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A chemical called BHPF—found in some ‘BPA-Free’ plastics—may cause harmful outcomes in mice, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
BPA, or Bisphenol A, has come under scrutiny in recent years, with studies suggesting that the chemical might mimic estrogen in the body in ways that are harmful to human health.
“In recent years, BPA was shown to have estrogenic activity, linking BPA to endocrine diseases and to an increased incidence of endocrine-related cancers,” lead study author Hu Jianying of Peking University told PopSci over email. “Because materials synthesized with BPA were widely used in packing materials for food and beverages, and BPA can be released into food from such containers, many countries have restricted or banned the use of BPA in materials or containers that come in contact with food, especially baby bottles for milk or water.”
Although BPA is not banned in the United States—in fact the US Food & Drug Administration ruled it safe for use in food packaging in 2014—manufacturers have still phased it out in response to consumer concerns. They’ve instead turned to plastics marketed as BPA-free, including BHPF.
In recent years, BHPF has shown up in all sorts of adhesives and plastic materials—everywhere from the aerospace and automobile industry to coatings used to protect floors. “So we are interested in the human exposure and risk due to the usage of BHPF,” Hu said.
The first step in that process was exposing cells—in this case yeast cells—to the chemical. Because BPA was known to be estrogen-like, the researchers exposed cells similar to those that bind with estrogen in humans. They discovered that while BPA mimics estrogen, BHPF actually blocks the hormone. This was confirmed via a computer model that simulates the effects of BHPF on cells. The model showed that BHPF fit into the antagonist pocket of estrogen receptor—it binds to an estrogen receptor but doesn’t elicit a response.
This sort of multi-step analysis is beneficial, says Maricel Maffini, because, “each step gives you more information and you can fine tune the type of testing you do next.” Maffini, who wasn’t involved in the new study, is a scientific consultant who works with public interest organizations and businesses on issues related to chemical safety—especially for chemicals that interact with our food.
The next step, in this case, was testing in animals. The researchers exposed four groups of pregnant mice to four different concentrations of BHPF. The mice exposed to BHPF experienced a host of pregnancy-related issues. This included low uterine weight, inflammation and thinning of the womb lining, and worse pregnancy outcomes. The mice exposed to the highest dose of BHPF had 24 percent fewer live pups per litter than the control group.
The study authors point out that we can’t extrapolate from mice onto humans. “[But] when you have a drug and you give it to animals, people take what happens to the animals pretty seriously and say this may happen in humans,” Maffini said. “Somehow there is a resistance to think the same way when we are testing chemicals. There is a tendency to say that the rat is not a human, the mouse is not a human, we don’t know if the same amount of chemical…is going to do anything to the human. We are different.”
And those knowledge gaps leave many concerned.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are especially concerning for children since these hormones guide so much of their development. Pexels
“In the U.S. there are no requirements for testing in animals unless a lot of the chemical gets into the food supply,” said Maffini. “There is definitely no requirement to test for potential endocrine disrupting properties in chemicals—not even doing a computer modeling study, or an invitro study, similar done to those that are done in report.”
Similarly, we tend to test individual ingredients that are used to make a particular product, but not the product itself.
“We can test sodium independently, we can test chloride independently, and get very bad, toxic data,” said Maffini, “but if we look at salt—the sodium and the chloride together—we’re going to have a very different picture of the toxicity.”
But none of this matters if we’re not coming into contact with BHFP—it’s only a potential problem if humans are exposed to it. To see if we are being exposed, Hu and his colleagues tested 100 students for the presence of BHFP. Seven percent of them tested positive for the chemical. The testing wasn’t done to prove that BHFP is harming human health, but rather serves to suggest that at least some of us are being potentially exposed to it—and that we need to look deeper into what this might mean. How dangerous might BHFP be, and how is it getting into our bodies?
We have some clues about the latter question: because BPA rose to such prominence due to its use in plastic drinking bottles, and because a lot of Chinese students drink boiled water out of plastic water bottles, Hu’s team tested polycarbonate bottles—both baby bottles (polycarbonate baby bottles are banned in China, so they had to purchase them from abroad) and adult drinking water bottles—for the presence for BHPF. They found that water samples taken from all three baby bottles tested positive for BHPF.
Similarly, they detected BHPF in water from two bottles made of Eastman Tritan’s BPA-free copolyester. It’s unclear if the bottles Hu tested are available in the United States. But the U.S. might not be regulating the use of BHPF at all. A survey of three FDA databases—Indirect Additives used in Food Contact Substances, Inventory of Effective Food Contact Substance (FCS) Notifications, and the Threshold of Regulation (TOR) Exemptions—failed to turn up references to either Fluorene-9-bisphenol or BHPF. If the FDA has deemed BHPF safe to use, it should show up in one of those databases.
In an emailed statement Eastman Tritan claimed that “no fluorene-9-bisphenol nor any other bisphenol analogs were added to Tritan,” and that “based on the chemistry of Tritan and the lack of bisphenol analogs, the results in this paper are not expected.”
The statement went on to note that in a 2012 study, researchers tested seven bottles made from Tritan resin and found that they did not release BPA “nor plasticizer or other substances.”
“Polymer migration testing and polymer chemistry can be very complex,” the statement added. “It is more likely that the detected substances were contamination from their lab equipment (other plastics, gaskets, seals, tubes, glassware, detergents for example) or the substances were misidentified.”
But in 2011, researchers on a different study found that most commercial plastic—including Tritan—leeches some kind of synthetic estrogen even when not exposed to microwaves, dishwashers, or boiling water, which are known to make plastics leech chemicals. Synthetic estrogens are worrisome, because estrogen hormones guide a host of biological processes—from growth, to puberty (even in boys, despite the fact that estrogen is considered a ‘female hormone), to reproduction. Eastman Tritan sued over the 2011 study and won.
Pexels
It’s possible that both Tritan and the team sued in the 2011 lawsuit are technically correct—the two sides used different tests, and different definitions of estrogenic activity. Scientists are still trying to figure out what level of endocrine disruption can be considered safe, and the answer is likely different for each chemical. In the new study, researchers found that BHPF affected mice at much lower levels than BPA did.
The method of exposure matters, too. The FDA labels BPA as safe because it’s assumed that the primary mechanism of exposure is through eating and drinking, and the body excretes BPA in just six hours. But this ignores that some of us are drinking from containers made with BPA pretty much constantly, preventing us from ever fully expelling BPA from our bodies. Meanwhile, a number of studies looking at the presence of BPA in paper receipts have found that a significant amount enters the bloodstream by way of skin contact alone. A May 2023 study found that those of us who live near industrial sites can be exposed to a high level of BPA simply by living our lives as usual. It may very well be that the level of exposure from any single source might be low enough to be safe, but that the cumulative exposure could cause health problems. We don’t know yet—there needs to be more research.
“We think,” wrote Hu to PopSci, “that toxicity of substitutes should be assessed comprehensively, and regulations for substitution of chemicals should be developed in the future.” Otherwise, we risk introducing alternative materials that cause just as much harm.
“People shouldn’t be put in the position of selecting which are the safe products,” said Maffini, “the products should be safe.”
In the meantime, there’s always glass.
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Sexism May Be Bad For Men’s Mental Health
Psychologists have found that sexism is bad for men, too. Take a second to recover from this shocking news: Views and beliefs that oppress more than half of the population can be harmful to the people who hold them. Recovered? Okay, let’s continue.
In the last three decades, social scientists and the broader public have examined the concept of toxic masculinity, focusing on traditionally male attributes that many have come to see as harmful not only to women, but also to men and the fabric of society. Scholars have not necessarily sought to demonize men or maleness, but to highlight the ways in which conforming to traditionally masculine qualities like dominance, self-reliance, and competitiveness could be harmful to men and the people around them. In a meta-analysis of 78 studies, comprising 19,453 participants, researchers at Indiana University Bloomington and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore found modest but negative associations between a number of masculine norms and mental health outcomes. These “masculine” social norms included the desire to win, the need for emotional control, risk-taking behavior, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity, self-reliance, high importance placed on one’s job, power over women, disdain for homosexuality, and the pursuit of status.
The three norms that researchers found to have the most consistent negative effects on men’s mental health were self-reliance, pursuit of sexual promiscuity, and power over women. Y. Joel Wong of Indiana University Bloomington was not surprised by the results. “It’s not rocket science,” he tells Popular Science. “It’s something that’s been demonstrated over 20 years of research.”
So what accounts for the consistent effects of these three norms in particular? Wong says that self-reliance is outdated in a world that increasingly stresses interdependence and interconnectedness among people. “The norm of self-reliance is increasingly not helpful,” he says. “You have to often rely on others.”
The other two – the pursuit of sexual promiscuity and wielding power over women – are not just associated with masculinity, but closely tied to sexism, Wong says. No big shock there. He points out that what makes them particularly harmful now, though, is that societal attitudes have changed over time to make these qualities increasingly unacceptable. “Perhaps 30 years ago you could behave in a sexist manner, you could do and say things that’d be inappropriate and get away with it,” Wong tells Popular Science. “People would suffer in silence and not speak out. But that’s changed a lot.”
Researchers found that the masculine norms most consistently associated with negative mental health outcomes are self-reliance, pursuit of sexual promiscuity, and power over women. PixaBay
It would be remiss to approach this topic without recognizing the reality that, to many people, these qualities simply encompass what it means to be a man. Many believe that these traits are biologically ingrained, and critical for the evolutionary success of our species. It’s not hard to see the appeal of being self-reliant, for example – being strong enough to best life’s challenges without assistance. But putting too much stock in self-reliance could also make it hard for a man to reach out for help in times of crisis or difficulty, as this research suggests. This can have a negative effect on men’s mental health, especially if they think any other course of action would emasculate them. In such a scenario, suffering in silence may appear to be the only acceptable option.
Wong says attitudes like this capture what is so problematic about these masculine norms: People may assume that they’ll be looked down upon if they break out of this pattern of behavior, even if that’s not actually true. “There’s a gap between what men perceive other men believe or do and what men actually believe or do,” says Wong. There’s a perception that a man will be seen as less manly for not conforming to gender norms. “The irony is that a lot of men feel that way,” says Wong, so they’re afraid to break away from these norms and end up perpetuating them.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In our increasingly connected world, in which people have access to so many ideas beyond what they might have been exposed to in the past, there are more opportunities than ever to expand one’s cultural consciousness. And indeed, this research is not the first or last word on the concept of toxic masculinity. Many others have written on it, and will no doubt continue to do so. And just because these harmful norms will probably continue to be passed on doesn’t mean that they’re unavoidable. Wong says being a man is not some sort of essential quality, and that ideas about what it means to be a man have changed throughout history. Masculine identity can even evolve for an individual over the course of his lifetime. “Just because you’ve always behaved in a particular way doesn’t mean you’ve got no choice,” Wong says.
The Smart Home You Want May Not Be The Smart Home You Need (Yet)
The smart home you want may not be the smart home you need (yet)
The connected home we want is one which anticipated our needs, almost a digital butler. If we’re cold, the thermostat would know. Angry? Maybe the stereo plays the music it knows calms us down. A home security system that recognizes the same face lurking a few times in a week, then notifies you about a potential burglary.
It all sounds like something out of a terrible Michael Bay Summer Sci-Fi movie where people wear Nike shoes we’ve only dreamed of. While we groan at the one-liners, we marvel at the concept of such a home. As the concept becomes reality, missteps have proven it may be the home we want, but not the home we deserve.
Nest’s recent snafu with their Protect smoke alarms that just didn’t work proved that overreaching was perhaps the order of the day. A simple wave to dismiss a fire alarm sounds calming and contextual, but proved potentially disastrous. A bug in the system meant it may not work at all in certain life threatening scenarios.
The Nest thermostat has been met with the same type of furrowed brow response. While not yanked from store shelves like its stablemate (which has yet to return), many question the real aim and use of the expensive device. It might look like something Michael Bay would dream up, but what does it do for $250? Many wonder.
As Honeywell enters the connected home space with the Lyric, their new thermostat promises to bring a bit of civility to home automation. A thermostat, an app, and temperature control. Geofencing brings the contextual awareness, and the device is likely going to be part of Apple’s HomeKit. We get a smart thermostat that actually reacts, an important small step forward.
There are several issues to consider, though. As Nest’s thermostat proved, when you start offering up smarter choices, people question them. Nest can help save money, and thousands of happy users will attest to that. It also over steps bounds we’re not comfortable with. Programming itself, the Nest thermostat absconds with our sense of control; it automates, which is scary to some maybe most). Helpful, sure, but a step too far for many home owners.
Honeywell, leaning on their brand recognition and current spot in most homes, will attempt to bridge a gap. They, among others, want to give us the connected home we need — one we control, but also extend the leash on as desired. The Honeywell thermostat, for instance, can be automated to turn off and on via geofencing. It doesn’t monitor us creepily, it just helps if we want it to. Their algorithm also promises to comfort us in a distinct way, appreciating environmental factors that may not make 68 degrees feel like 68 degrees.
Nest is our future, that much is nearly affirmed. Some day, we’ll have a home that learns in a very unique way, and can offer up intrinsic suggestions based on things we’re not even aware of. The digital butler will tend to our whims, and anticipate our needs appropriately. Until that smart home is ready, we’d be smart to throttle back a touch and accept the baby steps that will get us there.
5 Things Ppc May Be Telling You About Your Business (Without You Realizing!)
Below are 5 things which PPC data can tell you about your business:
1) Impact of Branding ExercisesIn my last post here at Search Engine Journal, I covered some points on how to effectively run an AdWords display campaign. In this post, I mentioned that even if you had the best display campaign setup possible, this traffic is still a lot less likely to convert versus search traffic and sometimes should be considered more as a branding exercise. Search can help you measure the impact of branding exercises with a surprising degree of accuracy.
By running a brand-specific search campaign, you’ll be able to quickly analyze daily search trends and determine whether particular brand marketing campaigns have resulted in an uplift in your brand searches on Google.
2) Website and/or Landing Page PerformancePaid search is a great way of identifying website issues, as the traffic you’re sending to the site via PPC should primarily be people that are extremely interested in your product/service.
Because of this, if you can’t convert PPC traffic, then you’re going to have a very hard time converting traffic from other marketing channels.
3) Insight into Your USPs (“Unique Selling Propositions” or Points of Difference)Your USP can be any feature of your business that makes you stand out from your competitors. Many online website owners will use USPs as a way of adding additional value to customers as an incentive to choose to deal with their business instead of a competitor, but the question is, what kind of USP will your audience respond to best? Well, you can use your PPC campaign to find out!
After this quick test has been completed, you’ll then have valuable information that can be used to dictate what content you highlight on your website, as well as other marketing campaigns. (More on optimising adwords ad text here, if you’re not familiar with the basics.)
4) Insight into Your Audience’s Language BehaviorYou can use this data to gain insight into the most commonly used language and terminology by people who are looking for information on your product and/or services. Mimicking commonly used language and terminology onto your website could increase your website’s relevancy for users, and this can only be a good thing for your conversion rate!
5) Popularity of Certain ProductsIf you’re running an online store, chances are you’ve got hundreds or even thousands of different products listed on your site. One of the major causes of profit loss when it comes to running either a physical or online store is spending money on products that simply do not sell.
A great way of determining the popularly of your products is by running product-specific keywords within your PPC campaign, and then monitoring their search volume. This information can help you when determining appropriate stock volumes needed for each product.
As you can see, there are many ways in which PPC data can help you learn a lot about your business—and knowledge is power!
Israeli Ambassador Says Time May Be Right For Peace
Israeli Ambassador Says Time May Be Right for Peace Speaking at LAW, Dan Gillerman calls for brave leaders
Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations.
It has been nearly 60 years since the United Nations partitioned what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, which led to the creation of Israel and engendered a bloody conflict between that state and many of its neighbors, including the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, is optimistic that a unique opportunity for peace may now be within reach.
“I believe we have an opportunity that we did not have before to finally bring some solace and some peace to the very tough neighborhood that we live in,” said Gillerman, speaking yesterday to an audience of about 100 at Boston University’s School of Law.
Ironically, Gillerman noted, this opportunity may have sprung from the recent increase in turmoil across the region — from battles between the Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian militants to the daily sectarian killings in Iraq to last summer’s bloody and inconclusive war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which killed 119 Israeli soldiers and hundreds of Lebanese civilians.
“I think the terror we witness every day and that very bitter war we experienced last summer may have laid the groundwork,” said Gillerman. “We are seeing many moderate Muslim states finally realizing that it’s time to put an end to the violence of Islamic extremism. I believe there are far more moderates and that most Muslims want to live in peace.”
Gillerman’s visit was the second event in a two-part series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, organized by the International Students Consortium (ISC). Two weeks ago, Afif Safieh, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s ambassador to Washington, D.C., also spoke at LAW and called for a two-state solution.
“Our coexistence is unavoidable,” Safieh told his BU audience. “Our two societies are burdened, or plagued, or blessed, with too much theology and too little geography.”
Yesterday, Gillerman echoed that basic sentiment, but added his opinion that “the real problem in the region is the terror and the extremism which does not stem from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is today a real, bitter fight between the moderates and the extremists.”
He repeatedly contrasted moderate Muslim leaders with the rulers of Iran, a country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Gillerman labeled “a lunatic.”
Gillerman became Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. in 2003 after a long career as a businessman and leading economic thinker. He was the first Israeli representative to successfully introduce a resolution to the U.N. General Assembly when in 2005 that body voted unanimously to designate January 27 as Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year he was elected vice president of the General Assembly.
At the BU event, Gillerman was introduced by Bilal Bilici (CAS’07), ISC president, University Provost David Campbell, and Charles Dunbar, a professor of international relations in the College of Arts and Sciences and a former ambassador to Qatar and Yemen. According to Dunbar, part of what has kept Israel and the Palestinians from achieving peace is that it is “less painful” for their leaders “to live in the difficult situation that now prevails than it is to take the steps that could be taken to break that stalemate and bring about a peaceful settlement.”
Dunbar also placed some blame on the United States. “The Bush administration has been less active [in the peace process] throughout its time in office,” he said. “As a result, the peace effort has languished.”
Gillerman also called for more help from the international community to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians. In addition to the rise of moderate Arab leadership, he said, the world must create “a vast plan of injecting money, incentives, and projects into the Middle East, and especially the Palestinian world, to use the economy and business as an engine to create confidence-building measures and to prove to both sides that peace has its dividends.”
After Gillerman’s talk, about 20 audience members approached a microphone to ask about issues ranging from the media portrayals of the conflict to the willingness of the Israeli government to remove Jewish settlements on disputed land that Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War.
Several of the students, who had attended last month’s talk by the PLO ambassador, came away persuaded that both men truly want peace.
“Both ambassadors were extremely optimistic,” said Ghenwa Hakim (CAS’08), vice president of BU’s Arab Student Association. “It’s reassuring to hear that optimism from both sides.”
“Both sides emphasized dialogue and how leadership is important,” added Adina Vogel (CAS’09), president of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Alliance.
And Gillerman himself ended his address with a call for “brave leaders” who could bring the two sides together.
“I believe that if the Palestinian people produce such a leader,” he said, “if they produce someone who is willing to rein in the terror and recognize Israel, that he will find in the Israeli leadership a partner who will go very far with him to assure that those two peoples, bleeding and wounded and tired, will be able to live in peace.”
Chris Berdik can be reached at [email protected]. Nicole Laskowski can be reached at [email protected].
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New Zealand May Be The First Country To Carbon Price Cow Farts
Right now, there are 68 carbon pricing initiatives implemented around the world, according to the World Bank. Carbon pricing schemes apply a financial cost to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to try and shift the burden of environmental impact to those responsible for it and who are in a position to reduce it. The goal is to bring down GHG emissions by taxing the carbon content of fossil fuels and creating a supply and demand for emissions allowances.
However, New Zealand is taking carbon pricing to a whole new ballpark—the ranch.
Last week, the New Zealand government announced its plans to impose a farm-level levy on farmers for their livestock’s emissions—the first of its kind around the globe—to meet climate targets. Taxing animal agriculture, which contributes about 14.5 to 16.5 percent to global GHG emissions, can be important in transitioning to a low-emissions future.
Although the levy is far from being implemented, it’s essential to explore how feasible it is to impose and how it would affect farmers, animals, and food.
Reduce emissions from animal agriculture to meet climate goalsMethane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide are responsible for more than half of New Zealand’s gross emissions. Livestock supply chains generally emit these through four pathways: enteric fermentation or the digestive process of ruminants that produce methane as a byproduct, feed production, manure management, and energy consumption.
Livestock burps, urine, and manure are significant methane and nitrous oxide sources. These two greenhouse gasses are about 25 and 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere. Feed production is also a big factor because the expansion of feed crops and pastures into natural areas emits carbon dioxide. At the same time, the use of manure and nitrogen fertilizers results in nitrous oxide emissions.
The goal is to set this farm-level pricing system in motion by 2025 to incentivize farmers to minimize their emissions. The revenue will be invested back into the agriculture sector by funding research and technology that may reduce emissions further.
[Related: Putting cows on a seaweed diet helps curb their methane burps.]
“[Livestock emissions] are currently not priced in the market, and when we buy beef, the climate impacts and environmental costs to society are not reflected in the price,” says Greg Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. “The proposed tax on livestock in New Zealand is a mechanism to internalize that cost and avoid the further expenditures related to climate change impacts.”
There are various emissions reduction strategies that farmers can adopt across the livestock supply chain. For instance, increasing reproductive efficiency (like by reducing the interval between parities) may be beneficial because a more efficient animal retains more dietary nitrogen protein. Therefore there will be less nitrogen in their urine and manure. Improved fertility in dairy cattle can reduce methane emissions by 10 to 24 percent and nitrous oxide by 9 to 17 percent.
That said, enhancing productivity or efficiency must be carefully measured and controlled because it may harm animal health and welfare. More reproductive pressure can increase the metabolic demands associated with pregnancy, potentially resulting in a higher risk of metabolic diseases like clinical hypocalcemia and ketosis, reduced immune function, and reduced subsequent fertility.
Changing livestock’s diet—like adding fatty acids, seaweed, or maize and barley—may also reduce emissions from enteric fermentation. Regularly scraping manure and transporting it to an outside storage facility for pigs and cattle production systems can reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions by 55 and 41 percent, respectively.
“This program is positioning the agriculture industry in New Zealand to become leaders in reducing methane and carbon dioxide emissions from livestock production,” says Keoleian. “Certifications and labeling could be used to differentiate their farm products in the marketplace for green consumers willing to pay more for lower carbon footprint meat.”
Levy on farmers might not necessarily be the magic bullet to reducing emissionsAlthough the levy proposal aims to reduce GHG emissions, it isn’t as straightforward as it seems.
“There is no doubt the food system in general and ruminant production in particular needs to reduce its carbon footprint,” says Ermias Kebreab, director of the UC Davis World Food Center. “However, the burden needs to be shared by society and not just farmers that are already operating on small margins.”
Sam McIvor and Andrew Morrison, CEO, and Chairman of Beef + Lamb New Zealand, respectively, emailed farmers last week and said, “we will not accept a system that disproportionately puts our farmers and communities at risk.” The Federated Farmers of New Zealand also expressed disappointment with the government’s proposal.
There is potential for emission leakage if livestock production is displaced to areas with little regulation, says Kebreab. Emission leakage refers to the increase in emissions of a region with weaker environmental regulations due to another region’s strengthening of its environmental policies because the production just relocated to unregulated jurisdictions.
[Related: The inconvenient truth about Burger King’s ‘reduced methane’ Whopper.]
In addition, the policy might encourage some farmers towards less carbon-intensive livestock, such as pigs instead of beef cattle, which can pose a problem from an international perspective regarding beef supply, says Keoleian. “Setting the policy is complex because of how it could impact small versus large producers, trade implications, and how consumers respond, which ultimately drives production and livestock emissions,” he adds.
Regarding regulation, Kebreab prefers the ‘carrot’ over the ‘stick’ approach, which means rewarding positive behavior instead of having the threat of punishment. And research shows this might be a better strategy for newer policies. According to a 2023 Scientific Reports study, positive incentives or rewards are necessary to foster cooperation in collective action for the public good—like international climate change mitigation—while negative incentives like sanctions are more effective for maintaining cooperation after it has been initiated.
Kebreab believes it is a bit too early to implement such a levy on farmers today and suggests setting the goal low and ramping it up later as more technologies and emission reduction strategies become available or adopted by farmers.
For now, the proposal is currently going through a consultation process to get feedback and work through the transition assistance, levy setting, and sequestration. This farm-level emissions pricing system will likely take a while and a bit of refining before being implemented.
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