Month: June 2009

Move Over, Summer of Love. It’s Time for Power Flower

We tend to think of renewable power as coming in two sizes: single home-sized photovoltaic arrays, or big, remotely-located power plants.  Thus, we pour incentive dollars on solar homes, and place a tremendous emphasis on building large new transmission lines.  Perhaps it is time to review this approach, and consider what we can do to …

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Climate bill up for a vote

Looks like the House leadership is taking its chances on a vote on Waxman-Markey’s climate bill today or tomorrow, despite some uncertainty about the outcome.   And not all environmentalists are hoping for a victory — in addition to worries about biofuel lifecycle emissions that Jonathan discussed earlier, there’s concern over the recent deal Waxman and Markey …

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The costs and benefits of coal

It was widely reported earlier this week that outspoken NASA climate scientist James Hansen and 30 others were arrested at a West Virginia coal operation where they were protesting mountaintop removal mining. The protesters were met  at the mine by several hundred counter-protesters, described by the Charleston Gazette as “miners and family members” defending their …

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New EPA air toxics report presents sobering assessment of cancer risk

A new U.S. EPA report released today presents a scary picture of our exposure to hazardous pollutants in our air.  The National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment for 2002, which analyzed health data based on chronic exposure to air toxics for 124 pollutants for which those data are available.  (The assessment’s name is potentially confusing; the report …

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Preble’s mouse jumps back into the courtroom

Five environmental groups — NRDC, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Native Ecosystems, and Biodiversity Conservation Alliance — have filed a lawsuit challenging FWS’s decision last year to list the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse (pictured) as threatened only in Colorado, leaving it off the protected list in Wyoming. FWS justified that distinction …

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Is Waxman-Markey Even Worth It?

If Michael O’Hare is right about this, then Waxman-Markey might not be worth the candle: Waxman appears to have sold out the indirect land use issue in a deal with Peterson on the climate change bill: “Waxman also consented to block EPA from calculating “indirect” greenhouse gas emissions from land-use changes when implementing the federal …

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An Invitation to Review the Supreme Court’s Environmental Record

This has been a blockbuster year in the U.S. Supreme Court for environmental law and policy. In the Term that concludes this month, the justices have decided five major environmental cases, involving many of the nation’s most important environmental laws. Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE), one of the sponsors of …

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Fisheries governance and sustainability

An interesting new paper by a group at Dalhousie University compares several key aspects of fisheries management with a measure of the probability that fisheries are sustainable. The authors conclude that “policy transparency” is more strongly related to sustainability than scientific robustness,  implementation capability, or the extent of subsidies, overcapacity, and foreign fishing. The measure …

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Clean Water Restoration Act clears committee

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has voted 12-7 to send the Clean Water Restoration Act, S 787, to the full chamber. The bill would reverse the limitations imposed on the scope of the Clean Water Act by the Supreme Court in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army …

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Waxman-Markey May Lower Household Costs

In another report issued today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency counters the predictions of some critics of climate change legislation by concluding that the  Waxman-Markey bill would not lead to higher energy costs for consumers.  In fact, the EPA concludes that household energy costs actually may go down.  In one scenario, each household on average …

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