California’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) has released its proposed regulations governing hydraulic fracturing pursuant to Senate Bill 4, controversial legislation signed into law this September. DOGGR’s November 15 public notice begins its formal rulemaking process and marks the start of a 60-day public comment period for the new rules. DOGGR also […]
Last week on Legal Planet, Dan Farber posted about the surprising regulatory inattention paid to food safety, using as example the latest chicken salmonella outbreaks in the U.S. (see “Playing Chicken with Food Safety,” 10/20/13). This post picks up from there, to mention that while the recent incidents highlight the chicken-salmonella problem, they don’t quite […]
Voters in swing states would prefer that EPA rather than Congress decide on U.S. climate policy. According to a poll commissioned by the League of Conservation Voters, ”The voters are much more inclined to trust the Environmental Protection Agency than they are to trust members of Congress” — by a 66-12 margin. Here are my reactions […]
The UCLA Law Review is holding a symposium next Friday, November 1 – Toward a Clean Energy Future: Powering Innovation Through Law. Leading scholars from around the country will be at UCLA School of Law for the day to discuss innovative energy technologies, international energy issues, the challenge of new energy technology diffusion, and the […]
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court’s famously ruled in Massachusetts v. USEPA that petitioners in that case had standing to sue the Environmental Protection Agency in federal court to challenge EPA’s failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Observers then could have been forgiven for thinking that this ruling flung open […]
On Sunday, the start of the heating season in northern China brought the “airpocalypse” back with a vengeance (although some might say it never left). Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province and home to 11 million people, registered fine particulate (PM2.5) pollution levels beyond 500 on the Chinese Air Quality Index, which is considered hazardous […]
Food safety is something of a step-child of U.S. regulation. The public obviously cares about it, but it lacks the kind of attention from advocacy groups that the environment gets. The results have not been pretty. Food safety is divided between the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (for […]
A recent study shows that rats find oreos addictive — they like eating them just as much as they like cocaine. And they definitely preferred them to healthier foods like rice cakes. People seem to have the same difficulty in resisting junk food as rats. What’s to be done? A recent paper by RAND researchers suggests that relatively modest […]
In follow up to my early morning post of this morning, here are a couple of additional points. 1) A related but different argument petitioners are making about why the PSD provisions don’t apply to the regulation of greenhouse gases is that the application of the provisions would lead to absurd results. The absurd results […]
This morning, the Supreme Court announced that it has granted six of the nine petitions challenging the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The Court granted cert on only a single question (petitioners had raised a number of them): Whether EPA […]
