National Monuments Under Trump
Does the Antiquities Act give the President the authority to revoke national monument designations?
Debate on the Antiquities Act continues in the early months of the Trump Administration. Opponents of Obama's recently-proclaimed Bears Ears National Monument (see earlier post) have pushed for Trump to revoke or significantly alter the designation, fueling debate as to whether a president has the authority under the Antiquities Act to do so. By way of background, the relevant portion of the Antiquities Act, 54 USC § 320301, now reads (in part): (a) Presidential D...
CONTINUE READINGThe Implementation Gap
What lawmakers expect isn't necessarily what happens -- sometimes for better, often for worse.
The public drama revolves around efforts to make and unmake environmental regulations. But as we all know, what statutes and rules say isn’t necessarily what happens on the ground. Often, the result is that environmental goals are frustrated. Deadlines are missed, standards are ignored or fudged, or enforcement efforts misfire. The result is incomplete implementation, falling short of the statutory mandate. We’re all familiar with the results, including illegal condu...
CONTINUE READINGThe Overlooked Part of Trump’s Executive Order on Climate Change
It Revoked a Market-Based Approach to Natural Resource Management
President Trump’s March 28th Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth has understandably received a great deal of attention from the environmental community. Commentators, including those on Legal Planet, have examined the order’s efforts to roll back the climate change initiatives of the Obama administration. Another aspect of the order, though, has been entirely overlooked and could have serious implications for market-based natural reso...
CONTINUE READINGCourt of Appeal Confirms California Cap-and-Trade is Not a Tax
It's voluntary and it provides valuable commodities to purchasers
With the feds backsliding (or worse) on climate regulation, the efforts of California and other states to tackle climate change are especially prominent and critical. So it's a welcome time for today's good news for California climate regulators: The state court of appeal has rejected industry's challenge to California's cap-and-trade program. That program is one important component of California's plan to achieve its ambitious 2020 and 2030 climate emission reduction ...
CONTINUE READINGCutting Through the Smog
New research highlights the importance of reducing ozone pollution and suggests ways to do it.
As a change of pace, here's a post that's not about Trump, Pruitt, or their friends in Congress. Two recent papers highlight the importance of EPA's tightening of the air quality standard for ozone and suggest some ways of doing so that could be more acceptable to industry. (We're talking about ground-level smog here, not the ozone layer high above the earth.) The Obama Administration issued regulations two years ago tightening the air quality standard for ozone. Indu...
CONTINUE READINGShould the Feds Leave Regulation to the States?
The more we've learned about environmental problems, the less they seem purely local.
Voices in and out of the Trump Administration have called for a shift responsibility for environmental protection to the states. Given that none of them has ever shown enthusiasm for state environmental protection, it’s possible whether their rule concern is federalism or deregulation. (In fact, as NYU's Ricky Revesz points out, Pruitt has generally opposed state-level environmental protection.) Be that as it may, there are legitimate questions about precisely where ...
CONTINUE READINGTrump’s Executive Order: Bad Policy and More Uncertainty
President Trump’s Executive Order on climate policy is an invitation to bad policymaking and legal uncertainty. The big-ticket item targeted by the Order, of course, is the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and related rules on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The EO has limited immediate legal impact: none of the major rules can be rescinded or revised without following the process required by the Administrative Procedure Act, although a number of n...
CONTINUE READINGA House Divided
The climate change executive order shows the signs of the bitter divisions within the White House.
Actually, there are two divided houses. One is the House of Representatives. The other is the White House. The divisions in the House of Representatives were on display in the abortive effort to pass a health care bill. Similar fissures in the White House are just below the surface of yesterday's executive order on climate change. Much of the executive order is entirely congenial to the radical Right and correspondingly horrifying to liberals: first, the repeal of ...
CONTINUE READINGSome Resources for Non-Experts (and for Experts Too!) on the Executive Order Rolling Back Federal Climate Change Regulations
Cutting Through the Information Overload
The President's Executive Order rolling back climate change-related initiatives, "Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth," just came out today, and there's already plenty of analysis to help people to understand its likely impact. While the short answer is that it is terrible for our country, the long answers tend to make people's eyes glaze over if they're not climate policy wonks. And as has been widely reported, there's a lot of misinformation about cl...
CONTINUE READINGTrump’s Frontal Assault on Climate Policy
The true victims aren't you and me. It's our descendants who will pay the price, long after Trump is gone.
We live in a time of contrasts. Yesterday, scientists reported more evidence that climate change will intensify heat waves and droughts in temperate zones through changes in the jet stream. Today, however, the Trump Administration initiated the process of eliminating federal climate policies. In a pointed insult to EPA staff who have worked long and hard on those policies, Trump made the announcement at EPA headquarters. The Administration’s actions have been long-e...
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