Search

We study supply response to irrigation water salinity—an important and ubiquitous environmental problem facing agriculture around the world. The geographical setting is the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, a main water hub in California, where salinity is a significant part of recent policy debates over water management and infrastructure. We use highly granular farm‐level panel data on Delta farming activity to estimate two sets of response parameters using (i) standard (fixed coefficients) logit model, and (ii) a mixed (random coefficient) logit model. The mixed logit results provide evidence for heterogeneity in supply response across farmers. To put these findings in a meaningful economic context, we use the results from both models to simulate estimates for aggregate acreage responses under two alternative salinity scenarios. We implement a method to simulate individual specific responses together with their confidence intervals, which provides additional insight into the composition of farmer heterogeneity. Based on these post‐regression simulation results, we find the mixed logit model predicts an elasticity of aggregate acreage for salt‐sensitive (hence higher value) crops that is an order of magnitude larger compared to that of the standard fixed coefficients logit method. This result sheds light on category of costs likely to increase in response to rising salinity in the Delta region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newcomers to California could be forgiven for thinking they have crossed into treacherous terrain. By virtue of the state's Proposition 65 right-to-know law, store shelves and public garages everywhere announce, -WARNING: This Iproduct/food/jacilityl contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer For reproductive harml." The proliferation of consumer warnings about toxic exposures in everyday lijZ has made Prop 65 highly controversial, as has the degree to which the law incentivizes citizens to sue businesses for failure to warn. Both features make the law recurrently vulnerable to weakening in Sacramento and preemption in Washington, D.C. Against this backdrop-and at a time when Prop 65 faces a live preemption threat in Congress-this Article tells a new story about the law's considerable benefits in reducing exposure to toxic chemicals. Looking beyond Prop 65's known direct effects in prompting warnings and enforcement suits, we use original archival research and qualitative interview data to identify hidden modes by which the law reduces toxic exposures in California and nationwide. This Article presents evidence of three previously unexplored or underexplained mechanisms of salutary Prop 65 action, in: (1) spurring direct regulation of specific toxic chemicals; (2) seeding broad supplemental chemical regulatory regimes: and (3) disseminating information about toxic chemicals in previously information-poor business-to-business and consumer marketplaces, with transformative effects on commerce. We conclude that assessing these modes of action is necessary to any fair evaluation of the merits of Prop 65. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a look on the significance of CALFED Bay-Delta Program (CALFED), a collaborative water management effort to manage the highly contested and interconnected system of waters, levees and habitat in the San Francisco Bay Estuary and Sacramento in California. The program engaged different agencies and stakeholders in a joint search for solutions to Bay-Delta problems. It changed how water was managed and produced new practices that persisted until 2005. According to the author, the formation of CALFED illustrates how formal and informal systems are interdependent across planning, participation and decision-making.

A methodology is presented whereby automotive air pollution areal emission factors may be determined by land-use category. The technique is applied to the City of Sacramento for the year 1971. It is found that the air quality of this particular city is dominated by pollutants emitted from arterial streets, as contrasted with residential streets and freeways. It is suggested that since many physical and cultural factors are strongly correlated with land-use, the planning of future environments of man could be done most conveniently in terms of land-use categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]