El Niño is Coming. Californians Still Need Better Tools to Recover from Disaster.
AB 2385 would have helped local governments prepare for disaster recovery, but the bill failed to make it out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Last week, AB 2385 (Petrie-Norris) died in the California Senate Appropriations Committee. Its demise is the latest frustration in the long saga to rebuild from the terrible January 2025 Los Angeles fires—and to apply some lessons learned about disaster recovery in the process. I’ve had a front row seat, as both an Angeleno and a co-leader of the UCLA research team that supported the Blue Ribbon Commission convened by County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath to offer rec...
CONTINUE READINGA Mile High Solution To Housing Affordability?
Want to expand the availability of deed-restricted affordable units? Build market-rate ones!
One of the most dispiriting debates in housing policy and land use concerns the relative merits of deed-restricted affordable versus market-rate housing. YIMBY advocates argue building more market-rate units will eventual filter down and expand affordability; many on the Left argue that market-rate housing reduces the availability of land for deed-restricted affordable units. Eunisses Hernandez ran a successful Los Angeles City Council campaign opposing all market-ra...
CONTINUE READINGThe Challenges of Wildfire
Why wildfire management is so difficult to reform
This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF. The draft article this blog post series is based is here. This is the second in a series of blog posts on our proposal to reform wildfire law in the United States. The first post is here. Why is fire such a hard problem to solve? Understanding the answers to that question helped us develop proposals to improve fire policy in the United States. First, fire is dynamic. Fire behavior is hard to pred...
CONTINUE READINGTroubled Waters
We’re seeing increasing signs of a malfunctioning US water system.
Water problems are popping up all over. Literally so, in at least one case. In the Permian basin, geysers of toxic wastewater are erupting. The water was pumped underground as part of the basin’s massive fracking operations. Fracking produces five or six barrels of wastewater for every barrel of oil. High pressure underground is pushing wastewater into oil and gas basins as well as threatening drinking water aquifers. That's starting to happen in Ohio, too, which has b...
CONTINUE READINGFixing Wildfire Law
The urgent challenge of reforming how we manage wildfire
This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF. The draft article this blog post series is based is here. Every year brings another reminder of why fire is at the top of environmental and natural resource issues for the United States, and how our legal system struggles to adjust to fire. The recent fires that destroyed hundreds of homes in Spokane, Washington are just the most recent example. The core problem is that fire does not just present a sing...
CONTINUE READINGNEPA and Remedies
Trying to solve the difficult challenge of reforming remedies for NEPA violations
Earlier this year, the Institute for Progress (a pro-permitting reform organization) published a series of proposals for changing remedies for agency violations of NEPA. There are good reasons to think about the problem. If any NEPA violation can stop an entire project, that can incentivize efforts to fly-speck environmental review documents to strategically stop projects – whether they are beneficial to the environment or not. While this approach can benefit opp...
CONTINUE READINGPaying More to Stay Cool, Super El Niño, Solar Politics
The Drain is a roundup of climate and environmental news from Legal Planet.
Every time I walk by my mailbox these days I dread receiving my electricity bill for this summer, because it’s been hellishly hot and I know our bill is going to be higher than usual. I try to tell myself the good news: After installing an energy-efficient heat pump this year, our home has been cooler — and safer. Sweltering in your house is not just uncomfortable; it makes you cranky, leads to poor sleep, and in extreme situations can kill you. Extreme heat i...
CONTINUE READINGDear 2026 1L
Today's entering law students are preparing to start careers at a critical time for the environment.
Dear Entering 1L: Welcome to law school. You’re beginning your life in the law at a critical time. What we do together between now and 2035 will determine what your lives look like in 2050 and 2080, and what your children and grandchildren will see in the next century. So, grab your books, get yourselves ready, and be prepared to head for the legal trenches when you graduate. No time to waste! The Current Situation It’s no secret that this is a dark time for peo...
CONTINUE READINGDon’t Mess With Solar
A new clean energy PAC has become a big player in GOP primaries. But what happens in November?
Congressmember Andy Ogles of Tennessee is a zit on the face of American politics: a white nationalist and Islamophobe who started out as a flunkie for the Koch Brothers and lied about his credentials when he first ran for Congress. Unsurprisingly, he is also a climate denier, (in)famously stating during a 2024 House debate on an Interior-Environment spending bill that "You know, we may have had a hot summer, but I just went trick or treating with my kids and it was like,...
CONTINUE READINGYou May Have Forgotten About Climate Change. But It Hasn’t Forgotten About You
Denial is a great coping mechanism. Until reality turns around and bites you.
Climate change is, apparently, passé. Democratic politicians are avoiding the topic and dialing back ambitious plans to reduce emissions. The President apparently doesn’t think it exists, and the government’s official position is that its effects are too uncertain to worry about. Amazon and other corporations had solemnly pledged to become carbon neutral. Now Amazon is about to open its own power plant for an AI data center, which will instantly become the l...
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