Current Events

1.   What action has Exxon taken to promote a carbon tax? Now, ExxonMobil has announced it’s endorsing the CLC proposal and is putting up $1 million to lobby for it. 2.  How does this article define a carbon tax? a per-ton tax on the carbon dioxide emissions embedded in fuels or other products. 3.  What would be the predicted impact of a $50 per ton carbon tax? The $50 tax served as the central case. 4.  How expensive would the tax need to be to reduce emissions by 80%? The tax would ultimately cover more than 80 percent of the economy’s total greenhouse gas emissions. 5.  Which industry would be most impacted by the implementation of a carbon tax? that modelers get a little more adventurous in this respect. Of all the reasons to make a carbon tax revenue-neutral, “difficulty modeling anything else” is among the worst. 6. How would the carbon tax impact the transportation industry? Those sectors are somewhat more amenable to price-driven carbon r...

1. What is the last that anyone knows about journalist Jamal Khashoggi? The 59-year-old veteran journalist was last seen on October 2 walking into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. He was there to obtain a document verifying his divorce so that he could marry his Turkish fiancée. 2. What does Turkey say happened?  What does Saudi Arabia say happened? Turkish officials have said they have “concrete” evidence that Khashoggi never left the building and was murdered there; some have even put forth gruesome theories of how his body may have been dismembered and smuggled out. The Saudi government, however, says it had nothing to do with his disappearance and maintains that he left through a back entrance, though it has provided no evidence to support that. 3. Why would the Saudi Arabian government have motive to murder him? “We think the Saudi authorities need to provide a credible account with evidence and testimonies to explain what happened to him,” Mansour said. “We have far mo...

1. What is the earliest that Brett Kavanaugh could join the Supreme Court if he is approved by the Senate? Brett Kavanaugh won’t join them for another week at the earliest. 2. What does the Supreme Court do without a 9th justice? And if it looks likely that there won’t be a nine-justice court until after the first week of November, the justices will probably keep declining to schedule the cases that they know they’ll want nine votes on. (This is what the Court did after Scalia’s death, too.) 3. What is the potential problem with having only 8 justices? But even a 4-4 split isn’t the end of the world; it just means that the lower court’s ruling stays in effect. That can be frustrating when there are conflicting rulings from different lower courts, but it’s generally survivable — and there’s nothing stopping the Court from taking a similar case up once there are nine justices to resolve the same question. 4. How many cases are already scheduled to be heard by the Court? T...