Budget

• Until recently, almost all of them ran on diesel or gasoline, contributing to U.S. demand for fossil fuels and encouraging automakers to continue focusing on fossil-fueled vehicles.
• That’s starting to change, and a new directive that the Biden Administration quietly issued in September 2023 will accelerate the shift.
• Ultimately, it could shift demand enough to change what industries produce, not just for the government but for the entire country.

What’s the social cost of greenhouse gas?

• The social cost of greenhouse gases represents the damage created by emitting 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
• These greenhouse gases, largely from fossil fuels, trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet and fueling climate change.
• The result is worsening storms, heat waves, droughts and other disasters that harm humans, infrastructure and economies around the world.

Estimating the cost

• The Obama administration introduced the first federal social cost of carbon to incorporate climate risk in regulatory decisions.
• Recent research suggests that the actual social cost of carbon is closer to $185 per metric ton.
• Without directives like these, decision-makers implicitly set the cost of greenhouse gas emissions to zero in their benefit-cost analyses.

The vehicle fleet as an example

• The federal vehicle fleet is a good example of how the social costs of greenhouse gases add up.
• Let’s compare the costs of driving an electric Ford Focus and an equivalent conventional-fuel Ford Focus.
• Assume each vehicle drives an average of 10,000 miles (about 16,000 kilometers) per year – that’s less than the U.S. average per driver, but it’s a simple number to work with.
• Scale that to 50,000 new vehicle purchases, and that’s a cost difference of about $4 million to $13.5 million per year for emissions from operating the vehicles.

How the government can shift demand

• These types of comparisons under the new directive could help shift purchases toward a wide range of less carbon-intensive products.
• Much of the U.S. government’s spending goes toward carbon-intensive goods and services, such as transportation and infrastructure development.
• Directing agencies to consider and compare the social cost of purchases in each of these sectors will send similar signals to different segments of the market: The demand for less carbon-intensive goods is rising.
• Ultimately, if one of the largest segments of demand, the U.S. government, transitions to less carbon-intensive products, supply will follow.

• But a research collaborative, of which I’m a member, has found that schools might not be ready to protect students from environmental contaminants.
• Environmental health standards can help a school community ensure each potential hazard is accounted for.

Air, water and food quality

• Understanding and controlling common pollutants indoors can improve the indoor air quality and reduce the risk of health concerns.
• It may seem like maintaining proper food safety and drinking-water quality would be common practices.
• But many schools do have some level of lead contamination in their food and water.
• To combat contamination and ensure safe food and water, the Food and Drug Administration overhauled the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2016.

Integrated pest management

• Many schools have insect infestations, and many combat these pest problems with harsh chemicals when there’s a simpler solution.
• Integrated pest management is an environmentally sensitive approach to pest management.
• IPM programs consider the pests’ life cycles and their larger environment, as well as all the available pest control methods, to manage pest infestations economically and scientifically.

Green cleaning

• School administrators also determine what products to use for pest control and cleaning.
• Green cleaning uses safer – or less harsh – chemical and pesticide products, since studies have found that the repeated use of harsh chemicals indoors can lead to chronic health effects later in life for anyone directly exposed.
• Schools need a plan to manage their pollutants long term – these pollutants might be cleaning chemicals and pesticides or chemicals used in science classes.
• When the school building is safe, students and educators are more able to get down to the business of learning, undistracted.

• These tragic incidents not only resulted in the loss of innocent lives but were also immensely challenging for emergency response teams.
• Each of these events required coordination between several different emergency services: the police, fire services and medical teams.
• Therefore, decision making by emergency response teams is a high stakes game that can influence the outcomes of different crises.
• We have been part of a team from the universities of Portsmouth and Winchester investigating how virtual reality (VR) can help prepare responders for these scenarios.

VR and decision making

• This makes it an invaluable tool for studying decision making under high stress.
• For emergency responders, there are many benefits to working with VR.
• Firstly, it can act as a training simulator, allowing first responders to practice critical decision making during a crisis scenario played out in a simulated environment and with a VR headset.
• By harnessing 360-degree cameras to create immersive simulations based around simulated terrorist events, desktop VR can closely mirror real world emergency scenarios.

Outperforming older methods

• They show that desktop VR can be a particularly valuable tool in training.
• For example, VR-based training, especially the interactive kind that responds to a user’s input, has been shown to outperform traditional video-based training methods.
• This opens up possibilities for the wider adoption of VR in emergency response training, making it more accessible for agencies and organisations with different budgets.

• AFET-BUDG - Members to vote on Establishing the Ukraine Facility - 05.10.2023
  26-09-2023 - 17:16
  On 5 October 2023 Members of the Committees on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and on Budgets (BUDG) will vote on the draft report by the co-rapporteurs, Michael Gahler (AFET, EPP) and Eider Gardiazábal Rubial (BUDG, S&D).
• The draft report endorses a substantial assistance package, while strengthening democratic accountability of the Facility, encouraging multiparty democracy in Ukraine, and encouraging the alignment of Ukraine with the requirements for the EU accession.
• The Ukraine Facility is part of a package also containing the targeted revision of the EU's long term budget (multiannual financial framework - MFF) and the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP).