Our Mission: Keeping Hope Alive

If you read Legal Planet, you know the work of the environmental law centers at Berkeley and UCLA is critical. Now is the time to support it.

States like California will be the best hope for making progress in the next four years.  Keeping the torch burning — helping California succeed — will be challenging.  Our environmental law centers at Berkeley and UCLA are at the heart of this work.  We run lean operations, and every dollar of support goes a long way.

This work is even more important now. Trump 2.0 will likely bring a tsunami of anti-environmental actions.  While the first Trump Administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules, the Project 2025 cabinet picks guarantee a more organized sequel. Given the situation in Washington, environmental progress will happen in states like California or not at all.

I know you’re flooded with requests from environmental advocacy groups and others, asking you to help keep Trump’s efforts in check.  We’re all in favor of playing defense, and we’re engaged in some of that ourselves.  But our unique contribution is to go beyond defense and play offense on environmental policy — operating law clinics and working closely with Sacramento policymakers and other states, to help cut carbon emission and protect the public despite the collapse of environmental protection efforts in D.C.

The work we’ve done at UCLA and Berkeley has more than local significance. In a project headed by former Governor Jerry Brown, our California China Climate Institute is working to bring what we’ve learned in California to assist China in reducing its carbon footprint.  In recent years. UCLA Law has also convened meetings and symposia with Chinese environmental activists and high-level China delegations. With D.C. and Beijing likely not to be on speaking terms, this work is crucial to helping cut emissions by the world’s larger emitter. At Berkeley, we’re spearheading international efforts to reduce methane emissions. At UCLA, a team is advancing methane regulations using remote sensing and remote measurement.

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.

The last few years have been a time of turmoil, from political shockers to a pandemic that took us by surprise.  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.

In the years ahead, you will look to Legal Planet for analysis and insights. I hope you’ll take a minute and help the blog by recommending it to friends or colleagues. And if you feel moved, please share your own testimonial for why you read Legal Planet in the comments below.  

And finally, thanks for reading the blog.  And Happy Holidays!

CLEE, defending climate action, Emmett Institute, environmental action, environmental philanthrophy