While most literature on federal climate change policies has focused on failures to adopt broad policies, this article describes and explains successes in two important sectors. Regulations to improve the fuel economy of motor vehicles and efficiency standards for appliances and equipment have produced substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, although they largely have other goals and hence can be considered implicit climate policies. We synthesize the existing literature with our analyses of case studies to offer three explanations for the adoption of effective policies in these two sectors. First, the policies delivered politically popular co-benefits, such as reducing consumers' energy bills, enhancing energy security, and promoting public health. Second, they gained business acceptance because they were narrow in their scope, avoided longterm economic costs, and helped industry cope with state-level regulations; industry often strategically tried to influence these policies rather than resist them. Third, the legislation that initiated and expanded these policies received bipartisan support, which was aided by co-benefits and business acceptance; more recently, these laws have been strengthened through the actions of Democratic administrations. We conclude by comparing these policy areas to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

This article discusses four examples of risk regulations in the United States, namely vehicle emissions, appliance efficiency, chemical safety, and the labeling of genetically modified food. In each example, consumer or environmental regulations were initiated at the state level despite business opposition. But when faced with a multiplicity of state product regulations, the affected firms decided to support the expansion of federal regulations. They were willing to accept stronger federal standards in order to preempt individual states from enacting more stringent standards than the federal government. This, in turn, led to a conflict between firms who wanted federal preemption of state restrictions and states who wanted to be able to enact regulations more stringent than those of the federal government. The outcomes of each of these conflicts over the scope of federal preemption had important impacts on each multilevel governance regulatory regime. The ability of both levels of the American government to enact more innovative risk regulations – often referred to as dynamic federalism – has made it more likely that they will be strengthened.

Abstract This article explores the role of business in supporting and benefiting from nature protection during the second half of the nineteenth century. It begins with the support of business for protecting scenic wilderness in California and the creation of Yellowstone, as well as the role of the railroads in encouraging easterners to visit to the nation’s western national parks—all designed to create economic value by promoting tourism. It then examines the efforts of a wide range of business interests to protect the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Adirondack forest in New York State. The later effort was led by business interests from New York City who worried that deforestation would impair freight traffic on the Erie Canal and Hudson River as well as endanger the city’s water supplies. This article compliments Hay’s research on business and conservation during the Progressive Era by demonstrating that business also played a critical role in supporting wilderness and forest protection.

California is a long-standing role leader in environmental regulation in the United States. Wilderness preservation and restrictions on coastal oil drilling began in California, as did the regulation of pollution from automobiles. More recently, California has played a prominent role in addressing the risks of global climate change through its programs promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy and its restrictions on greenhouse emissions from motor vehicles. The state has also been highly active in regulating chemicals. Many of California’s environmental regulations have been adopted by other states as well as by the federal government. However, because the United States is a federal system, its regulations have also brought the state into frequent conflict with the Trump administration.

At the end of the Cold War, the attention of the United States was drawn away from its own neighbouring region, Latin America. Events in the Balkans and the Middle East, besides others, and the fall of the Soviet Union left the region unattended, leaving a vacuum there. Latin American states slowly found their way back to democracy, although after a short period most of them tried a different route than before: the populations of several countries elected left-wing governments one after the other. The phenomenon known as Pink Tide changed the political landscape of the region not just domestically but also with regards to foreign relations: governments started to look for allies other than the US and other countries in the Western World. In parallel to these changes, China started to reach out for resources, and Russia rebooted its strategic views about its own global role — thus some of the new connections. Additionally, however, in the shadow of these large-scale steps, smaller steps by a distant regional power were also taken: Iran, and its proxy, the Hezbollah, as well as Lebanon, also set foot in Latin America. The paper aims to focus on these actors, with special regard to Iran and its growing influence in certain areas of the region.

This article presents an in-depth review of scholarship on how mandatory and voluntary regulatory pressures on firms affect their environmental strategies and performance. Although mandatory regulation typically has a strong and positive influence on firms’ environmental performance, studies of the effects of voluntary pressures demonstrate that by themselves they are unlikely to bring about significant improvement in environmental outcomes. Accordingly, future research should focus on the complementary impacts of mandatory and voluntary programs on organizations’ environmental strategies and performance rather than analyzing their separate influence. Scholars should examine i) more than a single environmental pressure at a given time, ii) more than one response to the regulatory context, iii) the synergy between mandatory and voluntary pressures, iv) the impact of imperfect enforcement, and v) the political influence corporations exert on the mandatory and voluntary pressures that affect them. This essay argues that managers react to environmental regulations in different ways depending on how they understand the multiple pressures that they confront and their opportunities to influence the outcomes.

This chapter describes how, for four decades, California has been at the forefront of national efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These initiatives began with policies to reduce energy use in order to avoid the construction of additional power plants and went on to include progressively more stringent energy efficiency standards and renewable energy mandates, additional curbs on automotive emissions, and a cap-and-trade program designed to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions. The emergence and expansion of these efforts demonstrates the importance of the factors that have shaped environmental policy innovations in other areas. At the same time, these policies are also distinct from those described in the previous chapters. First, they developed more incrementally, with some backsliding, much conflict, and frequent compromises. Second, some of their policy triggers—most notably, the 1973 energy crisis and California's 2000–2001 energy deregulation fiasco—were unrelated to environmental risks or threats. Third, their scope, diversity, and economic impact have been more substantial than those of the state's regulations protecting land use, coastal areas, and automotive emissions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in marked contrast to the state's other environmental policy threats, California cannot protect itself from the risks of global climate change. This means that the state has a critical stake in promoting a “California effect” that will encourage other political jurisdictions both in and outside the United States to also restrict their greenhouse gas emissions.

This article describes and explains why the state of California has long played a leadership role in adopting innovative and stringent environmental standards. It argues that critical roles have been played by the state's attractive natural environment, the extent of threats to its environmental quality, the material interest of citizens in protecting the natural environmental around where they lived, and the support of business interests who stood to benefit from protecting the state's many environmental amenities. These dynamics are illustrated by several historical examples, which have laid the basis for the state's current environmental policy initiatives. It concludes by generalizing from the experiences of California in order to explore the role of politics and public policies in promoting more sustainable business practices.

This chapter discusses the efforts to protect Yosemite and the sequoias in the Sierras in the nineteenth century and then turns to the more heated conflicts over the fate of the coastal redwoods. The roots of California's tradition of civic mobilization lie in nature protection. This tradition began with the efforts of a few prominent individuals—including John Muir, Horace Greeley, and Frederick Olmsted—and then became institutionalized in the upper-middle-class Sierra and Sempervirens clubs and the predominantly upper-class Save-the-Redwoods League. Broader grassroots citizen mobilization played a critical role in campaigns to return control of Yosemite to the federal government, expand the size of and increase the funding for state parks, and protect endangered sequoias in the Sierras. The state's administrative capacity to protect California's scenic environment was initially limited, paralleling its inability to regulate hydraulic mining during the mid-nineteenth century. However, this capacity subsequently expanded through the establishment of institutions such as the State Board of Agriculture, the State Forestry Commission, and the State Parks Commission.

This concluding chapter reviews the key themes of the book and explores some of the broader implications of this analysis of California's regulatory leadership. Three points are particularly critical: the importance of the local dimension of environmental policies, the role of business in environmental politics, and the limits of environmental regulation. The chapter then discusses the increasingly important role states are playing in environmental protection in the United States and shows how California has economically benefited from its environmental policy leadership. One important reason why California has been able to consistently adopt more stringent regulations than those of the federal government and other states is that many of its improvements in local and state environmental quality have been a source of competitive advantage. The improvements it has made in air quality—most notably in Los Angeles—its protection of the trees in the Sierras and along the Pacific, and its land use controls along the coast and around the San Francisco Bay have all made California a more attractive place to move to, invest in, and visit.

This chapter begins by exploring the conflicts over Southern California's beaches and coastal areas and then turns to efforts to protect the San Francisco Bay and the entire Pacific coast. In addition to its aesthetic value and opportunities for recreation, the coast is a major economic resource. It enhances the value of property located on or near it, and the coastal area also contains substantial deposits of oil. Precisely because the coast is a scarce and valuable resource with so many competing uses, protecting it, like the coastal redwoods, has been highly contentious. On one important dimension, the dynamics of two of the important cases described in this chapter depart from the book's explanatory framework. The campaigns to establish the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the world's first coastal protection agency, as well as the more sweeping California Coastal Commission, received no business support. In both cases, the interests of business were not divided. Rather, their creation was made possible by extensive citizen mobilization, an outcome that reveals the important role played by public support for environmental protection in California beginning in the middle of the twentieth century.

Over the course of its 150-year history, California has successfully protected its scenic wilderness areas, restricted coastal oil drilling, regulated automobile emissions, preserved coastal access, improved energy efficiency, and, most recently, addressed global climate change. How has this state, more than any other, enacted so many innovative and stringent environmental regulations over such a long period of time? This book shows why the Golden State has been at the forefront in setting new environmental standards, often leading the rest of the nation. From the establishment of Yosemite, America's first protected wilderness, and the prohibition of dumping gold-mining debris in the nineteenth century to sweeping climate-change legislation in the twenty-first, the book traces California's remarkable environmental policy trajectory. It explains that this pathbreaking role developed because California had more to lose from environmental deterioration and more to gain from preserving its stunning natural geography. As a result, citizens and civic groups effectively mobilized to protect and restore their state's natural beauty and, importantly, were often backed both by business interests and by strong regulatory authorities. Business support for environmental regulation in California reveals that strict standards are not only compatible with economic growth but can also contribute to it. The book also examines areas where California has fallen short, particularly in water management and the state's dependence on automobile transportation.

Physarum polycephalum no es ni un animal, ni una planta, ni una seta. Este organismo unicelular es sorprendente en muchos aspectos: presenta una diversidad de 720 sexos, puede desplazarse varios centimetros por hora y es facil de clonar. Aunque carece de neuronas, para alcanzar el alimento puede aprender, por habituacion, a cruzar un puente cubierto de una sustancia repulsiva. Mas sorprendentemente, una masa de P. polycephalum puede transmitir a otra su capacidad de cruzar dichos puentes.

Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments of corporate environmental responsibility.

Few environmental impacts are as consequential as the way energy is produced: energy production affects local environmental quality as well as global climate change, and the siting of power plants and other electrical generation facilities also impacts local land use. The United States now faces a number of critical choices about how it will meet its future energy generation needs. These choices include whether and when to build new power plants, construct electricity transmission lines and oil and natural gas pipelines, and how much to invest in new technologies for producing oil and natural gas, wind “farms,” and fields of solar panels.The purpose of this important book is to describe and explain how the American public thinks about these choices. It is based on the assumption that public opinion has played and will continue to play an important role in shaping policy outcomes in this space—especially as many new energy-related technologies will be located near population centers. Drawing on extensive public opinion polling data, the book seeks to answer two critical and related questions: “what sort of energy do people want and why” (p. 8). The authors argue that it makes little sense to ask people about their energy preferences in the abstract, as previous surveys have done, for instance by soliciting general thoughts or opinions about nuclear or solar power.Instead, what really matters politically is how members of the public judge the relative desirability of real-world energy production alternatives. It turns out that Americans think about all energy sources in the same way. What matters to them, as the book’s title reveals, is energy that is both clean and cheap. If forced to make a trade-off, however, the public has a strong preference for energy that is cleaner. People are very concerned about the local or immediate environmental impacts of the way energy is produced.Americans want to rely less on coal and oil and more on solar and wind power. Strikingly, the public mistakenly believes that the latter energy sources are less expensive than the former, although that is clearly not the case. But the authors suggest that Americans have become so concerned about the negative health and environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels that even if they knew the correct relative costs, they would still prefer solar and wind power. In other words, when it comes to what matters to the public more, cleaner or cheaper, the data indicate that the answer is “cleaner.” Accordingly, the public would be pleased to accept higher-cost coal if it was cleaner.But while there is substantial public demand for energy use that protects environmental quality, this does not translate into public support for measures to address the issue of global climate change. An important and original contribution of this book is to explain why public opinion about climate change has had so little political traction among much of the public. The reason, the authors argue, has to do with its relatively low political salience. Not only has environmental protection rarely been ranked as one of the most important issues confronting the country, but more important, when asked to rank the importance of various environmental challenges, the public consistently ranks global climate change substantially below all other environmental problems, such as air and water pollution. Notwithstanding all the media attention to global warming, the latter gap has continued to increase.The good news is that the public does like solar and wind power, which is helpful for addressing the risks of global climate change. But based on a careful analysis of polling data, the authors argue that the public does not prefer these energy sources because of their impact on carbon emissions. Rather, it values them because they are perceived as “cleaner,” in that they produce less local pollution. What the public most cares about are immediate, local health and environmental harms and benefits. Global climate change does not fall into this category, since the effects of policies to directly address it are too remote and indirect to the average American.This insight has important and challenging implications for attracting public support for future public policies to address the risks of global climate change. Policies that focus too narrowly on reducing greenhouse gases are unlikely to succeed politically, as they do not address the local and immediate health, safety, and environmental concerns of citizens. Rather, we need to formulate energy policies that can be justified by their immediate health, safety, and environmental benefits—and that also reduce carbon emissions. Policies that focus too narrowly on reducing greenhouse gases are unlikely to succeed politically, as they do not address the local and immediate health, safety, and environmental concerns of citizens.Revealingly, the reason Americans are more supportive of a cap on carbon emissions than of cap and trade is that they see a clearer and more causal connection between the former and a reduction of air and water pollution, due to reduced use of fossil fuels and greater reliance on alternative energy sources.This book can be challenging to read, as it is filled with detailed analyses of polling data from previous surveys as well as from an original one commissioned by the authors, but it is well worth the effort. Cheap and Clean is an important and original contribution to our understanding of one dimension of the politics of climate change, namely public opinion toward energy production.

'Perrini et al provide a detailed, authoritative look at the evolving European perspective on corporate social responsibility. They show how Europe has moved from follower status to leading edge practice. The book is the best current indicator of what the next stages of CSR will look like.' Thomas W. Dunfee, University of Pennsylvania, US uthors provide a European perspective on corporate social responsibility.