Justice Stevens and the Rule of (Environmental) Law
A simple but powerful principle: courts and agencies should respect statutes.
Justice Stevens and the Rule of (Environmental) Law There’s already been a lot written in the aftermath of Justice Stevens’s death, including Ann Carlson’s excellent Legal Planet post last week. I’d like to add something about an aspect of his jurisprudence that had great relevance to environmental law: his belief in the rule of law, and specifically, in the duty of both the judiciary and the executive branch to respect and implement congressional mandates. ...
CONTINUE READINGWill Self-Driving Battery Electric Buses Replace Rail Transit?
A question for LA Metro CEO Phil Washington at "LA Infill" conference at UCLA Law on July 24th
Many urbanists, environmentalists, and transit enthusiasts love rail. Los Angeles voters in particular have repeatedly expressed the wish for more rail, approving county sales tax increases by overwhelming margins in 2008 and 2016, along with prior measures in 1980 and 1990, in part to fund a nation-leading, multi-billion dollar rail transit build out (a history I documented in the 2014 book Railtown). Many other cities around the country also either have mature rail sys...
CONTINUE READINGIs the Sun Finally Rising in the Southeast?
Slowly, and a bit grudgingly, the Old South is moving toward solar.
Southern states like to brag about their sunny weather. Florida even calls itself the Sunshine State. Yet the region lags well behind in terms of putting that sunshine to work. But it appears that change is coming. Solar generating capacity in the Southeast is expected to nearly double over the next three years, though from a low baseline. The situation has been fairly dismal. For instance, despite growth in solar over the past few years, solar is only 0.2% of F...
CONTINUE READINGWarren’s public lands policy proposal
The Senator's policy proposals have a lot of good points, but could be even better
Senator Elizabeth Warren has become famous for her policy plan documents as she runs for President. A few months ago, she released a new one focusing on public lands. The key points in her plan include: A moratorium on all new fossil fuel leasing on federal public lands Providing 10% of US renewable energy from projects on public lands Restoring the National Monuments that the Trump Administration is trying to shrink A commitment that funding from the Land ...
CONTINUE READINGDoes the US have a delegation problem?
A comparison of US and Canadian environmental law indicates perhaps not
One of the big cases at the end of this year’s Supreme Court term was Gundy v. United States, where four justices signaled they were open to reviving a long dormant doctrine, the non-delegation doctrine, to constrain open-ended delegations of authority from Congress to Executive Branch agencies. There’s been various prognostications as to whether the Court will go further. Here, I ask whether the US really has a delegation problem in the first place. Arguments for...
CONTINUE READINGThe Witching Auer
The Supreme Court rules on deference to agency interpretations.
The Court’s opinion in Kisor v. Wilkie was eagerly awaited by administrative law experts. It is one skirmish in the ongoing war over deference to agencies. In this case, the issue was whether to overrule the Auer doctrine, which requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of its own regulations. This doctrine, like its big brother, the Chevron doctrine, has become a target for conservative scholars and judges. The Auer doctrine has obvi...
CONTINUE READINGCan Planting Trees Solve Climate Change?
Unfortunately, a new scientific paper overstates forests’ potential
Today, The Guardian reports: Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists... As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into t...
CONTINUE READINGSome Thoughts About “The Pursuit of Happiness”
What did the Declaration of Independence mean? And why does it matter?
When looking for something else, I stumbled on a Fourth of July post that I wrote a decade ago. Despite the temptation to rewrite, I've made a only a few small tweaks. It seems, if anything, more relevant today, when our society seems so divided about fundamental values and our President has devoted his life to the pursuit of money, publicity, and conspicuous consumption. But that's not at all what the Founding Fathers meant by the "pursuit of happi...
CONTINUE READINGThe Democratic Presidential Candidates Should Debate How to Address Climate Change
The DNC Can Help to Make Climate Change Into an Issue of Consequence for the Campaign
This is my first post in my new role at the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and Environment, working on Project Climate. Last year, as a Legal Planet guest blogger, I wrote that political will and scale are the two biggest challenges of climate change response. So for this first post, I want to take issue with the Democratic National Committee’s decision –so far—to preclude a climate-change-centric presidential debate. Fifteen candidates have expressed su...
CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Forest Service proposes NEPA regulatory revisions
Forest Service proposes revisions to NEPA regulations to increase exemptions for logging and other projects
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has long been a lightning rod for debates over public land management. NEPA requires federal agencies to fully analyze and publicly disclose the environmental impacts of proposed major federal actions that significantly affect the environment, including analysis of a reasonable range of alternatives and a response to public comments. The adequacy of an agency’s NEPA analysis can be challenged in court, though NEPA does n...
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