New Report: A Cleaner, More Resilient Electrical Grid for California
California’s electrical grid is at the center of our fight against climate change, with aggressive goals to decarbonize through renewable energy. But the grid is at risk as climate impacts become more severe, particularly from worsening wildfires. To help modernize the grid to be cleaner and more resilient, the state will need deployment of clean technologies such as distributed renewable generation, microgrids, energy storage, building energy management, and vehicle-g...
CONTINUE READINGD.C. and Puerto Rico are not the same.
Blanket calls for D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood miss a critical difference: D.C. is the American capital. Puerto Rico is an American colony.
“D.C. and Puerto Rico should be states. Pass it on.” With passage of the D.C. statehood bill in the House of Representatives last Friday, variations on this statement have been gaining traction as a liberal rallying cry. Because they are not states, neither D.C. nor Puerto Rico have voting representation in Congress. The votes of Puerto Rico's 3.2 million citizens also do not count in U.S. presidential elections (thanks to a constitutional amendment, D.C. citizens...
CONTINUE READINGDespite Trump
Climate action outside DC is far broader and deeper than when he took office.
Trump remains a grave threat to climate action and to the planet at large. But there actually has been significant progress on climate policy despite him. Not so much in DC, of course. But outside the Beltway, climate policy has widened and deepened. At the state level, there has been a barrage of climate activity. Some states were active before Trump’s election. They have redoubled their efforts since he took office. For instance, in 2018, California enacte...
CONTINUE READINGOn This Date in History: Property Rights Won Big in the Supreme Court
June 29, 1992 was a great day for property rights advocates. But what came later wasn't so good.
On this date in 1992, the property rights movement achieved its greatest victory in the form of the Supreme Court’s Lucas ruling. The campaign to protect property rights seemed to have huge momentum. But things didn’t work out that way. For property rights advocates, Lucas turned out to be a false dawn. Mr. Lucas owned land on a barrier island off the South Carolina coast. Alarmed by the risks of building on such vulnerable areas, the South Carolina passed a l...
CONTINUE READINGFancy Dancing on the Appalachian Trail
How to Use Textualism to Evade Statutory Texts
The Supreme Court’s decision in Cowpasture case allows gas pipelines to cross the Appalachian trial. The ruling didn’t get much attention because of its timing. It came down the same day as Bostock, which outlawed employment discrimination against gays and transsexuals. Bostock featured a big battle over the meaning of textualism. But Cowpasture was also a case about textualism. The opinion was written by uber-textualist Clarence Thomas. The statutory text was a...
CONTINUE READINGTrump’s Border Wall, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Separation of Powers
U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Unconstitutional Trump Administration's Diversion of $2.5 Billion in Congressionally-Appropriated DOD Funds for Border Wall Construction
Late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down the Trump Administration's attempted diversion of $2.5 billion in federal funds Congress had appropriated for the Department of Defense. The Trump Administration did so in order to finance President Trump's proposed, controversial border wall at a level Congress had expressly declined to approve. That diversion, ruled the appellate court, violates the Appropriations Clause of the U.S. Con...
CONTINUE READINGTowards an equitable microgrid policy
The California Public Utilities Commission's recent decision is a first step to grid resiliency for communities of color and low-income communities
The 2020 fire season has already started, and we cannot repeat the mistakes of past fire seasons. PG&E recently pled guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter after 84 people were killed when a derelict PG&E transmission line sparked the 2018 Camp Fire. The 2019 fire seasons saw widespread public safety power shutoffs (PSPS events), most notably PG&E’s seven-day outage in late October, over the course of which 941,217 customer meters--serving nearly 3 million peo...
CONTINUE READINGA small bit of good news for the role of science and expertise
EPA decides not to appeal court ruling vacating directive excluding agency grantees from advisory boards
There's not much good news about US environmental governance (or, really, US governance at all) these days. So it seems worth noting when even a small morsel shows up. Today, EPA announced that it will not appeal a decision from the District Court for the Southern District of New York vacating a 2017 agency directive which forbade appointment of EPA grantees to advisory boards. EPA had touted the policy as a way to avoid conflicts of interest. Prominent science organi...
CONTINUE READINGHappy Birthday, Chevron Doctrine!
The Chevron doctrine has been a keystone of administrative law. But now it’s under siege.
Thirty-six years ago today, the Supreme Court decided the Chevron case. The case gives leeway to agencies when their governing statutes are unclear or have gaps. It’s probably the most frequently cited Supreme Court opinion ever. But now the Chevron doctrine is under fire from conservatives, who used to be its strongest advocates. Here’s how the doctrine works. The Chevron doctrine is a rule about court review of agency actions that many scholars consider cent...
CONTINUE READINGThe “American family” in crisis: Colonialism, COVID-19 risk, and climate vulnerability
The fight for racial justice must include a reckoning with US imperialism.
The recent spotlight on anti-Black violence has awoken many white Americans to an uncomfortable truth: that underneath its rhetoric of equality, the United States is a fundamentally racist country. The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on U.S. communities of color underscores this fact. The pandemic also reveals a lesser known but equally uncomfortable truth: that underneath its rhetoric of liberty and justice for all, the U.S. is not only a racist country, but a racis...
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