Politics

Believing in Climate Change

For many years, I didn’t really believe in climate change.  Not in the sense of skeptics or deniers.  It’s not like I didn’t intellectually understand the science behind climate change, and didn’t understand in my head that greenhouse gases were contributing to significant alterations in global climate systems, and that those alterations have the potential …

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On the risks of CEQA exemptions

In the course of a very good post about the benefits of environmental review statutes such as CEQA, Jonathan ascribed to me the position that “policymakers should [not] continue to look for useful exemptions to CEQA” based on a prior post that I had written opposing recent (now enacted) legislation creating limited exemptions from CEQA …

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One reason for anti-EPA riders

There’s been a lot of (appropriate) outrage over the efforts in the past year and a half by House Republicans to gut environmental protections through the use of appropriations riders.  Those efforts might well continue in the next appropriations cycle, especially since bashing the EPA is apparently a popular election-year activity for Republicans.  One of …

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Is EPA regulation of carbon dioxide anti-democratic?

There’s been a lot of noise from House Republicans (and others) about how EPA regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act is somehow an end-run around Congress or anti-democratic.  But it is neither.

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Primary Colors with a Green Overtone

Frederick Anderson, a leading Washington lawyer who works on energy and environment issues, has written a novel about the current primary campaign.  It features a candidate who starts thinking for himself, with predictably negative political effects.  Gary Hart, who knows a thing or two about how a primary campaign can go wrong, calls it a  …

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More on “Distrust”

I posted a few days ago about declining public trust in societal institutions (including the courts, the presidency, big business, the military, the church, etc.)  By coincidence, Nate Silver has a post today that touches on the same subject.  He reports that Democrats tend to have more trust institutions these days than Republicans.  Moreover, Republican …

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More on California Environmental Leader & Coastal Advocate Peter Douglas

Legal Planet colleague Jonathan Zasloff has previously written about the recently-announced retirement of long-time California Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas.  I’d like to add a few additional comments about Peter, my long-time mentor, client and friend. Peter Douglas has devoted the past four decades of his incredibly rich and active life to the cause of …

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U.S. House of Representatives v. Modern Science

Nature, one of the two leading scientific journals in the world, has a strongly worded editorial about the recent House hearings on climate change: At a subcommittee hearing on 14 March, anger and distrust were directed at scientists and respected scientific societies. Misinformation was presented as fact, truth was twisted and nobody showed any inclination …

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Obama’s 80% “Clean” Energy Goal: Ambitious or Inevitable?

In a recent post on Grist, Keith Schneider found President Obama’s 80% “clean” energy goal rather incredible: Arguably the central provision of President Obama’s State of the Union address last night was the proposal to generate 80 percent of the nation’s electricity from clean energy sources by 2035 — including nuclear energy and “carbon capture and …

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Whose Nature? God, the GOP, and Everyone Else

Some Americans say they don’t believe in climate change because they believe in God – or, more exactly, because of what they believe about God.  A few weeks ago, the New York Times quoted some Indiana Tea Party activists who explained that, because the world was created for human use and benefit, using its mineral …

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