Yes, It’s That Time of Year Again

If you read Legal Planet, you know why the work we do matters.

Like everyone else, I’m sure you find fundraising appeals annoying. That’s why we only do them twice a year. But there couldn’t be a more important time for the work we do, given the urgency of the climate crisis and the ongoing policy disaster in D.C.

Yes, we’re in the middle of a pandemic and an economic crisis. But climate change and the biodiversity crisis aren’t going away while we deal with those other problems. That means that the environmental work we do at Berkeley and UCLA remains as urgent as ever.

Federal environmental law has been under constant assault for almost four years. Only the states have been able to move forward, with California in the vanguard. At both Berkeley and UCLA, we have worked closely with state officials to help keep California moving forward.

Whatever happens in November, this work will remain vital. If Trump wins, California’s efforts will be crucial to keep hope alive. If Biden wins, our work will move into a new phase. We’ll help translate California’s programs to the national level. As the federal government works to catch up to the state, California in turn will need to push ahead. We can help make that happen.

The work we’ve done has more than local significance. In a project headed by former Governor Jerry Brown, we are working to bring what we’ve learned in California to assist China in reducing its carbon footprint. And there’s also a need for reliable, evidence-based insight into the national situation. Our research programs at Berkeley and UCLA are dedicated to those missions.

Supporting Berkeley. If you’d like to support Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment (CLEE), click here. If you’d like more information about the Center, click here.

Supporting UCLA. You can find out more about UCLA’s Emmett Institute here. The Emmett Institute has a dedicated donation page here.

This has been a time of turmoil, from the unexpected results of the 2016 election to the coronavirus outbreak today. One constant has been the need to address the environmental crises facing the world. We have devoted ourselves to that effort in past years, and we need your help to keep doing so in the future.

Thanks for your support, and for reading Legal Planet! We promise not to hit you up again till the nights grow long again next winter.

One Reply to “Yes, It’s That Time of Year Again”

Sadly, I have learned two most troublesome things over the years that I have been studying and commenting on Legal Planet posts:

1. You folks aren’t uniting to communicate with We The People to inform, educate and motivate us to demand actions to prevent global warming from destroying quality of life for our newest and future generations. One major cultural failure was documented by Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” where he reported that academics characterized themselves as pure. And he emphasized that one of the reasons why there were so few public intellectuals of note in America because so many intellectuals don’t want to take on the sort complications and impurities that come with being public.

2. Far too many lawyers and judges are corrupt, especially by looking the other way to allow rich people to literally get away with murder even when their experience teaches them to know who is guilty beyond any doubt, and people like Trump to destroy American lives. This was also proven to me when I used to ride a bus to work with a neighbor who was one of the most respected judges in our city, and told us his kids that if any of them married a lawyer he would disinherit them.

So here we are with global warming totally out of control, with no solutions being implemented to protect and perpetuate an acceptable quality of life before time and resources run out to do so.

UC, please try harder, you really are our last resort.

Comments are closed.

Reader Comments

Anthony St. John says:

July 8, 2020 at 6:24 am

Sadly, I have learned two most troublesome things over the years that I have been studying and commenting on Legal Planet posts:

1. You folks aren’t uniting to communicate with We The People to inform, educate and motivate us to demand actions to prevent global warming from destroying quality of life for our newest and future generations. One major cultural failure was documented by Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” where he reported that academics characterized themselves as pure. And he emphasized that one of the reasons why there were so few public intellectuals of note in America because so many intellectuals don’t want to take on the sort complications and impurities that come with being public.

2. Far too many lawyers and judges are corrupt, especially by looking the other way to allow rich people to literally get away with murder even when their experience teaches them to know who is guilty beyond any doubt, and people like Trump to destroy American lives. This was also proven to me when I used to ride a bus to work with a neighbor who was one of the most respected judges in our city, and told us his kids that if any of them married a lawyer he would disinherit them.

So here we are with global warming totally out of control, with no solutions being implemented to protect and perpetuate an acceptable quality of life before time and resources run out to do so.

UC, please try harder, you really are our last resort.