Year: 2013
Sunstein 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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CONTINUE READINGThe Case Against CEQA “Reform” — San Diego’s Lame Transportation Plan
The movement to “reform” the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a citizen-enforced law that requires public agencies to analyze environmental impacts of significant proposed projects, is gaining strength in 2013. Everyone from the Governor to the Senate President to business groups to public agencies are joining forces, singing the same anti-CEQA song. Their evidence that …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Change in the Second Inaugural
From the prepared text: We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Political Path to Federal Climate Legislation
For climate legislation to pass, U.S. politics will have to become more like California.
CONTINUE READINGAn Introduction to Environmental Economics
I’m a quirky teacher. I don’t use textbooks and I try to focus on real world examples. Here are 30 short videos about environmental economics. Here are all of my course materials for my Winter 2013 Environmental Economics undergraduate course at UCLA. I focus on incentives and empirical hypothesis testing.
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