Year: 2012
I’m Too Sexy for this Chimp
Growing up, I had always heard of Jane Goodall, knew that she had something to do with primate research, and that she was famous. So when my second-grader came home from school and announced that she had chosen to do a presentation about Goodall, I thought it would be a nice opportunity for me to …
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CONTINUE READINGA New Report on the Governor’s Local Renewable Energy Initiative
Last July, I reported on a conference convened at UCLA by California Governor Jerry Brown to further his efforts to increase the amount of local renewable electric generation in California to 12,000 megawatts of installed capacity by the year 2020. Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment provided the substantive support for that event, …
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CONTINUE READINGOut With the Old, In With the New
A recent GAO report pulls together a lot of information about electricity generators, which shows how much of our air pollution problems are due to aging plants: Older electricity generating units—those that began operating in or before 1978—provided 45 percent of electricity from fossil fuel units in 2010 but produced a disproportionate share of emissions, …
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CONTINUE READINGA Brief Survey for U.S. Environmental Law Professors
At the AALS midyear meeting, as part of the Workshop on Torts, Environment, and Disaster, Bruce R. Huber, John Copeland Nagle, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Kalyani Robbins, Hari Osofsky and I will be co-presenting and co-moderating a session on “Generations of Environmental Law.” To help focus that discussion, we have prepared a brief survey for …
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CONTINUE READINGWho Took the “Think” Out of Think Tanks?
The American Enterprise Institute is an interesting organization, often shrilly ideological but also scholarly from time to time. I was curious to find out what kind of research they were doing on climate change. I did find some interesting policy papers on their webpage on the topic of climate policy. But here’s the surprising part: …
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CONTINUE READINGNinth Circuit corrects itself on gold mining and the ESA
Cross-posted at CPRBlog. The en banc 9th Circuit issued its opinion Friday in Karuk Tribe v. US Forest Service. This opinion brings a welcome reversal of a panel opinion from last April which had ruled in a split decision that the Forest Service did not have to consult with the wildlife agencies before authorizing suction …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Protection and Conservative Values
Tom Friedman had an interesting column yeserday about conservatism and the environment. As he points out, the current wave of anti-environmentalism is out of line with Republican traditions: “Teddy Roosevelt bequeathed us national parks, Richard Nixon the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, Ronald Reagan the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer …
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CONTINUE READINGRent-seeking and property rights in environmental law
Jonathan Adler is guest-posting over at the Atlantic on conservative approaches to environmental law. In general, I can only support someone who is valiantly trying to make arguments about why conservatives should support efforts to address climate change, and developing climate change policies that are consistent with conservative and libertarian principles. But I want to …
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CONTINUE READING“The Devil’s Excrement”
That was the phrase used in 1975 by OPEC co-founder and Venezuelan Oil Minister Juan Perez Alfonso to describe crude oil: Perez predicted that it would bring wealth, but also ruin. Fortunately for the rest of us, the Organization of American Historians has devoted the most recent issue of the Journal of American History to pursue its …
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CONTINUE READINGIs Environmentalism Bad for Fighting Climate Change?
Sure, it sounds like a paradox. The environmental movement has done a lot of good for the planet and for pollution. But in the face of the greatest environmental threat of our time, the movement may be fundamentally ill-suited to tackle the climate crisis. For most of its history, environmentalism has essentially been about stopping …
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