Climate Change and the Hard-Headed Realist
Henry Kissinger showed that you don’t have to have a shred of idealism to favor climate action.
It’s not surprising that Bernie Sanders said, rather emphatically, that he was not a friend of Kissinger’s. Yet there was one issue where they did agree: climate change. If there was one thing that Henry Kissinger stood for, it was the hard-headed “realist” view of foreign policy — a view that prioritizes national interest at all costs, rejecting idealism as weak-minded sentimentality. Nobody in all his long career ever called him progressive. We alrea...
CONTINUE READINGWhy Do Small Changes in Global Temperature Matter So Much?
One problem is that we’ve pursued optimization rather than robustness.
Scientists are warning us that even comparatively small changes in average temperature may have disastrous results. If you turn up your thermostat 2 ºC (about 3.6 ºF), the difference may be noticeable but it’s no big deal. So why is that a scary increase in global temperatures? Some reasons are physical, particularly the difference between being one degree below freezing versus one degree above. But another key reason is that we've finely tuned our society to a s...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Backlash
Vicious attacks on climate progress are on the rise.
Presumably, no one actually wants rising seas, dangerous heat waves, severe droughts, runaway wildfires, and floods. Nor, I assume, are there many who want those climate disasters for their children and grandchildren. Still, there are all too many politicians and public figures who act as if their goal was to foment climate change. No doubt the real motives are more mundane: ignorance, financial gain, political ambition, or fear of change. Regardless of motive, the resu...
CONTINUE READINGA Guide to Environmental Law Centers
There are twenty and the list is growing.
Many law schools consider public service a key part of their missions. More than most people appreciate, they play an important role in public policy in areas as diverse as intellectual property, criminal justice, and environmental law. Research centers are an increasingly common institutional setting for that work. With that in mind, I’ve tried to put together a list of environmental law centers. Please let me now if I've missed some centers. I'll be more than happ...
CONTINUE READINGU.S.-China Climate Deal Means Good Vibes for COP28
Here are key takeaways from the Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis ahead of the UN climate talks in Dubai.
The chances for a productive COP28—the U.N. climate talks that get underway Nov. 30 in Dubai—got a big boost from the recent climate agreement between the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest polluters. Announced just before President Joe Biden and China leader Xi Jinping met at the APEC Summit in San Francisco, the Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis was negotiated by Climate Envoy John Kerry and his Chinese cou...
CONTINUE READINGFour EV Trends
One of these things is not like the others.
The automotive world is changing quickly. Most of the trends are mutually reinforcing. But one points in the opposite direction. The first and most obvious trend is the rise of EVs. In the twenty years since Tesla arrived, EVs have gone from 0.2% of new cars to 13%, and Bloomberg predicts that this figure will nearly double in the next few years. According to the Economist, by 2040 about three-quarters of global sales will be EV even under conservative assumptions...
CONTINUE READINGWhy There is (Still) a Carrot Boycott in Cuyama Valley
Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms are technically no longer plaintiffs in the lawsuit they launched. But their water war wages on.
Don’t expect to see carrots on Thanksgiving menus in the Cuyama Valley, where residents and small farmers have been boycotting Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms over their outsized water use. They’re still not welcome at the table. Back in September, I wrote about the carrot boycott and the hardball tactics by those big growers that had led to this fight. The water war spilled into the mainstream media this week thanks to an excellent pair of stories by Ian...
CONTINUE READINGHave We Begun the Third Age of Climate Law?
Some thoughts for Environmental History Week.
An international agreement in 1992 committed the world’s nations to addressing climate change but contained few specifics. The US ratified that agreement, but there was little concrete action here through the end of the 20th Century. As this century began, things looked optimistic, with both presidential candidates favoring reductions in carbon emissions. Promptly after taking office, however, George W. Bush reversed himself and fervently embraced fossil fuels. The t...
CONTINUE READINGHow to Get to Zero Emissions at the Ports
A new report by UCLA and UC Berkeley examines policy solutions to accelerate deployment of zero-emission cargo handling equipment at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are well on their way toward electrification, but the road to zero emissions is a long one. This new report—A Heavy Lift: Policy Solutions to Accelerate Deployment of Zero-Emission Cargo Handling Equipment at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and Beyond—surveys the biggest obstacles to speedy electrification and makes some recommendations. The Ports are the largest in the United States, serving as a hub of economic...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Policy in the World’s Fourth Largest Country
In case you’re wondering, that would be Indonesia in terms of population.
Indonesia has the world’s fourth largest population, right after India, China, and the U.S. It has about the same GDP as Spain. Indonesia ranks in the top dozen carbon emitters. It gets relatively attention in the United States. Yet Indonesia’s role in cutting energy emissions is crucial. As an archipelago, Indonesia is at the prey of sea level rise. Jakarta, a city of ten million, is only two feet above sea level. A quarter of the densely populated city could be ...
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