The Kudlow Inversion
Trump's key advisor on the economy, the coronavirus, and regulation, with a gift for getting everything wrong.
“Only the best people,” Trump said. Let’s talk about his chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow. Kudlow seems to live in an inverted, upside-down world. He somehow manages to be wrong about everything — wrong about the economy, wrong about deregulation, wrong about climate change, wrong about the coronavirus. A full sweep, in other words. It’s not easy to achieve that level of consistency. Trump must have had to look far and wide to find Kudlow. Just look at t...
CONTINUE READINGMembers of Congress Oppose Trump Administration’s Attempt to Revoke California’s Clean Car Standards
UCLA Law’s Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic files a brief on behalf of 147 members of Congress in the D.C. Circuit
California has long led the fight against pollution from passenger vehicles, setting its first car emissions standards in 1966 before federal rules were established. After the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, California retained authority to establish a series of more stringent vehicle emissions rules—with the most recent iteration of greenhouse gas emissions standards adopted by 13 other states. But after decades of cooperation with the federal government, Califo...
CONTINUE READINGYes, It’s That Time of Year Again
If you read Legal Planet, you know why the work we do matters.
Like everyone else, I’m sure you find fundraising appeals annoying. That’s why we only do them twice a year. But there couldn’t be a more important time for the work we do, given the urgency of the climate crisis and the ongoing policy disaster in D.C. Yes, we're in the middle of a pandemic and an economic crisis. But climate change and the biodiversity crisis aren't going away while we deal with those other problems. That means that the environmental work we ...
CONTINUE READINGFighting to Preserve California Vehicle Emission Standards
Ted Lamm and Sean Hecht Co-Author Amicus Brief on Behalf of National Parks Groups
Last week, Sean Hecht and I filed an amicus brief with the DC Circuit in the legal challenge to the Trump Administration’s attempt to eliminate California’s authority to apply its own automobile emission standards under the Clean Air Act. (We filed the brief in our individual capacities and not on behalf of our respective institutions.) Our clients are the National Parks Conservation Association and the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, two nonprofits ...
CONTINUE READINGJuly Fourth at Mt. Rushmore: What about the “unalienable rights” of the Lakota?
In the limbo game of the 45th presidency: no matter how far the bar descends, Trump clears it by going under. Just two weeks after political furor over a planned Juneteenth support rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma—site of the 1921 Race Massacre, in which white mobs killed up to 300 Black people in 48 hours, and burned or looted some 1,500 homes—Trump found a way to go still lower. He celebrated Independence Day in the Black Hills of South Dakota, on land properly occupie...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Appellate Court Upholds Water Board’s Broad Drought Response Authority
Court of Appeal Rejects Water Users' Legal Challenge to Board's Emergency Regulations, Temporary Curtailment Orders
California's Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District recently upheld the State Water Resources Control Board's temporary emergency drought response regulations--enacted in 2014-15--as well as related curtailment orders the Board issued to specific water users to implement those regulations. In doing so, the Water Board rejected a legal challenge agricultural water users brought against the Board seeking to elevate private water rights over other interests--lik...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s Spiking Coronavirus Cases
Clearly, it's not just increased testing. We have a real problem.
The number of reported COVID-19 cases in California has risen dramatically. What's going on, and what should be done about it? The situation has changed so rapidly that I've had to rewrite this story repeatedly since I began work on it last week. Early Last Week When I started work on the story a week ago, state public health officials attributed the problem to increased testing rather than a resurgence of the disease. That was probably true for at least part of ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Danger of Climate Change Deadlines
Essential targets set by some of the world's leading climate scientists and policymakers just passed. Now what?
Seven prominent figures in the global climate change policy discourse published an opinion essay in Nature. In “Three years to safeguard our climate,” they set a deadline for key targets to be met in order to stay on track to meet the Paris Agreement’s global warming goals. The notable thing is that the essay was published three years ago this week: The year 2020 is crucially important for another reason, one that has more to do with physics than politics. … sho...
CONTINUE READINGNew 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...
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