A Sense of Urgency at COP 23
Guest post by Alexandra Gay, UCLA Law student
Christiana Figueres, the former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC who is widely credited with the success of COP 21 in Paris in 2015, launched a global initiative earlier this year called Mission 2020. The overall goal of the initiative is to ensure that global CO2 emissions reach a “turning point” by 2020 and begin to decline (drastically) over the following decades so that the world can achieve zero net emissions by 2050 and can meet the Sustainable Development...
CONTINUE READINGDispatch from the Bonn UN Climate Conference
So what's up with the Paris Agreement now that the U.S. has announced its intent to withdraw? The main annual UN conference on climate change is underway in Bonn, Germany, and UCLA Law is on the ground here. We'll be reporting this week on what we see and hear. This conference, which serves as the annual Paris Agreement gathering, has an official agenda that includes developing the details necessary to bring that document to life. The Paris Agreement is a landma...
CONTINUE READINGOfficially-True Lies
Administration policy is based on a series of falsehoods.
There are some falsehoods which the United States government has now adopted as dogma. They aren't true but they're repeated day in and day out. Sadly, they're sometimes not even deliberate falsehoods, because the people who repeat them have been brainwashed into believing them or are just too ignorant to realize the actual facts. "Greenhouse gas emissions aren't causing climate change." This comes in various flavors, like "I'm not a scientist" and "We don't kno...
CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Resilient Federal Forests Act
Bill to reduce environmental protections for timber management on federal lands passes House
The Resilient Federal Forests Act (RFFA), H.R. 2936—which would curb environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for a variety of forest management activities on National Forest and BLM lands—passed the House November 1. (We previously wrote about a version of this bill in committee here.) NEPA requires agencies to consider whether proposed major federal actions may have significant environmental impacts. If a proposed action will have sig...
CONTINUE READINGA Major Defeat for Property Rights Advocates
Hardly anyone noticed a decision last June limiting the rights of property owners against regulators.
Murr v. Wisconsin was a sleeper case decided by the Supreme Court last June. But it deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten. As I discuss in a new paper, Murr was a major defeat for property rights advocates and a big win for land use planners and environmentalists. Murr has escaped much notice for two reasons. First, the facts were undramatic, involving a dispute about whether one of two adjoining lots on the shore of a river could be separately developed. S...
CONTINUE READINGIt’s Official: Climate Change is Real and It’s Serious
The Administration allowed a key scientific report to come out. They'll have trouble explaining it away.
The release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment got some attention from the press. The press mostly focused on the forthright endorsement of climate science by the NCA4 report -- something of a surprise in the anti-science Trump Administration. That was indeed notable, but there are other features of the report that will make it harder for the Administration to get away legally with ignoring or downplaying climate change. The endorsement of climate science w...
CONTINUE READINGHouse Republican Tax Plan Would Hurt Climate And Clean Tech Progress
The plan hits electric vehicles and wind energy but could present an opening for a national carbon tax
Republicans in the House of Representatives debuted their proposed tax reforms today, and climate and clean tech advocates are looking to see how the proposals will affect progress on these intertwined issues. Specifically, tax reform could impact electric vehicle and renewable energy deployment, which rely on federal tax credits to stimulate investment and demand. To that end, Republicans want to completely eliminate the $7500 federal tax credit for battery electric veh...
CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Sage grouse
Interior Dept. considering revisions to protection for iconic species
The greater sage-grouse is the largest grouse species in North America, about the size of a domestic chicken. Estimates for its historic population are that it numbered 1.1 million across the sagebrush plains throughout the Western United States and Canada. The grouse depends on sagebrush habitat, but that habitat is declining due to a range of issues including invasive species, wildfire, and oil and gas development. Population estimates today for these pieces are ...
CONTINUE READINGHot Off the Presses: An Intro to Climate Change Law and Policy
The Paris Agreement. The Clean Power Plan. Geo-Engineering. Trump. And there’s more!
I'm really excited to announce the publication of Climate Change Law: Concepts & Insights (Foundation Press 2017), by Cinnamon Carlarne and me. There are lots of great scholarly tomes on the subject -- either monographs or collected volumes. But there really hasn't been anything that provides a comprehensive introduction to climate law as a whole, from international climate agreements to U.S. energy policy to geo-engineering. So far as I know, this is the first boo...
CONTINUE READINGFlorida’s Retro Energy Policy
It may be called the Sunshine State, but you wouldn’t know that from the lack of solar.
Florida is the paradigm of the ostrich with its head in the sand. It may be the most vulnerable state to climate change. Yet, the state government is assiduously ignoring the problem though some cities and counties and South Florida are keenly aware of the risks. Even after Hurricane Irma, the governor still professed complete uncertainty on the subject: “Clearly our environment changes all the time, and whether that’s cycles we’re going through or whether that’s...
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