What the Administration Failed to Learn from Past Disasters
There are some basic rules about how to respond to emergencies. They were ignored.
An epidemic and a hurricane require different responses. But the organizational challenge of confronting an emergency is a constant. Here are some basic rules the Trump Administration failed to heed. Ensure in advance that sufficient supplies will be quickly available. When Hurricane Katrina hit, the government did have supplies, but they were located hundreds of miles away. The government learned a lesson from that and prepositioned supplies before later h...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s governance innovation for groundwater sustainability
by Anita Milman and Michael Kiparsky
For the past several years, California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act has been the talk, not only of the town and of the state, but also of the national and international groundwater and environmental policy community. What’s the big deal? SGMA fundamentally changes groundwater management in California – a big deal to be sure. Equally important, as we discuss in a recently published paper, is the broader conceptual significance of the SGMA experimen...
CONTINUE READINGThe Right Wing’s Views of Coronavirus and Climate Change
There’s a common theme: “nothing to worry about, folks.”
It's interesting to see what conservative think tanks are saying about the coronavirus and compare it with their views on climate change. There are some common themes -- both problems tend to get downplayed, along with any possible need for major government action. Like Trump himself, the conservative think tanks seem unable to process scientific evidence and prefer optimistic conjectures. A table at the end of this post gives the details. On the coronavirus, with...
CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Revisions to NEPA regulations
Trump Administration proposes drastic revisions to regulations that implement bedrock environmental law
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is one of the most important statutes for public lands management in the United States, even though it actually is not specific to public lands. NEPA requires federal agencies to analyze and publicly disclose the significant environmental impacts of proposed agency actions, consider alternatives to those proposals, and seek and respond to public comment on the analysis of impacts and consider alternatives. NEPA has been contro...
CONTINUE READINGAn Easy, No-Fuss, Climate Fix for that Big First Day in Office
No, not rejoining the Paris Agreement, though that’s a good idea too. Something else.
This is kind of like one of those recipe things you see: putting a gourmet meal on the table in five minutes. But it’s more like: the one ingredient that will make all your recipes come out better. More seriously, what I’m about to propose is very conventional, easily integrated into agency procedures, and a big boost for climate policy. So here’s this simple trick to improve your agency cookouts: fix the social cost of carbon. The social cost of carbon is...
CONTINUE READINGUnderstanding wastewater utility views on innovation and regulation
by Luke Sherman, Alida Cantor, Anita Milman, and Michael Kiparsky
The same underlying technology has been used in the municipal wastewater sector for 100 years. New technologies that treat effluent more efficiently and effectively exist, yet deployment of those technologies has been slow. The limited adoption of new technologies in the wastewater sector raises questions about how to encourage innovation. Popular narratives around innovation sometimes focus on an individual innovator, an Elon Musk-ian figure with the ability to envis...
CONTINUE READINGRisk, Uncertainty, and COVID-19
What do we actually know at this point about the dangers?
Like many environmental hazards such as toxic chemicals, the coronavirus is fundamentally a problem in risk management. And like issues such as climate change, the problem involves scientific data, modeling, and a good deal of uncertainty. With climate change, the key parameter is climate sensitivity. For diseases the key parameter is called R0, which measures how contagious the disease is. The most recent estimate of the R0 for the coronavirus is 2.3. [2021 update:...
CONTINUE READINGVirus Denial
Yet another effort to ignore reality, from the usual players.
We’ve seen this movie before. Scientists warn of a serious threat. But in Trump World, the problem doesn’t exist. It’s just a product of alarmism. First, climate change. Now, the coronavirus, COVID-19. Trump himself has worked hard to minimize the problem. "We have very few people with it," he said, and " people are getting better, they're all getting better," referring to U.S. patients. "I think that whole situation will start working out. Lot of talent, lot of...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Change Threatens Tropical Fish Stocks. How Should Countries Respond?
As climate change warms the world's oceans, marine scientists have paid special attention to how this will influence the movement of fish. Recent articles have shown that fish stocks are migrating toward colder waters in the poles. In a piece published yesterday in Nature Sustainability, a group of economists, marine scientists, and I examined for the first time the economic implications of this stock shift for nations that rely on commercial fishing. We modeled pr...
CONTINUE READINGMaxing Out NEPA: Environmental Review of Early Solar Geoengineering Field Research
Done right, environmental review can reach what worries people most about climate engineering
A few months ago, Congress earmarked $4 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to research: stratospheric conditions and the Earth’s radiation budget, including the impact of the introduction of material into the stratosphere from changes in natural systems, increased air and space traffic, proposals to inject material to affect climate, and the assessment of solar climate interventions. Within these funds, the agreement further d...
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