Nobel Laureate to Speak on Greenhouse Dangers

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WILLIAMSTOWN - Thomas C. Schelling, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics, will deliver the talk "What is the Greenhouse Danger, and Can We Manage It?" on Thursday, April 10, at 8 p.m.  

The event will be held in the '62 Center on the Williams College campus. The public is invited and the event is free.

The talk is the keynote address of a conference on "Global Warming and Developing Countries: Addressing and Coping with the Challenge," which will take place on Friday, April 11. The conference is open to the public. A schedule of events can be found here.

Schelling has been involved in the global warming debate since chairing a commission for President Carter in 1980. He is presently a participant in the Copenhagen Consensus, which analyzes the world's great challenges and establishes a framework in which solutions to problems are prioritized according to efficiency based upon economic and scientific analysis.


Schelling, who is Distinguished University Professor at the Maryland School of Public Affairs, was previously at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy. He has held positions in the White House and Executive Office of the President, Yale University, the RAND Corporation and the Department of Economics and Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

He has published on military strategy and arms control, energy and environmental policy, climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, organized crime, foreign aid and international trade, conflict and bargaining theory, racial segregation and integration, the military draft, health policy, tobacco and drugs policy, and ethical issues in public policy and in business.

The lecture and conference is being hosted by the Center for Development Economics, Center for Environmental Studies, and the department of geosciences, with the generous support of the Mellon and Luce Foundations.
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Williamstown Planning Board Narrowing in on Subdivision Bylaw Changes

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Planning Board late last month discussed specific features of what it plans to pass as a new subdivision control bylaw this year.
 
The board long has discussed the complex set of regulations as being out of date and cumbersome to both potential developers and the board itself, which has needed to hear requests for waivers of outdated rules for the handful of residential subdivisions that have been proposed in town in recent years.
 
This spring, the town engaged consultants from Northampton's Dodson and Flinker Landscape Architecture and Planning to go through the existing bylaw, compare it to more contemporary regulations in other communities and help craft a revised bylaw.
 
Unlike the zoning bylaw, where amendments require approval of town meeting, the subdivision control bylaw is a creation of the Planning Board, which can make changes on its own after a public hearing process it hopes to complete this year.
 
At a special Planning Board meeting on May 26, Dillon Sussman of Dodson and Flinker and his colleagues walked the board through a dozen different decision points that the board must resolve — either by leaving the bylaw as is or making a change — and offered suggestions based on best practices.
 
All of the issues are technical and ranged from the fundamental, like how the bylaw will define types of subdivisions, to the highly specific, like what turning radii will be required in new streets that are constructed to serve planned developments.
 
One example of a topic that came up in the recent approval of a four-home subdivision off Summer Street is stormwater management.
 
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