Pineapples and Preparing for the Future at COP23
Guest post by Eric Sezgen, UCLA Law student
As Alex’s previous blogpost states, there was a sense of urgency at this COP. Urgency had observable consequences all around the conference and was not only embraced but enhanced by Fiji’s presidency. You could see this even in the COP’s logo. Whereas the COP logo is usually a sleek and trendy design to look good on banners and t-shirts, Fiji’s logo, though seemingly innocuous, is emblematic of the true stakes of negotiations coming out of the COP. The logo i...
CONTINUE READINGOf Dreamliners and Drinking Water
Michael Kiparsky and Christian Binz
As we have written previously, potable water reuse (recycling water to augment water supplies) is a promising way to diversify urban water supply portfolios. Direct potable water reuse (DPR), the injection of highly purified wastewater into drinking water systems, is among the newest, and most controversial, methods for augmenting water supplies. DPR is garnering increasing interest, but does not come without risks. In a new article, several of us examine the notio...
CONTINUE READING‘Let the Sunshine In’: The Fight for Solar in the Tar Heel State
Despite utility opposition and conservative state legislature, the law is slowly shifting toward solar energy.
In North Carolina, renewable energy is more a distant dream than a reality. The state has a modest renewable portfolio standard (10-12% by 2018 or 2021, depending on the utility). Right now, the state is at only about 7%, with the remainder split more or less equally between coal, gas and nuclear. It has old-fashioned utility regulation, with Duke Power as the main power supplier. Duke’s goal, of course, is to protect its monopoly position in its service area and the r...
CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: National Park Fee Increases
Park Service proposes to more than double fees at popular parks for peak times
On October 24, the National Park Service published a proposal to hike entrance fees in 17 of the most popular parks—including Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon—during peak visitation seasons. The per-vehicle fee during peak season would rise to $70 from the current range of $25 to $30. The plan would also raise the per-person and motorcycle fees during peak seasons, and raise annual-pass fees. The fee hikes would help pay for deferred maintenance in the par...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Law Professors File Amicus Brief in Defense of Technology-Forcing in the California Supreme Court
Professors oppose efforts to limit the Legislature’s authority to enact laws protecting the public health and safety of CA residents
My colleague Sean Hecht and I, along with eleven other California environmental law professors, filed an amicus brief in the California Supreme Court this week in support of the California Legislature’s authority to enact technology-forcing statutes. The underlying case, National Shooting Sports Foundation, Inc., et al. v. State of California, involves a gun control law passed by the Legislature in 2007 requiring the use of a developing technology called “mi...
CONTINUE READINGSeeking Salvation at the COP
Guest post by Sunjana Supekar, UCLA Law student
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” These words, attributed to famed anti-racist activist Angela Davis, permeated my thoughts as I walked through the halls of the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany (referred to as the “COP,” for conference of parties). The major question for this year’s COP was how exactly to implement the terms of the Paris Agreement....
CONTINUE READINGESA Under Attack. Again.
The Washington Post tomorrow is running an Op Ed written with Peter Alagona, a colleague in environmental studies at UCSB. We were approached by the Post and asked to write a piece addressing the current raft of bills that seek to weaken the Endangered Species Act and sharing our views about alternatives. With a tight limit of 700 words, we could not go into much detail but hope you find informative our assessment of the current legislation and promising future paths. ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Growing Schism Between Coal and Oil
They're both fossil fuels, but their producers don't always have the same policy views.
Bush's environmental policies were bad, but Trump's policies are way worse. One reason is that Bush and Cheney were oilman, and Trump is obsessed with coal. Yes, oil and coal are both fossil fuels, but they have different economics and different policy stances. These are two very different industries. The U.S. coal companies are in desperate economic straits; while the net annual income of major oil companies is measured in the tens of billions. Both stand to be har...
CONTINUE READINGA 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...
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