Some of the most important data on the state of the environment, and how it may be changing, are supplied by satellites, which have the enormous advantage of near-global coverage. They supply some of the most important data used in quantifying environmental change. What sort of measurements do satellites make, and how are we able to obtain meaningful, quantitative information about the atmosphere, or the Earth’s surface, from a sensor more than 500 km above? One key to this question is found in the previous chapter. There we saw that molecules have discrete absorption lines/bands. With a suitable space-based instrument we can observe these, using either thermal emission or absorption. The details of these processes may depend on temperature, so this information may also be inferred. By contrast, aerosol particles (mainly) scatter light, with relatively little wavelength variation: this presents a different challenge.

This chapter addresses the relationship between entrepreneurs and “common prosperity.” It argues four points both theoretically and empirically: (1) profit is a responsibility system under which everyone earns income only when he or she creates value for others; (2) entrepreneurs are the primary driver of wealth creation; (3) ordinary people are the biggest beneficiaries of the market economy and entrepreneurs; and (4) because the function of the entrepreneurship itself cannot be inherited, income distribution in the market is highly mobile and, “wealth cannot survive more than three generations” is the iron law of the market economy!

Chapter 12 concludes the book and ties its different strands together. It explains why, and when, lawfare came to be seen by leading RPF cadres as a functional equivalent to warfare. The chapter further explains why Rwanda’s present resembles its past to a remarkable degree. More specifically, the analysis demonstrates that the government of threat and care in the twenty-first century was informed by a raison d’état that has driven the imposition of grand institutional designs ever since the precolony. What this concluding chapter offers is a path-dependent argument about the rise of lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda. As such, it illustrate the analytic payoff of taking the study of the country’s gacaca courts out of the context of transitional justice.

Energy intersects with the environment at every stage of its life cycle. The energy supply chain can have adverse effects on nature and public health, including GHG emissions, air, land and water pollution as well the generation of harmful waste, among others. In order to reduce our dependence on high-carbon energy, more needs to be done to increase renewable energy generation and improve energy efficiency. As energy is involved in trade and investment projects, it is covered by the trade and investment branches of international economic law and regulated in these fields mainly by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), regional trade agreements (RTAs) and international investment agreements (IIAs). This book aims to contribute to the existing scholarship by providing a comprehensive analysis of the energy–environment nexus under trade law and investment law, showing, where relevant, their similarities, differences or even (potential) conflicts at the energy–environment interface. It examines the legal foundations of the energy–environment nexus and associated issues regarding trade control, subsidies, technical standards, investment protection and technology policies.

Virtually all of the energy at the surface of the Earth comes to us from the Sun. This is the energy that, in combination with the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, maintains our current surface temperature in the range where liquid water is present. In this chapter we will examine solar radiant energy, and its most important interactions with the various constituents of the Earth’s atmosphere. Most of it reaches the lower troposphere, some to be absorbed by water vapour, and some to be scattered by clouds, molecules, or aerosols. The rest (roughly half) reaches the ground. Human activity has the power to alter these inflows, in a number of ways. We devote one section to the potentially disastrous Nuclear Winter scenario, and another to the potentially useful idea, known as Geoengineering, of reflecting some of the incoming sunlight in order to re-balance the Earth’s energy budget.

Medical devices increasingly include software components, which facilitate remote patient monitoring. The introduction of software into previously analog medical devices, as well as innovation in software-driven devices, may introduce new safety concerns – all the more so when such devices are used in patients’ homes, well outside of traditional health care delivery settings. We review four key mechanisms for the post-market surveillance of medical devices in the United States: (1) Post-market trials and registries; (2) manufacturing plant inspections; (3) adverse event reporting; and (4) recalls. We use comprehensive regulatory data documenting adverse events and recalls to describe trends in the post-market safety of medical devices, based on the presence or absence of software. Overall, devices with software are associated with more reported adverse events (i.e. individual injuries and deaths) and more high-severity recalls, compared to devices without software. However, in subgroup analyses of individual medical specialties, we consistently observe differences in recall probability but do not consistently detect differences in adverse events. These results suggest that adverse events are a noisy signal of post-market safety and not necessarily a reliable predictor of subsequent recalls. As patients and health care providers weigh the benefits of new remote monitoring technologies against potential safety issues, they should not assume that safety concerns will be readily identifiable through existing post-market surveillance mechanisms. Both health care providers and developers of remote patient monitoring technologies should therefore consider how they might proactively ensure that newly introduced remote patient monitoring technologies work safely and as intended.

Over the past century or so, and especially since the end of World War II, our climate has been changing at an unprecedented rate. Human activity has been changing the composition of our atmosphere, and has also been responsible for significant changes to the land surface. And we have seen that the Earth’s surface temperature has risen by around 1°C. Are these changes connected? There are two steps in answering this question. The first is to quantitatively connect the changes just mentioned with any changes in the radiant energy fluxes into and out of the Earth–atmosphere system: the fluxes which ultimately govern our climate. This is the thrust of this chapter. The second of these steps, determining the response of the Earth System to any flux changes, requires a ‘full-scale’ 3D model of the system: that will be the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially embedded mechanisms and processes by which elites of the Rwandan Patriotic Front maneuvered to create modified arrangements of things past, these chapters excavate the microfoundations of the authoritarian rule of law in Rwanda. This chapter traces the obscure beginnings of the idea of gacaca in pre-genocide Rwanda, then accounts for the modernization of this social imaginary in the late 1990s.

Aerosols, and rising levels of certain aerosol types, are now recognized as important players in our environment, including climate change. Aerosol, or ‘particulate matter’ (PM), is the collective name for small particles and droplet solutions, with sizes ranging from ~1 nm to ~20 μm, suspended in the air. Aerosols vary enormously, in many ways, and in this respect, they differ radically from gases. In Section 4.7 we will look at their optical properties (i.e. their ability to scatter and absorb radiation) and the effects these may have on the energy flows that are central to climate. Aerosol particles are also the seeds of all cloud droplets, as will be discussed in Chapter 6, and so are a key component of the hydrological cycle. Finally, aerosols may be a pollution issue, and are a central component of air quality standards. For interested readers, we close with a section on aerosol research.