Dear UNFCCC, Subnational Governments are Key to Protecting Forests
GCF Task Force and Regions4 Submit Comments to COP30 Roadmap on Halting and Reversing Deforestation and Forest Degradation by 2030
Two of the world’s largest subnational governmental networks – the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF Task Force, a project of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law), and Regions4 – submitted a comment letter today providing input to the Roadmap on Halting and Reversing Deforestation and Forest Degradation by 2030. This Roadmap, one of the key results of the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the Unite...
CONTINUE READINGThe Path to Abundance, Part II
Reducing legal and procedural obstacles to development is a necessary, but probably not sufficient, solution
This is the second post in a series of six posts. The first post is here. As I explained in my prior post, the United States (and indeed other countries) has not produced the level of infrastructure for housing or energy required to address housing demand, demand for energy to advance economic development, the needed transition to climate change, or historical inequalities in housing. What diagnosis does the abundance movement have to address those challenges? ...
CONTINUE READINGThe War and the Energy Transition
The Iran War it is hitting energy markets hard. Will that affect the energy transition?
The Iran War has been a big shock to the global energy system. It's natural to wonder what the long term will bring. Will it lead to an orgy of oil and gas drilling, or will it speed up the energy transition? There are enormous uncertainties, and making confident predictions would be a clear mistake. In this post, I'll try to unpack some of the issues and offer a semi-educated guess about the answers. My best guess, for whatever it's worth, is that the war will ha...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Issues in the 2026 Governor’s Race: Housing and Climate
Fifth in a series of posts outlining key challenges and opportunities facing California’s next governor.
(This climate issue brief is authored by CLEE’s partners at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation.) California faces complex and integrated challenges of unaffordable housing and climate change. Failure to build adequate housing supply has resulted in high prices that have pushed home buyers and renters to locations that are further from jobs, schools, and services. This results in compounding climate risks - increased emissions from driving, conversion of natu...
CONTINUE READINGThe Path to Abundance, Part I
Exploring the legal, policy, and political challenges for the abundance movement.
The abundance movement is having a moment. Abundance policy reformers call for legal and policy reforms to advance more housing, energy, and other infrastructure. Abundance advocacy has motivated a Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement that has pushed for major changes to local land-use regulation to build more housing in states across the country. One of the most popular non-fiction books in 2025 was titled “Abundance,” authored by two journalists who have led t...
CONTINUE READINGChallenging Hegseth’s National Security Gambit
Hegseth may not have as much power as he thinks to run roughshod over the Endangered Species Act.
In my Monday post, I raised the possibility that the Administration would invoke national security to allow oil companies to push whales, sea turtles, and other species in the Gulf of Mexico toward extinction. That would involve using an obscure provision of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), that’s never been used before. I really hoped I was wrong, but you can usually count on the Trump Administration to pick the most environmentally destructive option. That's wha...
CONTINUE READINGPolicy Implications of Accelerating Warming
If warming is coming more quickly, we need to pick up the pace on policy responses.
There seems to be an emerging scientific consensus that the rate of global warming is rising. After screening out the effects of natural factors like El Niño, scientists have concluded that the pace of warming has roughly doubled since the 1970s. What does this tell us about policy? Some of the implications are more obvious than others, and at least one implication may be unsettling for some climate advocates. We’re unlikely to obtain complete success with any o...
CONTINUE READINGThe Environment is a System, Not an Array.
In 1969, Barry Commoner summed up much of environmental science in six words. Today’s conservatives don’t get it.
People have an intuitive tendency to focus on an action’s immediate direct effects. The same intuition leads us to downplay effects that are indirect, long-range, and cumulative. This can lead us astray, as it has the Supreme Court, when dealing with impacts on environmental systems. Writing at the outset of the modern environmental world, biologist Barry Commoner tried to crystalize what was known about the environment into four crisply phrased laws. The first law...
CONTINUE READINGHonoring Dolores Huerta
Huerta has received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and four honorary degrees--so why is her name rarely mentioned without Chávez’s?
Content Warning: Sexual Assault. Over the next week, as we draw nearer to California’s first “Farmworkers Day,” we’re undoubtedly going to see Dolores Huerta’s name in the news a lot. But unfortunately, I fear that the focus will be more about the recent New York Times investigation revealing that César Chávez sexually abused numerous women and girls—including Huerta, Ana Murguia, and Debra Rojas—for years during the height of the Far...
CONTINUE READINGHarming Species
The impact of repealing the ESA Section 9 prohibition on habitat destruction will be large for many endangered species.
As I posted last year, the Trump Administration is proposing to repeal an Endangered Species Act (ESA) regulation that limits destruction of habitat for listed species. Specifically, the proposal is to repeal the definition of “harm” in the regulations. That regulatory definition includes some forms of habitat destruction within the meaning of harm. And “harm” is in turn included in the statute within the definition of “take” which is prohibited under S...
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