Weaponizing Water in Kashmir
India’s legal moves on water put Pakistan on edge
A month after India’s move to exert more direct control over Jammu & Kashmir, the Indian state that occupies part of the larger Kashmir region, the country is also now in a position to exert control - in both illegal and legal ways - over important river waters that Pakistan relies upon to sustain people in cities and its agricultural sector. And India is no stranger to wielding water as a weapon against its nuclear rival. The legal landscape of a river system ...
CONTINUE READINGIs California’s High Speed Rail Project Falling Apart?
Join my KALW radio conversation tonight with newly appointed High Speed Rail Authority board chair Lenny Mendonca at 7pm
The future of California's high speed rail system has arguably never been as perilous as now. Otherwise-supportive legislators are now openly mulling raiding high speed rail funds meant to complete the first leg in the Central Valley for rail improvements in the more densely populated parts of California, namely the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles to Anaheim, as the Los Angeles Times recently reported. Governor Newsom also expressed a lack of confidence in the sys...
CONTINUE READINGTrump’s Legal Challenges to the California’s Car Deal
Is there any legal basis for the Trump Administration's actions?
Prompting rage by President Trump, California and several carmakers entered a voluntary agreement on carbon emissions from new cars that blew past the Administration’s efforts to repeal existing federal requirements. Last week, the Trump Administration slapped back at California. Although there’s been a lot of editorializing about that response, I’ve seen very little about the legal dimensions of the Administration’s actions. I’d like to shed a little bit of ...
CONTINUE READINGTrump’s Spite War Against California and the Automakers Ramps Up
Threatening letter, investigation in addition to waiver revocation
Today in the Trump spite wars against California and the four auto manufacturers, we learn that the threat to revoke California's waiver was only the first salvo from the administration. As I blogged last night, the Administration is considering revoking California's federal waiver to issue pollution standards for cars without simultaneously rolling back tough auto standards issued by the Obama Administration. I argued that the only explanation for yanking Californ...
CONTINUE READINGRumored White House Move to Revoke California’s Waiver Is Trump’s Revenge Against the State
Move Motivated by Spite, Not by Policy Considerations
A White House official today confirmed to Politico that the Administration is considering revoking California's permission (called a "waiver") to set its own greenhouse gas emissions and zero emission standards for cars and light trucks. Rumors are that the waiver revocation could happen as early as tomorrow. The news in this announcement is that the EPA would revoke California's waiver even while keeping in place -- for now -- the car standards the Obama Administrat...
CONTINUE READINGSidestepping Regulatory Ossification
The regulatory process can take forever. Here are some possible responses.
Some years ago, Tom McGarity coined the phrase “regulatory ossification” to describe the increasingly slow and cumbersome regulatory system. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. As a recent article by Bethany Davis Noll and Richard Revesz points out, significant regulations take an average of four years to issue, and judicial review adds another year. Admittedly, when deregulatory actions are undertaken by a Donald Trump, this ossification may seem ...
CONTINUE READINGCost-Benefit Analysis and the Next President
If it's Trump, we'll see more of the same. But what if a Democrat wins?
Under executive orders dating back to Reagan, regulatory agencies like EPA are supposed to follow cost-benefit analysis in making decisions. Under the Trump Administration, however, cost-benefit analysis has barely even served as window-dressing for its deregulatory actions. It has launched a series of efforts to prevent full counting of regulatory benefits, as well as committing any number of sins against economic principles, as I detailed in a post in January. Essent...
CONTINUE READINGCapturing Methane — Agricultural Waste and Landfills
Barriers to Solutions, continued
In California, over fifty percent of methane emissions come from the agriculture sector and over twenty percent from landfills. Most of the agriculture emissions come from manure and enteric fermentation, sometimes referred to as “cow burps.” As is the case with many sources of greenhouse gas emissions, there are many potential solutions for limiting and capturing methane emissions from agriculture and landfills and at least as many barriers. In the world of man...
CONTINUE READINGA Rule to Revoke California’s Waiver?
Why an action to revoke the waiver for California's Advanced Clean Cars program could be the Administration’s worst move yet.
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times reported that in the midst of growing “disarray” around the rollback of the Obama-era fuel economy and greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions standards, “Mr. Trump went so far as to propose scrapping his own rollback plan and keeping the Obama regulations, while still revoking California’s legal authority to set its own standards.” It goes—almost—without saying that such a move would be antithetical to the Adminis...
CONTINUE READINGAnd the Survey Says…
How to interpret and utilize "environmentalist" poll results showing widespread support for environmental protection
As most of us know by now, environmentalism in the United States has increasingly become a politically polarizing topic. A Gallup poll from March 2018 revealed that only 42% of surveyed individuals consider themselves to be “environmentalists,” a figure which has decreased over time from the early 1990s: Interestingly, however, this shift in identity for “environmentalists” does not appear to coincide with any meaningful changes in beliefs about environmen...
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