Year: 2018
Tribal Fishing/Environmental Justice Rights Prevail After Supreme Court Ruling
Justice Kennedy’s Recusal Proves Decisive in Preserving Tribes’ Legal Victory
Perhaps the most consequential environmental case of the rapidly-concluding U.S. Supreme Court Term ended this week with a whimper rather than a bang: in a curt one-sentence order, the Court ruled that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ earlier decision in Washington v. United States “is affirmed by an equally divided Court.” The justices split 4-to-4 on …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Puzzle of Capacity Markets
What are capacity markets and why do they matter?
If you live in the Midwest, East of the Mississippi and North of the Mason-Dixon line, or in Arkansas or Louisiana, the companies that generate your electricity are covered by what are called capacity markets. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. That’s actually part of the problem, because there’s very little transparency and hence little …
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CONTINUE READINGA Trumped-Up Bailout Plan
Legally deficient? Arbitrary? Disguised special interest favors? All par for the course in this Administration.
You couldn’t ask for a more typical example of the Trump Administration at work. Nuclear and coal plants are being closed across the country, unable to compete with cheap natural gas and increasingly cheap renewables. In a desperate effort to support the coal industry, Trump wants to force consumers to subsidize these plants. It’s not …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat Does Sports Gambling Have To Do With Environmental Law?
A Lot, Potentially, Following the Supreme Court’s Murphy v. NCAA Decision
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a major decision invalidating a federal statute that had prohibited states from allowing betting on competitive sporting events. Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, is one of those relatively rare Supreme Court decisions that directly affects a substantial portion of the American public. So it’s no great surprise that …
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CONTINUE READINGScenarios
We live in an uncertain world. Scenario planning can help.
When Shell Oil produced a sophisticated scenario of the path to a carbon neutral world in 2070, a lot people took notice. Shell concluded that the “relevant transformations in the energy and natural systems require concurrent climate policy action and the deployment of disruptive new technologies at mass scale within government policy environments that strongly …
CONTINUE READINGCARB Seeks to Maintain Stringency of California’s Vehicle Standards
Emmett Institute submits public comment in support of CARB’s efforts
Back in the halcyon days of 2012 when EPA, NHTSA, California, and the automakers crafted a grand bargain to adopt national vehicle emission standards, California agreed that compliance with vehicle emission standards adopted at the federal level would be “deemed to comply” with California’s standards. Now, as it becomes clear that the federal government intends …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat Trump Gives Appalachia With One Hand, He Takes Away with the Other
Ryan Zinke’s public land policies are accelerating the decline of eastern coal.
There is no one who Trump loves more than coal miners, and he has surrounded himself with Appalachian coal miners on important occasions. One of his most fervent pledges was to “end the war on coal.” Yet, Trump’s public lands policies are helping to accelerate the decline of eastern coal. A recent study by researchers …
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CONTINUE READINGFlood Safety, Infrastructure, and the Feds
Standards for levees, seawalls, and other infrastructure urgently need attention.
The federal government is responsible for responding to major floods and runs the federal flood insurance program. It also has millions of dollars of its own infrastructure at risk from floods. Yet the government is failing to deal effectively with flood risks before the fact. Let’s begin with the levees that are the main defense …
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CONTINUE READINGAttempting to Close the Floodgates of Litigation
Can Congress prevent state and federal courts from hearing WaterFix lawsuits?
The journey of California’s proposed delta tunnels project (also known as California WaterFix) has been anything but straightforward and already faces a slew of ongoing legal challenges.[i] Last week, Congress added a different kind of twist when the proposed Department of Interior budget for FY 2019 was introduced in the House Appropriations Committee. The relevant …
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CONTINUE READINGCRISPR Approaches to Environmental Problems
Breakthroughs in gene editing might open the door to improved environmental protections. Or maybe not.
CRISPR is a breakthrough gene editing method. (I can’t refrain from noting that a key role in the discovery was played Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley.) There are potential risks from gene editing to the environment, similar to other types of GMOs. But there may be environmental benefits too. Here are a few that have been …
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