Year: 2019
Planned Outages, Planning for Resilience, and Reducing Emissions
The power shutoffs begun yesterday by Pacific Gas & Electric across swaths of Northern California, cutting electricity for hundreds of thousands of Californians, are many things: a serious risk for vulnerable and immobilized populations; an economic hit for local businesses; a tremendous inconvenience for everyone; both an outrage and industry best practice, according to Governor …
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CONTINUE READINGAging Dams, Forgotten Perils
You’ve heard it before but it’s still true: U.S. infrastructure is a mess.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Critical U.S. infrastructure is dilapidated and unsafe. Regulation is week, and enforcement is weaker. Everyone agrees on the need for action, and climate change will only make the problem worse. but no one seems to do anything about it. Sadly, this has become a familiar story. Take …
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CONTINUE READINGNew Fellows Join Emmett Institute to Research and Advance Environmental Law
This fall, the Emmett Institute at UCLA Law is welcoming four new fellows for two-year faculty appointments. Holly Buck, Charles Corbett, Benjamin Harris, and Siyi Shen bring a wide range of experience and training to the Institute, and will contribute to projects on climate engineering, environmental governance in China, and more. The new fellows join …
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CONTINUE READINGGoing Nuclear?
Nuclear has some serious problems, but it may be worth hedging our technology bets.
Nuclear power has been an important source of zero-carbon energy, though it has been plagued by other problems. Does it have a future in our effort to decarbonize the grid? According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a third of U.S. nuclear plants, or about twenty percent of the nation’s total nuclear capacity, are …
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CONTINUE READINGIt’s time the Safe Drinking Water Act got some respect
A new primer that makes the law accessible and teachable
I have been writing about drinking water issues for the past fifteen years and often been struck at how little attention the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) receives in our field. Passed just two years after the Clean Water Act, it gets scant or no coverage in environmental law casebooks and is rarely taught in …
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CONTINUE READINGSixth International Geoengineering Governance Summer School, 2019
A brief report from a recent Emmett-convened event
As the severity of climate change risks and the inability of current efforts to adequately limit risks become clear, geoengineering technologies – active large-scale environmental interventions to reduce disruptions caused by elevated greenhouse gases – are increasingly receiving attention and generating controversy. These proposals would either remove and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide or modify the …
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CONTINUE READINGAnother Court Loss for the Trump EPA
D.C. Circuit enforces deadlines for air pollution compliance
On Friday, the D.C. Circuit issued a brief order in a case called New York v. EPA. In some respects, the order was a foregone conclusion, given the same court’s September ruling in a case called Wisconsin v. EPA. But it’s nonetheless noteworthy. Both the New York and the Wisconsin case involved a section in …
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CONTINUE READINGLet Discovery Begin!
Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, discovery can begin in the Baltimore climate nuisance case
The oil companies that have fought cities around the country that have filed climate change nuisance cases against them may finally have to tell plaintiffs’ lawyers about what they knew about the connection between climate change and their business activities, when they knew it, and what they did in response. The Fourth Circuit Court of …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Pro-Environmental Lochner Court
How a conservative Court defended environmental protection a century ago.
Like today’s Court, the Supreme Court a century ago was dominated by conservatives. The Lochner era, from around 1900 to 1935, was named after the most notorious case of that period. The Lochner case, which struck down a maximum hours law for workers, epitomized the conservative Supreme Court of that era. Yet that conservative Court …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Politics Down Under
Australia is leaping from the frying pan into the fire.
Australian climate politics has been strange if not chaotic. And in terms of climate policy, things seems to be going from bad to worse. This is partly a function of general political upheaval. In an enlightening 2018 paper, three University of Melbourne law professors (Baxter. Milligan, and McRae) traced the developments from 2007 to 2016. …
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