Donald Trump Creates the Green New Deal
Emergency Powers Can Be Very....Flexible
Mitch McConnell announced on the Senate floor today that Donald Trump will sign the new border compromise, then declare a National Emergency at the border, and use Presidential powers under the Emergency declaration to fund at least part of his border wall. Demonstrating his central philosophical principle -- party over country -- McConnell announced his support for the move, meaning that the Senate will most likely not override Trump's veto of any Congressional resolu...
CONTINUE READINGMore Tree-Huggers, Please
The Anti-Environmentalist Epithet Actually Derives From India's Great Environmental Justice Movement
If you want to insult an environmentalist, the standard go-to is to dismiss them as a “tree-hugger.” But where does the term come from? The answer might surprise you: The term ‘tree-hugger’ originated not as an insult but as a protest tactic. It is said to date back to 1730, when a village of Bishnois in India sacrificed their lives to save their sacred and resource-rich trees from being cut down to build a new palace for the king. This act of hugging a tree...
CONTINUE READINGOne Cheer For “Corruption”
New Public Lands Bill Is A Triumph For The Environment -- and an Attack on American Public Philosophy
Some unanticipated good news: The Senate on Tuesday passed the most sweeping conservation legislation in a decade, protecting millions of acres of land and hundreds of miles of wild rivers across the country and establishing four new national monuments honoring heroes from Civil War soldiers to a civil rights icon. The 662-page measure, which passed 92 to 8, represented an old-fashioned approach to dealmaking that has largely disappeared on Capitol Hill. Senator...
CONTINUE READINGGovernor Newsom Retreats On High Speed Rail
Revised Merced-Bakersfield vision in "State of the State" speech indicates reluctance to spend political capital
Governor Newsom's "State of the State" speech today offered an abrupt scaling back of the state's vision for its signature infrastructure project, high speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco: [L]et’s level about high speed rail. I have nothing but respect for Governor Brown’s and Governor Schwarzenegger’s ambitious vision. I share it. And there’s no doubt that our state’s economy and quality of life depend on improving transportation. But let’s be...
CONTINUE READINGIs the Green New Deal’s Ambition Smart Policy?
Some Lessons from Environmental History
At the the heart of the Green New Deal -- which demands slashing U.S. carbon emissions by 2030 by shifting to 100 percent clean energy -- is a major conundrum. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of ambitious climate policy don't believe the goals are achievable, technologically let alone politically. Stanford Professor Marc Z. Jacobsen, for example, among the most ardent advocates for decarbonizing the electricity grid completely, believes that we can achiev...
CONTINUE READINGNew report on housing entitlement in LA
Report covers regulatory approvals for residential projects in four LA cities in 2014-16
I’ve blogged previously about work that a team here at UC Berkeley (Moira O’Neill, Giulia Gualco-Nelson, and myself) have been doing on studying land-use regulation, environmental law, and housing production in California, to get a better sense of how regulatory processes may be driving the housing crisis in the state, and eventually to produce specific proposals for improvements to those processes. Last spring we produced a report on our data from five Bay Area ci...
CONTINUE READINGEmmett Institute Publishes Issue Brief on California’s Clean Air Act Vehicle Authority
Co-Authored by Ann Carlson, Meredith Hankins, and Julia Stein
Cross-posted to the American Constitution Society's ACSblog As we have previously covered in past Legal Planet posts, in an outright assault on public health and the environment, the Trump Administration recently proposed rolling back national motor vehicle emission standards put in place by the Obama Administration. As part of this proposal, the Trump Administration also took aim at a special provision long-enshrined in the federal Clean Air Act allowing California t...
CONTINUE READINGBottoms-Up! An Emerging New Governance System (2)
Bottom-up appraches aren't just fallbacks when top-down fails. They have their own strengths.
There are some obvious advantages to top-down climate police, whereby a uniform global climate policy is adopted at the global level and then seamlessly implemented by nations, or whereby a similar process takes place at the national level. Of course, this top-down model requires first global agreement on a uniform policy and then effective implementation, both of which are very difficult. Moreover, even we were in a position to take this route, it has some d...
CONTINUE READINGJohn Dingell, 1926-2019
The Surprising Environmental Record of Detroit's Biggest Congressional Defender
There’s an old story about Rep. John Dingell, the long-running chair of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, who died yesterday at the age of 92, and served in the House longer than anyone in American history. Outside the office of the Committee, there is a huge picture of the Earth, taken from the Apollo statecraft. At one point, a visitor asked what the picture was for. “That’s the Committee’s jurisdiction,” went the standard and wry response. ...
CONTINUE READINGI’ve Been Waiting My Whole Life for a Green New Deal
Get on Board or Get out of the Way: A Millennial Response to the GND
In 2016, millennials (those of us born between 1981 and 1996) surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest share of the US population. Yet you’d never know it by our relative shares of Congressional representation. Even after the great Millennial Wave of the 2018 midterm elections, millennials still only make up 6% of the House of Representatives. Boomers? 53.9%. If Congress actually reflected the US population, there would be 97 millennials in the House today. Instead, there...
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