Throughout history, technological development and economic growth has led to greater prosperity and overall standard of living for many people in society. However, along with the benefits of economic development comes the social responsibility of minimizing the mortality and morbidity health...

Gasoline and diesel fuel are heavily taxed in many developed and some emerging and developing countries. Outside of the United States and Europe, however, there has been little attempt to quantify the external costs of vehicle use, so policymakers lack guidance on whether prevailing tax rates...

Fiscal instruments are potentially among the most effective, and cost-effective, options for addressing externalities related to poor air quality, urban road congestion, and greenhouse gases. This paper takes a case study, focused on Mauritius (a pioneer in the use of green taxes) to illustrate...

This paper summarises the results of the assessment of health and environmental impacts, and the corresponding external costs within the China Energy Technology Program (CETP). China faces an enormous challenge, as it needs to meet the growing demand for energy in general and electricity in...

By exploiting exogenous variation in air quality during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, we estimate the effect of air pollution on mortality in China. We find that a 10-μg/m^3 (roughly 10%) decrease in PM_10 concentrations reduces monthly standardized all-cause mortality by 6.63%. The...

For 40 years or more, air quality policy has been based on the paradigm of the air quality standard as a uniform criterion of acceptable environmental degradation, built on the foundations of the precautionary principle. However, developments in health science have undermined some of the...

The objectives of this study were to assess potential health and productivity benefits for the year 2010 with five scenarios for reducing particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) air pollution in the cities of Osaka, Houston, Bangkok and Seoul. Assuming a uniform 10% decline in ambient PM levels, the...

The identification and characterization of particulate matter (PM) concentrations from construction site activities pose major challenges due to the diverse characteristics related to different aspects, such as concentration, particle size and particle composition. Moreover, the characterization...

Atmospheric air quality modeling relies in part on numerical simulation. Required numerical simulations are often hampered by lack of computer capacity and computational speed. This problem is most severe in the field of global modeling where transport and exchange of trace constituents are...

Photovoltaic (PV) applications, gaining worldwide interest during the last years, comprise a promising renewable energy based solution, able to considerably contribute to the constantly increasing energy demand of our planet. Currently, residential applications possess a considerable share of...