Some interesting reads:

  • Here is a link to a brochure that I found at SciencePo on Living Green in Paris. A nice iniative. Anyone knows similar initiatives for their cities? The guys who made the brochure also have a nice blog which you may want to visit, verTige. vertige is French for dizziness, vert is French for green, while tige is French for stem or culm, thus it is a nice wordplay. (Since I am an avid climber I’d like to add that if you meet a French who tells you (s)he has the vertige, don’t take them up high walls…)
  • Last chance (deadline 30th) to submit a paper for a nice climate change conference in Toulouse in September, follow this call HERE. The organizers are Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) and the Institut D’Economie Industrielle (IDEI), specifically Stefan Ambec, Claude Crampes, Thomas-Olivier Léautier and Jean Tirole. Furthermore, during the same week there is the 2nd annual meeting of the French environmental and resource economist association, deadline for submission is also 30th, and you can submit your paper through HERE.
  • EAERE early bird registration coming up. This is Europe’s most important annual Environmental and Resource Economist conference. I won’t be coming this year since I missed the deadline for paper submissions (doh!) and they are rather strict there… big PITY! Anyway, register here http://www.eaere2015.org/ if you can go even without presenting or if you sent a paper.
  • For researchers in need of money and with a good project at hand, please look into the ERC grants. A call is open now until 2nd June, follow this LINK.
  • Very interesting and illuminating database on anti-environmental lobbying: http://www.polluterwatch.com/.  They call it the Anti-Environmental Archive, and it contains a wealth of (leaked) documents on lobbying attempts, fruitful or not, of polluters and policy makers. Interesting is, for example, the lobbying works by ExxonMobil. According to the Anti-Environmental Archive:

Since 1999, ExxonMobil has spent almost $6.7 million on political campaign donations, $414,500 of which have gone to politicians in the 2013-2014 election cycle. ExxonMobil sends addition money on state politicials, spending over $5.3 million since 2003. Since 1998 lobbying disclosure laws went into effect, ExxonMobil has spent over $210 million on federal lobbying. In response to a three-phase plan to start controlling greenhouse gas pollution, ExxonMobil contributed pressure to former president George W. Bush’s office to prevent the Bush EPA from acting, effectively delaying initial EPA regulation for almost three years.