity generation. CARMA's prediction models are shown to offer significantly better estimates than more naïve approaches to estimating plant-specific performance.
Topic:
Democratization, Economics, Poverty, and Social Stratification
This policy brief proposes the concept of “chronic violence” to characterise the crisis of escalating social violence that currently affects about one-quarter of the world’s population. Based on an extensive analysis of literature on Latin America, the it advances six propositions to aid policymakers and other key stakeholders to recognise this significant – but largely ignored – phenomenon and to shift to a more productive approach that takes into account both its diverse drivers and its complex social consequences.
K–12 education policy has recently received much scrutiny from policymakers, taxpayers, parents, and students. Reformers have often cited increases in spending with little noticeable gain in test scores, coupled with the fact that American students lag behind their foreign peers on standardized tests, as the policy problem. School choice, specifically charter school policy, has emerged as a potential remedy. School choice is hypothesized to have both participant and systemic (sometimes called competitive) effects. This article concentrates on the latter by using a novel design not used before in studies of this subject. School level data from Ohio are analyzed to estimate if traditional public schools potentially threatened by charter schools respond with positive test score gains. Specifically, an exogenous change to the education system in 2003 provides a natural experiment to examine potential systemic effects. Results indicate that the threat of charter schools seems to have had a small positive effect on traditional public school achievement.
In 2008, many Americans feared another Great Depression had begun. Amidst all the gloom and doom, however, Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's incoming chief of staff, sounded more hopeful: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before.” There is no greater example of that mantra in American history than World War II, a time of unprecedented government spending and unsurpassed government control over daily life. In Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government , James T. Sparrow demonstrates how, in a crisis, the government can increase its reach into Americans' lives by promising an ever-expanding set of rights and benefits.
American intelligence continues to privilege strategic analysis for policy-makers. The core of the American intelligence system remains the National Intelligence Estimate process, the legacy of Sherman Kent, the 'Founding Father' of the analytical profession. In support of this process, vast technical resources are deployed in collecting secret material that is not available from open sources or from diplomatic reporting, and then subjecting it to elaborate analysis. The priority accorded to this activity is symbolized by the veneration of the President's Daily Brief, a top-level intelligence summary that is described by Bob Woodward as 'the most restricted document in Washington', and by the White House itself as 'the most highly sensitized classified document in the government'. George Tenet, one of the longest-serving directors of Central Intelligence, has insisted that President's Daily Briefs from his period of office were so important that none would ever be declassified and released for public inspection.