Month: June 2011

Environmental Law and “The Law of the Horse”

“The Law of the Horse” is the title of the (perhaps apocryphal) treatise on the same subject.  The point of the reference is that “there’s no there there,” as Gertrude Stein might have said: the law of the horse would simply be a compendium of contract cases that happened to involve horses, tort cases that …

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Poor grades on Delta progress

Delta Vision Foundation, the non-profit formed to continue the work of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Delta Vision Task Force, has released its second annual report card on Delta progress. (Legal Planeteer Rick Frank is a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors.) If you had to bring this one home to your parents, you’d likely be grounded …

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Good news for Hawaiian wetland birds

Regular readers know that we try to report good news when we can.  This positive report caught my eye because I recently returned from an extended stay in the islands, where I had the opportunity to see these beautiful birds. Conservation magazine reports on a recent study showing that populations of three endangered Hawaiian wetland …

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Court allows California to continue developing cap and trade program pending appeal

This just in: Late today, a California appellate court granted the State’s request to stay (in other words, lift), pending appeal, the injunction issued by the lower court in Ass’n of Irritated Residents vs. CARB, the environmental justice community challenge to California’s work so far under its Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32).  Absent any …

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Sea-Level Rise Rockets Ahead Due to Climate Change

Here’s a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: An international research team has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and has shown a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature …

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Brown Administration’s View of Renewable Energy in California by 2020

Governor Brown entered office in January with an ambitious agenda for renewable energy, calling for 20,000 megawatts from renewable sources by 2020, including 12,000 of localized or distributed generation and 8,000 from large-scale development. So how will this vision become a reality? UCLA and Berkeley Law gathered key leaders in California to discuss this issue …

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How the Financial Crisis Destroyed Standing Doctrine

Environmental scholars are very familiar — perhaps too familiar — with how the constitutionalization of standing doctrine has restricted the ability of environmental groups to challenge agency actions.  I’ve recently read several books about the financial crisis, and it’s occurred to me that Wall Street innovation may have made traditional standing doctrine a dead letter. My …

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Supreme Court Grants Review in Montana Rivers/Public Trust Case

Understandably, today most U.S. Supreme Court mavens focused their attention on several new opinions  the Court issued in key cases–including the major climate change decision (in American Electric Power v. Connecticut) about which Dan, Jonathan and I all blogged earlier today.  Not to be overlooked, however, is the fact that today the Court also granted …

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YouTube persuasion

Why do some messages persuade, and others don’t?   What is good science messaging?  How can we reach new audiences about the importance of sustainable resource management? If you’re interested in these questions, you might like this video on overfishing, created by a couple of UCLA undergrads as extra credit for a class in oceanography.  I …

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Conn. v. AEP: Never Underestimate Congressional Power to Do Damage

Dan’s and Rick’s posts very helpfully summarize the impacts of the Court’s decision today.  (They were also probably written at the same time: great minds think alike).  But I’m a little more pessimistic than Dan is concerning Congressional action.  He suggests that the decision makes it more complex for Congress to repeal EPA jurisdiction since …

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