Month: January 2013
Can Anyone Stop the Filibuster?
The DC Circuit’s outrageous opinion on Friday essentially banning recess appointments has brought further chaos to the Age of Dysfunction. Now, President Obama will confront potentially dozens of new filibusters without recourse; it didn’t help that less than 24 hours beforehand, the Senate scotched the efforts at meaningful filibuster reform. So what to do now? …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia cap-and-trade offsets challenge rejected
Breaking: California has successfully weathered (at least in the lower court) another challenge to its cap-and-trade program. A state court has affirmed ARB’s significant discretion to design offsets protocols that rely on standardized additionality mechanisms, denying a petition that had sought to invalidate those protocols. Argus has the first story on this that I’ve seen. …
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CONTINUE READINGA Case of Intellectual Bankruptcy
It pains me to say this about a fellow alum of my high school, but George Will has apparently reached the point of intellectual insolvency. A case in point: his recent Washington Post op. ed. about climate change. Will begins by setting up a straw man. He slams climate advocates like Obama for supposedly basing …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Rise of the Low Carbon Consumer City
Matthew Holian and I have just released a new NBER Working Paper. The “big idea” is that similar to a REESE’S Peanut Butter Cup we merge together two separate economics literatures. Glaeser and I have written about low carbon cities in the United States and China. Glaeser has published on “consumer cities” and …
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CONTINUE READINGSunstein on Climate Change
Should the U.S. take action on climate change prior to a global treaty? Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein argued against unilteral action in a well-known paper. The argument received more extensive discussion in a book by Eric Posner and David Weisbach (with Sunstein dropping out because of government service). I’ve argued (see this paper) that …
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CONTINUE READINGWe Interrupt This Blog…
…and outsource it to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns, and Money, who sets forth succinctly the meaning of Neoconfederate David Sentelle’s DC Circuit opinion today regarding recess appointments. Specifically, this controversy concerned recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, and the right-wing Republican panel struck them all down, which I am sure is completely …
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CONTINUE READINGNapoleon Bonaparte, Zoning Administrator
This semester, I am teaching Land Use, and in the casebook I came across this evocative and meaningful quote from Tony Arnold: The real law of land use regulation exists mostly in zoning codes and regulatory procedures, as well as in the actions or decisions of local land use regulatory bodies. Consider all the zoning, …
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CONTINUE READINGCall for Cabinet Nominations!
With all the heat generated by the nominations for the Secretaries of State and Defense, it is easy to overlook that President Obama must make nominations for four agencies critical to environmental policy: EPA, Interior, Energy, and USTR. And it says something that there do not seem to be obvious, strong candidates that environmentalists can …
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CONTINUE READINGBicameral Congressional Task Force on Climate Change Formed Today
In the days that have followed the President’s strong statement on climate change in his second inaugural, many have speculated about what role Congress will play, if any, in moving forward on this issue. (See Greenwire’s story here, for example, covering the question and writing about signs from WH press secretary Jay Carney that the President “will pursue both …
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CONTINUE READINGCan We Make a Deal on Keystone XL?
Well, no, we probably can’t. But President Obama might be well advised to try. Republicans are currently trying to force the White House into approving the pipeline. Nebraska’s Governor recently flip-flopped and supported Keystone, saying now that he trusts TransCanada to do the necessary environmental work to protect the state’s econoloigcally sensitive Sandhill region. In …
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