This book argues that a variety of policies will be required to create synergies between the water-energy-food nexus sectors while reducing trade-offs in the development of a green economy. Despite rising demand for water, energy and food globally, the governance of water-energy-food sectors has generally remained separate with limited attention placed on the interactions that exist between them. Brears provides readers with a series of in-depth case studies of leading cities, states, nations and regions of differing climates, lifestyles and income-levels from around the world that have implemented a variety of policy innovations to reduce water-energy-food nexus pressures and achieve green growth. The Green Economy and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus will be of interest to town and regional planners, resource conservation managers, policymakers, international companies and organisations interested in reducing water-energy-food nexus pressures, environmental NGOs, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students.
This book examines the potential for cities, states and regions to take decisive action on climate change at the local level. Local action constitutes an essential component of global efforts to keep temperatures below the 2°C Paris Agreement threshold. Focusing on three green municipal leaders - New York, Boston and Paris - this volume examines their multilevel interactions with higher governance echelons in the United States and France. Even though these countries are located on different continents, similar patterns emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. This book explores the key role of municipalities and sub-state entities in shaping the climate policy agenda vis-à-vis national governments in the US and France. It argues that inadequate articulation of multilevel governance may jeopardize efforts to limit global temperature increase below the 2°C threshold by the end of the century.
The electric vehicle offers many promises--increasing U.S. energy security by reducing petroleum dependence, contributing to climate-change initiatives by decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, stimulating long-term economic growth through the development of new technologies and industries, and improving public health by improving local air quality. There are, however, substantial technical, social, and economic barriers to widespread adoption of electric vehicles, including vehicle cost, small driving range, long charging times, and the need for a charging infrastructure. In addition, people are unfamiliar with electric vehicles, are uncertain about their costs and benefits, and have diverse needs that current electric vehicles might not meet. Although a person might derive some personal benefits from ownership, the costs of achieving the social benefits, such as reduced GHG emissions, are borne largely by the people who purchase the vehicles. Given the recognized barriers to electric-vehicle adoption, Congress asked the Department of Energy (DOE) to commission a study by the National Academies to address market barriers that are slowing the purchase of electric vehicles and hindering the deployment of supporting infrastructure. As a result of the request, the National Research Council (NRC)--a part of the National Academies--appointed the Committee on Overcoming Barriers to Electric-Vehicle Deployment. This committee documented their findings in two reports--a short interim report focused on near-term options, and a final comprehensive report. Overcoming Barriers to Electric-Vehicle Deployment fulfills the request for the short interim report that addresses specifically the following issues: infrastructure needs for electric vehicles, barriers to deploying the infrastructure, and possible roles of the federal government in overcoming the barriers. This report also includes an initial discussion of the pros and cons of the possible roles. This interim report does not address the committee's full statement of task and does not offer any recommendations because the committee is still in its early stages of data-gathering. The committee will continue to gather and review information and conduct analyses through late spring 2014 and will issue its final report in late summer 2014. Overcoming Barriers to Electric-Vehicle Deployment focuses on the light-duty vehicle sector in the United States and restricts its discussion of electric vehicles to plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), which include battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The common feature of these vehicles is that their batteries are charged by being plugged into the electric grid. BEVs differ from PHEVs because they operate solely on electricity stored in a battery (that is, there is no other power source); PHEVs have internal combustion engines that can supplement the electric power train. Although this report considers PEVs generally, the committee recognizes that there are fundamental differences between PHEVs and BEVs.
Modular forms and Jacobi forms play a central role in many areas of mathematics. Over the last 10–15 years, this theory has been extended to certain non-holomorphic functions, the so-called “harmonic Maass forms”. The first glimpses of this theory appeared in Ramanujan's enigmatic last letter to G. H. Hardy written from his deathbed. Ramanujan discovered functions he called “mock theta functions” which over eighty years later were recognized as pieces of harmonic Maass forms. This book contains the essential features of the theory of harmonic Maass forms and mock modular forms, together with a wide variety of applications to algebraic number theory, combinatorics, elliptic curves, mathematical physics, quantum modular forms, and representation theory.
"Enter the religious landscape of California's industrial agriculture in the 1940s. Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt's early 1940s reconnaissance tour of the social scene in the little town of Wasco offers us a composite picture of religious institutions in a typical industrial-ag town in the state. Anthropologists and sociologists of the time pointed to the proliferation of Pentecostal churches as evidence of industrial farming's undesirable social outcomes. In particular, they noted the enthusiastic and emotional expressions of Pentecostal services and how the recently dispossessed Dust Bowl or "Okie" migrants flocked into these churches. By the 1940s, Dorothea Lange's photograph of the Okie "Migrant Mother" capturing the pathos of white plight had surfaced and caught the national spotlight. California, many noted, had a migration problem, as many "undesirables" flooded into the state. Women such as the one captured in Lange's photograph "Revival Mother" standing and worshipping with eyes closed and raised hands in a makeshift garage church typified the poverty of Pentecostals described by the university researchers"--
