Month: April 2014

Quantifying Environmental Justice (& Injustice) in California–An Update

California Improves an Already-Powerful Environmental Justice Analytical Tool

A year ago, I wrote about an important environmental justice initiative pioneered by the California Environmental Protection Agency and its subsidiary entity, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. That 2013 initiative, titled CalEnviroScreen, divided up the State of California by zip code, applied 11 environmental health and pollution factors, assessed each of the state’s …

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Richard Lazarus Formally Notified the Supreme Court of Scalia’s Error

Letter Led to Change in Dissenting Opinion

Who knew that the U.S. Supreme Court has a formal process for notifying it about errors in Court opinions? Richard Lazarus, the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard and Supreme Court expert extraordinaire, that’s who.  Turns out that after he discovered Justice Scalia’s error about Whitman v. American Trucking (see my earlier post of …

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Dan Farber Highlights Scalia Error in Homer Dissent, Dissent Gets Corrected

Legal Planet post noted error yesterday

Yesterday Dan pointed out that Justice Scalia had made a “cringeworthy” error in his dissenting opinion in EPA v. Homer.  Scalia argued — in support of his claim that EPA’s interpretation of the provision of the Clean Air Act that governs cross-state air pollution was inconsistent with the plain language of the statute — that EPA …

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Ending Corporate Welfare for Oil

“There Will Be Blood” was the title of 2007 movie about an old-time oilman. If you were doing a similar movie about the situation today, you might call it, “There Will Be Tax Write-Offs.” The taxpayers have been generous to the industry. Oil companies get about $5 billion per year in favored tax treatment.  Mostly, …

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More About EPA’s Victory

The Court sensibly upheld EPA’s method of allocating responsibility between states, while Scalia wrote an unusually sloppy dissent.

As Ann has just written the Supreme Court’s decision today in the EME Homer case was a big victory for EPA and for air pollution control.  In an opinion by Justice Ginsburg, the Court upheld EPA’s interstate transport rule.  Ann focused on the potential implications of the decision for the other big environmental case pending before …

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Breaking News: Supreme Court’s Decision Upholding Cross-State Air Rule Is Good Sign for Greenhouse Gas Rules

Huge victory for EPA in regulating air pollution that crosses state lines

The Supreme Court’s 6-2 decision issued this morning in EPA v. EME Homer, upholding the agency’s rule to control air pollution that crosses state boundaries, gives plenty of reason for optimism that the Court will also uphold EPA’s greenhouse gas rules at issue in a different case, Utility Air Regulator Group v. EPA.   Both cases …

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Renewable Energy and Political Geography

The Washington Post had a story over the weekend about the concerted campaign by the fossil fuel industry to rollback state laws favoring renewable energy.  This effort was also the subject of an editorial in the Sunday Times. So far, this effort hasn’t gained real legislative traction.  The story attributes this failure to the growth …

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What Steve Jobs Could Teach Us About Land Use and Transit Planning

Lessons for making urban spaces great from the celebrated entrepreneur

Steve Jobs died in 2011, but his life experience, as related by biographer Walter Isaacson, offers some important lessons for today’s transit and urban development practitioners. I just finished reading the biography and was struck — like many others — by what a notoriously awful person he was to those around him. Part of the …

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Celebrate Earth Day By Destroying The Planet!

Is It Possible To Have A Holiday Without Going Shopping?

The first e-mail in my inbox this morning was from a regional pharmacy chain, advertising “Great Earth Day Savings!” That seemed to me to be a little ironic: celebrate by the planet by consuming as much as you can! It isn’t alone. Just Google “Earth Day Shopping” and you’ll get hundreds of hits.  Now, obviously, …

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George Kennan and the Environment: With Friends Like These…

One Cannot Divorce His Environmentalism From His Racism

Last year, I read John Lewis Gaddis’ magisterial biography of George F. Kennan, one of the prime architects of American Cold War policy and a distinguished foreign policy intellectual. I was surprised — and not a little pleased — to learn from that book that Kennan was something of a pioneering environmentalist, thinking about these issues …

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