A Year After the LA Fires, Who’s Accountable for a Resilient Recovery?
Altadena and the Palisades are moving forward but outcomes depend on survivors’ access to resources. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Last week, on a warm December evening in Los Angeles, my husband and I were tidying our backyard after hosting a holiday lunch when our street’s palm trees began listing in a strong wind. I felt a chill run down my spine then, the same chill I felt the next day when I smelled smoke in the air while picking my child up from an after-school playdate at a friend’s home in the hills above Brentwood Village. In my bones I felt transported back to that terrible week in Jan...
CONTINUE READINGEveryday Christmas: The Gift of the Commons
Clean air. Clean water. We receive these public goods every day without payment
One of the Christmas classics is the Jimmy Stewart movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey, Stewart's character, is despondent about his life until he learns how much he has unknowingly helped others and how grateful they are. It's heartwarming, if also a bit corny. There’s a flip side to that story: the need to remember how much others have contributed to our own lives. That includes people we don’t know who have helped give us a better planet on which t...
CONTINUE READINGCan Anyone Stop The Kennedy Center Abomination?
The answer may surprise you!!
A friend wrote to me on Friday, asking: isn’t Trump’s "renaming" of the Kennedy Center obviously illegal?” I couldn’t help responding: "what is this ‘illegal’ of which you speak?” Trump has broken so many laws with impunity, and been given a pass by a MAGAt Supreme Court and a supine Congress that such questions do seem quaint. For the record, the renaming is clearly illegal. 20 U.S.C. Section 76(h) reads in relevant part: There is established...
CONTINUE READINGGames Deregulators Play
Here are the six moves the Trump EPA consistently uses to justify deregulation.
Every deregulation is different, of course, but there are stock arguments that seem to surface again and again. There's a litany of legal arguments (citing Loper Bright, the Major Questions Doctrine, etc.) But there is also a menagerie of dubious policy arguments. The policy analysis also tends to be very slipshod and cursory, but that's a topic for a different time. Here are the half dozen policy arguments that the Administration favors the most. SOWING DOUB...
CONTINUE READINGOne Big Energy Idea for the Next Governor
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
If the candidates running to be California’s next governor want a prepackaged idea for how to reduce pollution while making energy more affordable in 2026, here’s one that has been hiding in plain sight. Make a modernization plan to direct money for electrification that is currently being diverted unnecessarily into aging gas infrastructure. But don’t take my word for it, read my UCLA colleagues who just last week put out a detailed report called “Go Big...
CONTINUE READINGNEPA Reform and Transmission
Reducing NEPA compliance alone won’t solve our transmission problems, and it might be a bad deal for the climate
The recent passage of the SPEED Act highlights one angle in current permitting reform debates: A focus on NEPA, which as a procedural statute might be more feasible to reform than other substantive statutes. Advocates for the SPEED Act have argued that it will help with a range of infrastructure projects, including transmission. But a key question is what do changes to NEPA alone get us in terms of clean energy infrastructure, versus other kinds of infrastructure project...
CONTINUE READINGIt’s Not the Generation
Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating Project, April 29, 2013, Wikimedia Commons
Abandoning low cost renewable energy generation is not the solution to electricity affordability
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board should not be your first stop for unbiased opinion on the state of energy policy in California. Nevertheless, I could not stop myself from reading Wednesday’s Op-Ed, California’s Stranded Solar Assets, about the ongoing saga of the Ivanpah solar thermal project, a 386 MW power plant near the California/Nevada border that began operation in 2014. The Op-Ed contributes to an ongoing fiction from the Trump administration and other...
CONTINUE READINGEliminate the Imperial Irrigation District?
Not yet, but maybe soon: a new UCLA report shows how Big Ag water agencies are robbing the rest of the state blind
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied water in the West: In a new study, researchers analyzed wholesale prices charged by the federal government in California, Arizona and Nevada, and found that large agricultural water agencies pay only a fraction of what cities pay, if anything at all. They said these "dirt-cheap" prices cost taxpayers, add to the strains on scarce water, and discourage conservation—even as the Colorado River's depleted reservoir...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Must Go Big to Save Big
A new Emmett Institute report shows how California can shift existing infrastructure spending from gas to electric to make homes and energy more affordable.
By Guest Contributor Craig Segall. California can still build big things – and in a new report today, my Emmett Institute co-authors, Denise Grab and Brennon Mendez, and I call for policymakers to think big on our energy system too. The headline: Tens of billions of dollars, annually, are available to make our homes cleaner and more affordable to live in. But those dollars are locked up in our aging and dangerous natural gas delivery pipelines. A big vision to r...
CONTINUE READINGWhat’s So Special About NEPA?
Guest contributors Dinah Bear and Niel Lawrence argue that the National Environmental Policy Act process provides unique and wide-reaching benefits.
Attacks on our federal environmental charter, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, have escalated from seeking the statute’s truncation to its outright abolition. Increasingly bandied about is the claim that while all well and good when passed in 1969, NEPA is now superfluous because we have a whole series of other laws protecting specific resource and places. This ill-founded contention misses what is unique about NEPA and why we benefit from it, today ...
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