Region: California

How Cities and Counties Can Improve Public Transit

Flashy and expensive new transit projects, such as the Los Angeles subway or San Francisco’s proposed Central Subway, get a lot of media attention. But cities and counties have a lot of discretion to improve their existing public transit systems in sometimes relatively low-cost ways. The benefits, as we discuss in a UCLA / Berkeley …

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U.C. Davis’ “CEQA at 40” Conference Now Available Online

On November 4th, the U.C. Davis School of Law’s California Environmental Law & Policy Center hosted “CEQA at 40: A Look Back & Ahead.”  Celebrating the 40th anniversary of California’s bedrock environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act, the conference drew some 400 attendees to U.C. Davis, with many more viewing the proceedings via a …

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Energy Storage in California by 2020: A New Report From the California Energy Commission

Yesterday, the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program released a strategic assessment of energy storage technologies in California by 2020. The report was prepared by a three-campus University of California team, including Berkeley Law, UC Los Angeles, and UC San Diego. Along with co-blogger Steve Weissman and Jessica Intrator (who did the …

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2012 California Water Law Symposium: register now

Registration is now open for the 2012 California Water Law Symposium, to be held Saturday, January 21, 2012. The Symposium is a remarkable event, launched in 2005 by a consortium of law students from Bay Area schools. This eighth edition is made possible by the cooperative efforts of students from Berkeley Law (this year’s host), …

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UC Berkeley / UCLA Law Conference on Local Government Climate Change Policies

The UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law are holding a free public conference at UC Berkeley on Friday, December 2nd to discuss local government climate change policies.  Conference speakers include some of the state’s top policy, business, and environmental leaders, who will report on promising ways that cities and counties can address climate change …

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Defending the “green guinea pig”

Just a quick post to point out my UCLA colleague Matt Kahn’s piece, in the Christian Science Monitor, defending California’s AB 32 climate regulations from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial (sub. req’d.) that maligns the state’s approach.   Apparently the WSJ relies on a long-debunked estimate of the costs to households from California’s program, an estimate that (among …

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Is California’s Anti-Sprawl Law Worth the Investment?

This past Friday, the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) approved the very first Sustainable Communities Strategy in the state as part of its regional transportation plan. The strategy document is the critical planning piece mandated by California’s anti-sprawl law, SB 375. As I discussed over the summer, SANDAG’s plan meets its greenhouse gas reduction …

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The Case for Cap-and-Trade

Dan asked for a vote, and being a good Legal Planetary citizen, I responded — voting very reluctantly for cap-and-trade. The biggest difficulty, as is the case with most polls, lies in the phrasing of the question:  “all things considered” what is “the best strategy” for controlling greenhouse gases.  The problem with this locution — perhaps unavoidable …

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A Completely Uninteresting Story

The Wall Street Journal editorial board claims that California’s new cap-and-trade regulations will cost each consumer $3,800 a year and calls it creeping Stalinism.  As my UCLA (and UCLAW!) colleague Matt Kahn gently and genially points out, the Journal’s editors are engaging in cranial-rectal fusion. In other news, dog bites man, the sun rises in …

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Trolling for Anti-Environmental Plaintiffs

A reader sent me a an email from the Coalition of Energy Users trying to find plaintiffs for a challenge to AB 32 implementation.   CEU claims to be a grassroots group that does not have a deep-pocket funding source, and that may be true.  On the other hand, its interests are so precisely aligned with …

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