Bringing ecological economics into the regulatory process: the Manitoba experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 2002, ENGOs Time to Respect Earth's Ecosystems (TREE) and Resource Conservation Manitoba (RCM) have intervened half a dozen times before Manitoba's Clean Environment Commission (CEC) in an environmental assessment) and Public Utilities Board (PUB) (in rate hearings) in reviews of Manitoba's crown electricity and gas utilities and public insurance corporation. We offer this case study of our 2005 Centra Gas rate intervention to illustrate the potential to apply ecological economics to the regulatory process. Our aim was to promote the application of principles of sustainability and social justice in the strategic planning, economic analysis, rates and DSM programming of this crown gas utility. To define sustainability, we invoked principles of Stewardship (intergenerational equity), Global Responsibility (economic, ecological and social interdependence) and Efficient Use of Resources (proper resource pricing, demand management, resource allocation, incentives and full-cost accounting) found in Manitoba's Sustainable Development Act (SDA). In addition, a socially just energy system must provide a limited amount of energy to meet basic needs. To introduce the concept of full-cost accounting, The Pembina Institute provided a limited and provisional life cycle costing of externalities (GHG impacts and alternative land use opportunity costs) and resource depletion associated with the provision and consumption of natural gas in Manitoba. The most conservative of Pembina's values ($1.36/GJ) plus estimates of avoided transmission and distribution costs ($0.50/GJ) and 'pecuniary benefits' from conservation ($0.64/GJ) yielded an increment of $2.50/GJ to be added to the conventional embedded costs of gas supply to calculate a Marginal Value of Gas to Consumers (MVGC). The MVGC then: (1) becomes the marginal tailblock cost of gas in an inverted rate structure, (2) sets a threshold value for cost-effective conservation and fuel switching programmes and (3) underlies a self-funding feebate proposal for new gas service connections in which a connection charge is rebated for buildings meeting higher efficiency standards. The energy needs of the poor are addressed by implementing the targeted conservation measures and rate relief programmes (in addition to general DSM measures) characteristic of many jurisdictions in the US. Interventions like this are a practical way to shift energy policies, but they also point to issues in economic analysis and politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".