governance

Should There Be a ‘Non-Use’ Agreement on Solar Geoengineering?

Volcanic eruption (Sarychev Peak)

Why I signed the call for a non-use agreement, and what that might mean for research.

Although I’m a newbie at the Emmett Institute, I have been working on geoengineering for a decade now. I have heard countless arguments over whether and how solar geoengineering could be useful in the struggle to manage climate change. I have seen deeply misleading claims by both its supporters and detractors, many trying to coopt …

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UCLA Law Faculty Weigh In on Solar Geoengineering Experiment at Harvard

How to engage the public when everyone on Earth is a stakeholder?

  It’s been a surprisingly busy year for solar geoengineering research. In late December, Congress appropriated $4 million to NOAA to study the influence of atmospheric aerosols on climate, with an eye on assessing “solar climate interventions.” In March, Australian scientists ran a trial of a cloud-seeding technology on the Great Barrier Reef that may …

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China’s Pollution Challenge

Can a new law save China’s environment?

Benjamin van Rooij and I published the following in the New York Times op-ed page today.  In short, it is about the challenges the new Environmental Protection Law will face in practice and the critical reforms needed to overcome these challenges: China’s national legislature has adopted sweeping changes to the country’s Environmental Protection Law, revisions …

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Overall impressions of COP/MOP: World Governance for the Climate-as-Artifact

By Jed Ela, UCLA Law delegation — part of a series of posts on COP 15 from Copenhagen: Deep in the bowels of COP15, in a temporary, metal-walled conference room nestled like a shipping container into a vast temporary hangar housing national delegation offices, a presenter from Google is apologizing. The Google team has lured …

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Breathless in Bombay Redux: Corruption and Environmental Law

As I mentioned a few days ago, Bombay has 55,000 taxicabs that all run on CNG.  (And as I updated, the municipal buses do, too — something else that India does better than the United States.). But Bombay’s taxis present India-watchers and scholars with something of a problem: if you believe the standard story about India, …

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