A pair of California business school researchers has found that companies that disclose greenhouse gas emissions enjoy an immediate rise in stock value and positive returns to shareholders.
"When a company makes a voluntary disclosure of this kind, it signals to the investment community that this is a firm that is environmentally responsible," Paul Griffin of UC Davis told The Daily Climate, an environmental news source. "Investors are saying they would prefer to invest in an environmentally responsible firm."
The pair wanted to test a theory known as “voluntary disclosure.”
The theory predicts that certain corporate information, if disclosed judiciously, will produce a benefit for shareholders. The theory also predicts that the disclosure of that information will benefit smaller companies – or companies with less information available about them – more than larger companies.
So the team, which also included Yuan Sun of UC Berkeley, went through all news wires released by Corporate Social Responsibility, a corporate news wire, between 2000 and 2010.
When several armed robberies occurred recently in Lancaster, Calif., police had little of use on the two suspects. Then, a reliable image of one suspect turned up from a surveillance camera.
In years past, that still might not have been enough for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to close the case.
But with the help of new facial recognition software, investigators plugged the image into a database of booking photos and quickly came up with a possible match. That led to a pair of arrests on Jan. 27.
Facial recognition technology is growing rapidly, both in the consumer world and among police, but privacy advocates are troubled by the potential for intrusion and misuse.
Police in Tampa, Fla., created an uproar several years ago when they installed facial recognition devices in an entertainment district, hoping to identify wanted criminals. The system eventually was unplugged, because it didn’t catch any perpetrators. A similar effort at the 2001 Super Bowl also netted few results.
Things have changed since then. Agencies like the cutting-edge Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida are using millions of jail mug shots to double-check identities if they believe someone is lying about who they are. Deputies can simply snap a photo of the person and begin a search using their in-car laptop.
Bolstered by a recent court ruling, a Southern California assemblyman filed legislation last week that seeks to crack down on school districts that charge parents and students fees that violate state law.
AB 1575, sponsored by Assemblyman Ricardo Lara, D-South Gate, would require school superintendents and county offices to conduct annual reviews of all policies and practices at their local districts to ensure no unlawful fees are charged.
The reviews would start during the 2012-13 fiscal year. The measure also mandates that all schools have a complaint process that enables parents to question fees and receive resolution within 30 days. Schools that don't have a process now would be required to create one by March 1, 2013.
Lara introduced the measure Feb. 1, days after a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge refused to dismiss an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit accusing the state of allowing schools to charge for participation in classes and extracurricular activities.
The attorney general's office, state Department of Education, state Board of Education and state superintendent of public instruction wanted the case dismissed, arguing that it wasn't their responsibility to ensure school districts comply with the law. But Superior Court Judge Carl West found the state's arguments "not persuasive." He ordered both the ACLU and the state to continue the case and file their next statements by March 2.
Lara called West's decision a victory for all children.
If you want to build a rail line between Anaheim and San Francisco, people are going to have to get out of the way. Literally.
The proposed California High-Speed Rail would require a lot of land, meaning thousands of California families and businesses will have to move if the project is ever built.
At completion, the project calls for 800 miles of track crossing through 18 counties. The state authority planning the project doesn't know at this point how much private land it needs or what property acquisition will cost, but it plans to buy whatever parcels are necessary at fair market value.
Using preliminary and alternate rail alignments, The Orange County Register traced the proposed track through three counties (Fresno, Kern and Merced) and partway through a fourth (Los Angeles) and found some 2,000 affected properties with roughly 1,300 different owners.
Many of the affected property owners are people and businesses you've never heard of. Some, however, are high profile: land developers and campaign contributors, big businesses and Central Valley farms. Many are sure to be unhappy about losing their land.
For a project that has already known its fair share of conflict, land acquisition is almost certainly high-speed rail's next source of discord.
“It's not going to be pretty,” said Elizabeth Goldstein Alexis, co-founder of Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design, a Palo Alto group monitoring the high-speed rail project. “Some people are going to be happy with the buyout. Others are not going to go quietly into the night.”
Poor, urban and minority residents are most at risk for health problems linked to climate change, according to a new California Department of Public Health analysis of Los Angeles and Fresno counties.
The department examined social and environmental factors ranging from the rising sea level to public transportation access and found that African Americans and Latinos living in these counties are more likely to be exposed to health and safety risks related to poor air quality, heat waves, flooding and wildfires stemming from climate change.
“Clearly, climate change risks are not equal across the state or within individual counties,” according to the report [PDF]. “Identifying communities at greatest risk is a necessary step in efficiently employing limited resources to protect public health.”
In Los Angeles County, neighborhoods near Santa Monica and Long Beach were among those deemed most vulnerable, "largely from risks due to sea level rise, but also partially attributable to poor public transit, wildfire risk, and a large proportion of elderly living alone,” the report said.
The study also found that there was a notable economic disparity between families living in the areas most vulnerable to climate change and those who didn't – the more at-risk families earned between 40 and 55 percent less each year than the least vulnerable families. Residents living downtownor in urban areas were also more vulnerable, the study said.
California State University and University of California campuses are taking new steps to limit what students can do with their class notes: At least one CSU Chico student recently was reported to judicial affairs for selling notes to a website, while a newly updated UC Berkeley policy restricts how students share their notes with others.
The policies raise questions about whether instructors or students have copyrights to the notes students take in class. While the California Education Code prohibits students and others from selling class notes – and many campuses have policies that also ban unauthorized note-selling – critics say students, not instructors, own the copyright to their own notes.
Some university officials say faculty members have the right to protect their professional reputation – they don't want inaccurate or low-quality notes to be attributed to them. But others say the university policies are restricting students' free speech.
"Given the amount of money students are paying to go to school right now, to ... confront them with these policies and say, 'You don't even have the right to use your own notes any way you want,' seems to be the wrong message to be sending," said Jason M. Schultz, assistant clinical professor of law at UC Berkeley and director of the university's Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic.
Fourteen construction companies are on the short list of firms poised to bid for contracts to begin building California’s high-speed rail system in the Fresno area later this year.
The list was revealed by California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Roelof van Ark at the authority board’s monthly meeting yesterday in Sacramento.
Van Ark said the companies have formed into five teams that the authority has qualified to compete for a contract on a stretch of the line through Fresno, from the San Joaquin River at the north end to American Avenue at the south end. The contract is expected to be worth $1.5 billion to $2 billion.
The builder teams are:
California Backbone Builders, a consortium of two Spanish construction firms – Ferrovial Agroman and Acciona
California High-Speed Rail Partners, composed of Fluor Corp. of Texas, Sweden-based Skanska and PCL Constructors of Canada
California High-Speed Ventures, made up of Kiewit Corp. of Nebraska, Granite Construction of Watsonville and Comsa EMTE of Spain
A joint venture of Dragados SA of Spain, Denver-based Flatiron Construction Corp. and Shimmick Construction of Oakland
Tutor Perini Corp. of Sylmar, Zachry Construction of Texas and Pasadena-based Parsons Corp.
The project includes building 12 street overcrossings or underpasses, two elevated viaducts, a tunnel and a bridge across the San Joaquin River. Laying the tracks will be done later under a separate contract.
While the authority has qualified the teams in a screening process, significant hurdles remain, and it could be months before the companies get a chance to submit bids.
