2021-2022 California Environmental Legislation: What’s Been Introduced?
Climate change and wildfire prevention remain top priorities, while environmental justice issues gain more attention
The California State Legislature is back in session, and legislators have introduced thousands of bills. The 2021-2022 session kicks off a new two-year legislative cycle, which means bills that are not passed in this session have the opportunity to be considered and passed in the subsequent session. While legislators will likely spend a significant amount of time addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, there are a number of time-sensitive environmental and environmental justic...
CONTINUE READINGMine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
New book explores the hidden rules governing who gets what and why
For the last six years, Michael Heller and I have been writing Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. It comes out today! We wrote the Doubleday book because we think everyone should have access to the handful of simple insights that can make us more effective advocates for change as consumers, parents, and citizens. The book tells engaging, surprising, and often infuriating real-life stories that reveal the ownership rules of the 21st century. ...
CONTINUE READINGRecalculating the Cost of Climate Change
The Biden Administration has already started to revisit this important issue.
“The social cost of carbon” isn’t exactly a household phrase. It’s an estimate of the harm caused by emitting a ton of CO2 over the many decades it remains in the atmosphere. That’s an important factor in calculating the costs and benefits of climate regulations. For an arcane concept, it has certainly caused a lot of controversy. The Obama Administration came up with a set of estimates, which Trump then slashed by 90%. In an early executive order, Biden...
CONTINUE READINGConservative Judicial Activism Strikes Again
A wild-eyed misinterpretation of the commerce clause
A federal district judge ruled today that the federal government's moratorium on evictions is unconstitutional. The judge's theory is that evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent isn't an "economic" activity. Therefore, it's beyond Congress's power under the Commerce Clause. I know that sounds nuts, but that actually it is what the judge said. The judge's theory was that Congress can regulate the payment of rent, but not access to property. Property law is, after a...
CONTINUE READINGThree Ways of Dodging Responsibility
After disaster strikes, there are some tried-and-true ways of avoiding responsibility.
In the wake of the Texas blackouts, we’re seeing a number of familiar moves to deflect blame by the usual suspects--politicians, regulators, and CEOs. These evasive tactics all begin with a core truth: Eliminating all risk is impossible and would be too expensive even if it weren't. But then they spin that truth in various ways. The result is to obscure responsibility for the disaster and the steps that should be taken going forward. Here are some of the most comm...
CONTINUE READINGGetting Down to the Nitty Griddy
The Texas Blackout and the Politics of Price Making
As has been widely reported over the past week, some Texas electricity customers are now facing astronomically high electricity bills as a result of the recent power grid crisis. Under the Texas system, which is as close to a fully deregulated system of electricity provisioning as we have in the U.S., retail customers are allowed to choose their retail electricity providers and have the option of changing their provider whenever they want (at least most of the time)....
CONTINUE READINGImplementing the “Biden Environmental Litigation Bounce-Back”
Encouraging Signals As To How Biden's USDOJ Will Resolve Environmental Lawsuits Originally Brought Against the Trump Administration
The transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration makes for fascinating spectator sport. President Biden's first month in office reveals that he and his Administration are committed to undoing the widespread damage former President Trump and his minions engineered across so many policy and legal areas. The environment is a particularly prominent example. Notably, opponents of the Trump Administration's environmental rollbacks used litiga...
CONTINUE READINGNew Report: Improving Access to Energy Data
Policy solutions to support the data needed for resilient decarbonization
Today, the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) at Berkeley Law and the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law are releasing a new report, Data Access for a Decarbonized Grid, which highlights key policy solutions to expand access to the energy data needed to operate a fully decarbonized grid. Join our webinar on Wednesday, April 7 at 10am PT to learn more. As California approaches the state target of delivering 100 ...
CONTINUE READINGHow Much Should Texas Invest in Grid Resilience?
The Texas blackouts provide a case study in how to think through resilience issues.
As we begin to think through the long-term response to the Texas blackout, there’s a lot we don’t yet know. The ultimate issues are how much resilience we need against events like this and how we should obtain it. It’s helpful to lay out the kinds of questions we need to be asking as we analyze these issues, in the Texas context or elsewhere. Based on past experience, how big is the resilience problem? The Texas storm is being discussed as a “once in a cen...
CONTINUE READINGA Tale of Two Blackouts
Learning from the Texas and California Power Grid Failures
The Texas blackouts earlier this week have reminded us once again of the vital importance of electricity as part of the basic infrastructure of everyday life and the terrible consequences that ensue when the grid fails. Recent reports indicate that dozens of people have died as a result of the extreme weather and blackouts and many Texas residents continue to struggle with a lack of basic services. As Dan pointed out in his recent post and has been widely reported in...
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