A nice editorial from the Los Angeles Times about the proposed carbon tax being offered by some Republicans under the front group Americans for Carbon Dividends, most notably former Secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz. Exxon-Mobil is even throwing $1 million into the effort — chump change for such a corporate behemoth. The Times […]
I’ve posted earlier about proposals by the Trump Administration to make significant changes to the regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act, some of the most substantial revisions to those regulations since they were overhauled in the early 1980s. A group of environmental law professors (including me) submitted comments on those proposed rules last month, with […]
Although I am in the midst of a series of blog posts (1, 2, 3) regarding novel technologies in the recent special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I take a brief detour to report on a court ruling in the Netherlands regarding climate change. Although I am skeptical of its impact […]
Not for nothing was Brett Kavanaugh referred to as “Voldemort” by Center for Biological Diversity counsel Bill Snape: he is quite hostile to environmental regulation and will freely rewrite statutes to constrict EPA authority. But now environmentalists have a new ace up their sleeves: The price of beer could rise sharply this century, and it […]
1968 was an especially tumultuous year in modern American history. The nation endured the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; then-President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection due to growing public dissatisfaction with the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War; and protests and riots consumed Chicago, Detroit, Washington, […]
In its desperate effort to save the failing American coal industry, the Trump Administration promised to use emergency powers to keep coal-fired power plants in operation even though they’re not economically viable. That would have been the kind of disruptive change that Trump promised to bring to Washington. But the effort seems to have gone […]
Brian Leiter at Chicago is again doing one of his occasional series identifying the top cited legal scholars in a range of substantive areas. One of the lists he did covered public law scholars including environmental law– however, his list includes a number of top administrative law scholars who do not focus on environmental and […]
In my previous posts on the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I described how models assume the use of uncertain negative emissions technologies at very large — if not impossible — scales in order to keep global warming within 1.5 or two degrees Celsius (1, 2; see also my colleague Julia […]
There are a surprising number of governor’s seats in play in this election, with many ranked as toss-ups. After looking at ratings by different experts, I’ve picked four elections as especially interesting. As you’ll see, there were major differences between candidates in these raceson environmental and energy issues. Besides showing yet again why elections matter– […]
Some of our readers may be interested in what is happening in environmental and energy legal scholarship. So I thought I’d post again (I also did this in 2016) about the Land Use & Environment Law Review, which is Thomson Reuters/West Publishing’s peer-selected annual compendium of significant legal scholarship in land use and environmental law. […]
The first (and probably only) debate in the California governor’s race happened earlier this week between Democratic nominee Gavin Newsom and Republican nominee John Cox. Appropriately enough both candidates were asked how they were going to address the state’s housing crisis. Newsom’s response was an ambitious target of 500,000 new homes/year through 2025 (far higher […]
