9 results
Europeanisation of Renewable Energy Support Law: A Suspended Step Towards Harmonisation
- Edited by Bernard Vanheusden, Theodoros Iliopoulos, Anna Vanhellemont
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- Book:
- Harmonisation in EU Environmental and Energy Law
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 26 May 2022
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- 21 January 2022, pp 237-254
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
In ancient Greek mythology, the goddess Harmonia (Ἁρμονί α), who personifies harmony, was the daughter of Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love. Extending the interpretation and the symbolism of the myth to the field of law, one could see harmonisation, that is, the action of bringing harmony between different legal systems, as denoting the reconciliation outcome of a process of dispute and cooperation, of discordance and understanding. In the end, harmonisation reconciles ‘the preoccupations and the interests of the various systems so as to avoid conflicts and clashes’.
Of course, such processes do not always end up with the desired result. In many cases, conflicts between different parties cannot be bridged, and harmonisation plans collapse or simply fade over time. This seems to have been the case with the plan for supranational harmonisation of renewable energy support law and of support schemes for renewable energy sources (hereinafter ‘RESSS’), which are instruments that Member States enact in order to promote renewable energy sources. But the recent enactment of the recast Renewable Energy Directive 2018/2001, often cited as ‘RED II’, might change the picture.
Since the mid- and late-1990s, when the first seeds of supranational harmonisation of renewable energy support law were planted, there has been little progress. The two first generations of secondary renewable energy law in 2001 and 2009 did not bring about any harmonisation, as it proved impossible for Member States and the Commission to reach an understanding. In response, in 2013 the Commission resorted to the term ‘Europeanisation of support for renewables’ and asked for more convergence in the field. But more recently, in December 2018, Directive 2018/2001 brought about certain interesting developments. The directive set down an EU collective target of a 32 per cent share of energy from renewable sources to be reached by 2030. This target is only binding for the EU as a whole; it is not converted into national targets, as was the case under the previous directive.
Finding the Spearhead of the EU Low-Carbon Energy Transition
- Edited by Marlon Boeve, Sanne Akerboom, Chris Backes, Marleen van Rijswick
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- Book:
- Environmental Law for Transitions to Sustainability
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 11 November 2021
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- 06 April 2021, pp 129-146
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
Since the mid-2000s, and especially since the early 2010s, the terms ‘low-carbon economy’ , ‘low-carbon energy transition’ and ‘decarbonisation’ have appeared in quite a few Commission policy documents and have encapsulated the direction of EU energy and climate change policy. Most recently, the new supranational strategy that was presented in December 2019 in the Communication ‘the European Green Deal’ emphasised the need for a ‘clean energy transition’ , which involves decarbonisation and an increased share of renewable energy sources, more energy efficiency and energy security, as well as the rise of a fully integrated, interconnected and digitalised European energy market. In addition, given that the energy sector produces the most emissions in the European Union, with the production and use of energy accounting for more than 75 per cent of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions, energy reforms are crucial in the struggle to tackle the climate change threat. Therefore, the promotion of renewable energy sources, in serving the low carbon energy transition policy objective, is a part of the overall transition to a sustainable future.
In November 2016 the EU put forward the Clean Energy Package, with the aim to bring a comprehensive update in its energy policy framework so that the low-carbon energy transition could be facilitated. The Clean Energy Package in essence constituted a set of eight legislative initiatives, which became legal acts in 2018 and 2019. One of these legal acts is the new Renewable Energy Directive 2018/2001, also known as the ‘RED II’ , which establishes a common framework for the promotion of energy from renewable sources. This chapter focuses on the RED II and especially on the rules therein relating to the support schemes for renewable energy sources ( ‘Renewable Energy Support Schemes’ (RESSs)); RESSs are defined in Article 2(5) of the RED II as instruments, schemes or mechanisms that Member States enact in order to promote the use of renewable energy sources.
Attention is called to the question to what extent the provisions on the RESS design also identify the main actors that are expected to deliver the desirable outcome, i.e. the increase in the use of renewable energy sources.
The Jurisprudential Configuration of the “Polluter Pays” Principle: A Critical Assessment
- Edited by Barbara Pozzo, Valentina Jacometti
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- Book:
- Environmental Loss and Damage in a Comparative Law Perspective
- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 26 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 13 January 2021, pp 53-70
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
Almost 15 years after the enactment of the Environmental Liability Directive (ELD), quite a few lacunae in the established Union liability regime have been highlighted. One can observe significant discrepancies among national environmental liability frameworks that implement the ELD, which to a large extent can be attributed to a certain confusion about how the ELD applies, as well as about the meaning of the concepts and the scope of the exceptions.
Within this context, an important issue that remains unsettled is the potential extension of liability beyond the operators of the activity that brought about the pollution and the environmental damage. More specifically, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has recently dealt with the question whether national legislation that holds the owners of contaminated sites liable for the pollution that occupational operators caused while using their land can be in accordance with the ELD.
This problem has its roots in the fact that the ELD is explicitly based on the “polluter pays” principle (PPP). In this regard, it is controversial to decide whether, and for the sake of a more stringent system of environmental protection, Member States are allowed to extend liability beyond the apparent polluters so as to cover more actors. Of course, as might be expected, the problem is exacerbated if the actual polluters are untraceable or insolvent.
Accordingly, this chapter examines whether national environmental liability regimes that extend liability are in conformity with the PPP, as enshrined in the ELD.
In dealing with this topic, this chapter adopts a jurisprudence-based approach. The case law of the CJEU is examined so as to elucidate the notion of the PPP in the field of environmental liability. The emphasis is placed on a triad of relatively recent CJEU cases that deal with the PPP and the extension of environmental liability. This triad consists of the landmark case ERG, the Fipa case, and the most recent case, TTK. Particular attention is called to the judgment in TTK, which raises significant issues, but is still not as thoroughly scrutinised by scientific legal literature.
In terms of structure, section 2 presents the PPP as an economics principle that is translated into EU law. Section 3 presents the core content of the PPP, as clarified by landmark CJEU cases.
Pre-operative neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio predicts low cardiac output in children after cardiac surgery
- Ilias Iliopoulos, Matthew N. Alder, David S. Cooper, Enrique G. Villarreal, Rohit Loomba, Rashmi D. Sahay, Lin Fei, Paul E. Steele, Saul Flores
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- Journal:
- Cardiology in the Young / Volume 30 / Issue 4 / April 2020
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 March 2020, pp. 521-525
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Neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio has been associated with clinical outcomes in several groups of cardiac patients, including patients with coronary artery disease, cardiac failure, and cardiac transplant recipients. We hypothesised that pre- and/or post-operative haematological cell counts are associated with clinical outcomes in children undergoing cardiac surgery for CHD. We performed a post hoc analysis of data collected as part of a prospective observational cohort study (n = 83, data available n = 47) of children evaluated for glucocorticoid receptor levels after cardiac surgery (July 2015–January 2016). The association of neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio with low cardiac output syndrome, time to inotrope free, and vasoactive-inotropic score was examined using proportional odds analysis, cox regression, and linear regression models, respectively. A majority (80%) of patients were infants (median/interquartile range 4.1/0.2–7.6 months) with conotruncal (36%) and left-sided obstructed lesions (28%). Two patients required mechanical circulatory support and three died. Higher pre-operative neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio was associated with higher cumulative odds of severe/moderate versus mild low cardiac output on post-operative day 1 (odds ratio 2.86; 95% confidence interval 1.18–6.93; p = 0.02). Pre-operative neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio was not significantly associated with time to inotrope free or vasoactive-inotrope score. Post-operative neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio was also not associated with outcomes. In children after congenital heart surgery, higher pre-operative neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio was associated with a higher chance of low cardiac output in the early post-operative period. Pre-operative neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio maybe a useful prognostic marker in children undergoing congenital heart surgery.
5 - Text redundancies
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- By G. Badkobeh, King's College London, M. Crochemore, King's College London, C. S. Iliopoulos, King's College London, M. Kubica, University of Warsaw ul
- Edited by Valérie Berthé, Université de Paris VII (Denis Diderot), Michel Rigo, Université de Liège, Belgium
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- Book:
- Combinatorics, Words and Symbolic Dynamics
- Published online:
- 05 January 2016
- Print publication:
- 26 February 2016, pp 151-174
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Summary
Redundancy: a versatile notion
The notion of redundancies in texts, regarded as sequences of symbols, appear under various concepts in the literature of combinatorics on words and of algorithms on strings: repetitions, repeats, runs, covers, seeds and palindromes, for example. Fundamental elements along these concepts are spread in books by Lothaire (1997, 2002, 2005). This has been also illustrated in Chapter 4.
Squares and cubes (concatenations of 2 or 3 copies of the same non-empty word) are instances of repetitions whose exponent is at least 2 and have been studied for more than a century after the seminal work of Thue (1906b) who described infinite words containing none of them.
Repeats refer to less repetitive segments in text, that is, those segments having a rational exponent smaller than 2 (but larger than 1). The frontier between repetitions and repeats is indeed rather blurred in literature. The famous conjecture of Dejean (1972) refers mainly to repeats and provides the repetitive threshold of each alphabet size: it is the minimum of maximal exponents of factors occurring in infinite words drawn from the alphabet (also see Section 4.3). After several partial results, including the result of Dejean on the 3-letter alphabet, the conjecture has eventually been solved recently see (Carpi, 2007), (Rao, 2011) and (Currie and Rampersad, 2011). Also see Section 4.3.
Further works show that maximal-exponent repeats or repetitions occurring in infinite words complying with the threshold can also have a bounded length (Shallit, 2004). Their minimal number is known for alphabets of size 2 and 3 (Badkobeh, 2011; Badkobeh and Crochemore, 2010), introducing the notion of finite-repetition threshold attached to each alphabet size. The latter threshold is proved to be Dejean's threshold for larger alphabet sizes and the minimum number of Dejean's factors is studied in (Badkobeh et al., 2014).
The design of methods for computing all the occurrences of repetitions in a word has lead to several optimal algorithms by Crochemore (1981), by Apostolico and Preparata (1983) and by Main and Lorentz (1984), all running in O(nlogn) time on a word of length n. They have been extended to algorithms producing certain types of repetitions with rational exponent by Main (1989), or a unique occurrence for each repetition by Gusfield and Stoye (2004). These latter variants run in O(nloga) time on an alphabet of size a.
Mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy and risk of gastrointestinal complications in infants undergoing surgery for congenital heart disease*
- Ilias Iliopoulos, Ricardo G. Branco, Nadine Brinkhuis, Anke Furck, Joan LaRovere, David S. Cooper, Nazima Pathan
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- Journal:
- Cardiology in the Young / Volume 26 / Issue 4 / April 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 07 September 2015, pp. 772-780
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We hypothesised that lower mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy values would be associated with a greater incidence of gastrointestinal complications in children weighing <10 kg who were recovering from cardiac surgery. We evaluated mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy, central venous oxygen saturation, and arterial blood gases for 48 hours post-operatively. Enteral feeding intake, gastrointestinal complications, and markers of organ dysfunction were monitored for 7 days. A total of 50 children, with median age of 16.7 (3.2–31.6) weeks, were studied. On admission, the average mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy value was 71±18%, and the systemic oxygen saturation was 93±7.5%. Lower admission mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy correlated with longer time to establish enteral feeds (r=−0.58, p<0.01) and shorter duration of feeds at 7 days (r=0.48, p<0.01). Children with gastrointestinal complications had significantly lower admission mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy (58±18% versus 73±17%, p=0.01) and higher mesenteric arteriovenous difference of oxygen at admission [39 (23–47) % versus 19 (4–27) %, p=0.02]. Based on multiple logistic regression, admission mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy was independently associated with gastrointestinal complications (Odds ratio, 0.95; 95% confidence interval, 0.93–0.97; p=0.03). Admission mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy showed an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.76 to identify children who developed gastrointestinal complications, with a suggested cut-off value of 72% (78% sensitivity, 68% specificity). In this pilot study, we conclude that admission mesenteric near-infrared spectroscopy is associated with gastrointestinal complications and enteral feeding tolerance in children after cardiac surgery.
Depositional environments, sediment characteristics, palaeoecological analysis and environmental assessment of an internationally protected shallow Mediterranean lagoon, Gialova Lagoon – Navarino Bay, Greece
- P. Avramidis, G. Iliopoulos, N. Kontopoulos, D. Panagiotaras, P. Barouchas, K. Nikolaou, P. Papadopoulou
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- Journal:
- Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh / Volume 105 / Issue 3 / September 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 25 May 2015, pp. 189-206
- Print publication:
- September 2014
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This study presents sedimentological, palaeoecological and geochemical data from a shallow Mediterranean coastal lagoon which has been severely influenced by human intervention over the last 70 years. The Gialova Lagoon is protected by international conventions and is listed in the Natura 2000 European Community Network as Special Protection Area (SPA) and Site of Community Importance (SCI). The spatial variability of sediment characteristics such as grain size, total organic carbon (TOC) and moment measures, mean, sorting, kurtosis and skewness were calculated. Moreover, micro- and macrofossil and sediment geochemical analyses were carried out on six gravity core samples. Study of the above parameters indicates that the anthropogenic impact and intervention are reflected in the micro- (ostracods, foraminifera, charophytes) and macrofossil (molluscs) taxa corresponding to different depositional environmental facies, representing a brackish lagoon with the influence of (a) fresh water inflow, (b) shallow marine environment and (c) hypoxic and dystrophic conditions. The geochemical characteristics and the calculation of the degree of sediment contamination using enrichment factors (EF), contamination factors (Cif) and the index of geo-accumulation (Igeo) indicate a recent relative improvement of the lagoon towards the upper layers of the gravity cores, rendering the lagoon as unpolluted to moderately polluted. This combinatorial study of sediment geochemical characteristics, as well as the downcore micro- and macrofossil assemblages, can be considered as a baseline for future monitoring in accordance with European Union directives, and for any future engineering interventions for the lagoon environmental maintenance and conservation; as this is the first time that geochemical and downcore palaeoecological data have been presented from this lagoon.
GREECE
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- By Julia Iliopoulos-Strangas, University of Athens, Stylianos-Ioannis G. Koutnatzis, Universität Berlin
- Allan R. Brewer-Carías, Universidad Central de Venezuela
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- Book:
- Constitutional Courts as Positive Legislators
- Published online:
- 04 August 2017
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- 19 September 2011, pp 539-574
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Summary
In international comparison, Greek courts recognized the judicial power to review the constitutionality of legislation very early on the basis of constitutional supremacy. However, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, Greek courts generally deferred to the political branches of government, and in practice, they have rarely challenged legislative or executive acts on constitutional grounds. Situated between the American and the European models, constitutional adjudication in Greece eludes neat definition in terms of both the system of review and its concrete application by the courts. Following an overview on the system of judicial review in Greek constitutional law (see section I), this report examines its concrete application. It focuses on the development of the interplay between judicial self-restraint and judicial activism, in addition to positive legislation through judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation and its limits (see section II).
THE SYSTEM OF JUDICIAL REVIEW
Judicial Organization
The Greek judicial system is divided into functionally different subsystems, each with its own high court. The courts are divided into administrative, civil, and criminal courts (Art. 93 § 1 Const.). The Areios Pagos Court (Áρειος Πάγος) sits at the apex of all civil and criminal courts; the Council of State (∑υμβούλιο της Επικρατείας), modeled on the French Conseil d'État, functions primarily as the supreme administrative court (Art. 95 Const.). The Constitution also provides for a third high court, the Court of Audit (Ελεγκτικό ∑υνέδριο), to which no lower courts correspond, and which has comparatively limited judicial responsibilities.
14 - Contracting and Organization in Food and Agriculture
- Edited by Éric Brousseau, Université de Paris X, Jean-Michel Glachant, Université de Paris XII
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- Book:
- New Institutional Economics
- Published online:
- 06 July 2010
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- 04 September 2008, pp 292-304
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Summary
Introduction
The food and agriculture sector offers many opportunities to apply concepts from the new institutional economics (NIE). Indeed, some of the earliest modern studies on economic organization focussed on agricultural contracting such as cropsharing (Stiglitz 1974), land tenancy arrangements (Roumasset and Uy 1980; Alston and Higgs 1982; Alston, Datta, and Nugent 1984; Datta, O'Hara, and Nugent 1986), marketing cooperatives (Hendrikse and Bijman 2002), and markets for commodities like honey (Cheung 1973) and fresh fish (Wilson 1980; Acheson 1985). Food and agriculture contracting are particularly interesting because of their unique characteristics. First, agricultural commodities are produced according to biological production functions, meaning that their production schedules are often “fixed” by nature. Combined with the seasonal nature of production, this typically leads to high levels of uncertainty and physical, site, and temporal asset specificity. Second, because agricultural commodities are often highly perishable, monopolistic and monopsonistic market structures are common. Third, agriculture operates in a unique political and regulatory environment, with substantial effect on ownership patterns and economic incentives. Agriculture is often viewed by policy makers as a “special” sector, not only because food is a basic human need but also because the independent farmer – often in a highly romanticized caricature – is usually viewed as an essential element of a nation's character.
Operating in this unique institutional environment, food and agricultural producers have adopted a number of specialized institutional arrangements to increase productivity, improve quality and variety, and protect relationship-specific investments, among other objectives.