Bringing Back Earmarks to Save the Climate
Climate action will require overcoming the US democracy deficit.
The U.S. has a democracy deficit. Winning national majorities isn’t enough to get majorities in Congress. This creates headwinds against climate action. In the short-run at least, legislative earmarks might be one way to overcome the problem. The House is already planning to bring back earmarks, but the the heart of the problem is the Senate. In the Senate, all states — not all people — are created equal. States with higher rural, white populations get two...
CONTINUE READINGThings to be Thankful For (2020 edition)
Trump has done his best to eliminate federal protection for the environment. But there have been many positive signs.
Nearly four years into the Trump Administration, we're now accustomed to waking up every morning to learn about a new attack on the environment. It’s also been an awful year in terms of the pandemic. But there are some things to be thankful for. Here’s how I started a similar post in 2017, nearly a year after Trump took office: “Overall, it’s been a pretty lousy year since last Thanksgiving. If you care about the environment, there are a lot of things NOT...
CONTINUE READINGEngineering Biological Diversity
In a new paper, I introduce the international governance of synthetic biology, gene drives, and de-extinction for conservation.
In addition to climate change -- the primary topic of my academic writing -- biodiversity loss is the other major global environmental challenge. Like climate change, efforts over the last three decades keep failing to meet agreed-upon objectives. And like climate change, scientists and others are considering novel technologies that would intervene in natural systems at large scales in order to meet associated sustainability goals. I previously introduced techno...
CONTINUE READINGBattle for the Senate: 2022 Preview
We’ve just been through one big election. But it's only 2 years till the next one.
We're only two years away from the next Senate elections. Granted, we're not completely done with the 2020 Senate elections given the Georgia runoffs. But just 24 months from now, control of the Senate will again be at stake. On average, the President's party loses two Senate seats in the off-year elections. That's not a universal rule, however. What happens in 2022 will shape the second half of Biden's term. We’ve learned how important the Senate is as th...
CONTINUE READINGReinventing Cost-Benefit Analysis
If the goal is to give decision makers the tools to make better decision, a single-dimensional metric isn't the way to go.
One key issue facing Biden on January 20 will be the role of the the White House regulatory czar. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is a tiny White House agency that is virtually unknown to the public. Yet it exercises outsized influence. OIRA is charged with screening all proposed government regulations using a strict cost-benefit analysis. Biden may want to rethink that role a little. Obviously, when making a decision, you generally want to...
CONTINUE READINGBiden Can Leverage Larger Trends to Make Climate Progress
Biden can use these three strategies to make major progress on climate issues.
With the next president of the United States finally decided, we can now begin moving on to the work at hand. Joe Biden’s election creates an exciting opportunity for climate action. But there’s one clear hurdle: Unless the January runoff elections in Georgia for two Senate seats deliver surprising success to the Democrats, President-elect Biden will face a Senate led again by Mitch McConnell. That narrows the range of available policy instruments, but Biden shoul...
CONTINUE READINGNew Fellows Join the UCLA Emmett Institute
Adrien Abecassis and Beth Kent bring expertise in international diplomacy and environmental justice to UCLA’s environmental law programs.
Belated introductions are due for two new fellows who joined the UCLA Emmett Institute this summer, Adrien Abecassis and Beth Kent. Abecassis and Kent join four other Emmett Institute fellows, Charles Corbett, Benjamin Harris, Jesse Reynolds, and Siyi Shen, in limited-term faculty appointments at UCLA Law, conducting research, teaching classes, and supporting our public service. Adrien Abecassis joins us as an Emmett Climate Engineering Fellow in Environmental Law an...
CONTINUE READING“Whole of Government” Climate Policy
We need the help of far-flung parts of the federal government to deal with climate.
President Biden will have to rely on administrative action to do much or all of the heavy lifting in climate policy. It’s clear that EPA has a central role to play in climate policy, but EPA does not stand alone. Other agencies also have important roles to play. Fortunately, the Biden transition team seems to have come to this realization. A multi-agency approach is especially important because bold actions by EPA will face a skeptical audience in the 6-3 Supreme Co...
CONTINUE READINGTrump’s Biggest Anti-Environmental Fail
He did his best to destroy EPA completely. But his devastating budget proposals got nowhere.
Trump was awful for the environment. But he wanted to be even worse. If Trump had had his way, only shreds of key environmental agencies would now be left. Although Trump has certainly succeeded in weakening them, the cores of the agencies remain intact. Without them, Biden's task would be much harder. Trump's budgets unvaryingly called for eviscerating or even zeroing-out environment-related agencies. In 2017, with his first budget proposal, everyone panicked at th...
CONTINUE READINGThe IPCC Misses the Mark on Solar Geoengineering
The Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change poorly portrays the "institutional and social constraints to deployment related to governance"
Not long ago, I re-read the top-level messages from the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) on solar geoengineering's governance issues. The Summary for Policymakers of most recent broad report, Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5), says, in full: Solar radiation modification (SRM) [i.e. solar geoengineering] measures are not included in any of the available assessed pathways. Although some SRM measures may be theoretically effective in reducing an oversho...
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