The UnBushes and the Environment
Cruz, Graham, Paul, Rubio & West are all equally hostile to environmental protection.
My post last week discussed Jeb Bush's environmental record. At this point, there's something of a free-for-all among candidates hoping to emerge as the Bush alternative - the UnBushes. Five of the remaining candidates announced or likely candidates have served in Congress, so they have scores from the League of Conservation Voters. Some of them are considered more moderate than others, but they all have essentially the same scores: 2014 Score Lifetime Score...
CONTINUE READINGAbalones and Gulls and Judges, Oh My!
Comparing the Mono Lake Committee with the Abalone Alliance
For several months now, I have been looking for a good comparison case to the Mono Lake Committee, whose work is one of the great success stories of the modern environmental movement. Why did the Mono Lake Committee succeed when other organizations failed? Lots of organizations had good causes and dedicated leaders: what made Mono Lake so special? There are lots of reasons: lack of financing, poor organization, inability to generate strategic alliances. But prosai...
CONTINUE READINGTracking Coastal Adaptation
Implementing CA’s Innovative Sea Level Rise Planning Database
Higher sea levels are already affecting California’s 3400 miles of coastline, millions of coastal residents, economy, buildings, and critical infrastructure. Yet, oddly enough for a state that is a worldwide leader in climate change mitigation, California has only recently begun to focus seriously on sea level rise adaptation. Recent reports have cited a lack of preparedness and a dismal level of coordination between the many actors engaged in sea level rise planning...
CONTINUE READINGJobs & Regs
The empirical evidence suggests that job loss from regulation is small.
It seems to be easy to make arguments one way or another about the effect of regulation on jobs. What does the evidence say? Those seeking an answer would do well to look at a recent book on the subject by Coglianese, Finkel, and Carrigan. Although the book is broader in scope, it provides a careful survey of the empirical literature. I'm going to forgo the opportunity to editorialize and just report what they found. A leading study by Michael Greenstone foun...
CONTINUE READINGWhat Will Driverless Cars Do To The Climate?
A Formidable Challenge for Policymakers and Modelers
It's no longer a question of whether driverless cars will appear on the market; it's when and how many. The answers so far seem to be: 1) soon; and 2) lots. German automakers are so confident of this that they are already negotiating with Nokia to compete to Google's self-driving cars. For Legal Planet, that means we should start thinking about how this would affect, well, the planet -- specifically emissions from vehicle miles traveled. And that presents quite a f...
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Requiem for a Bottom-Feeder
UCLA's Don Shoup Has Transformed Urban Planning
Every scholar wants to do good, productive, important work, but I suppose all us secretly would like to redefine our fields -- to go down in academic history, so to speak. Virtually none of us do. But UCLA's Don Shoup, who is retiring this year from the Urban Planning department, is one who has. And he has done so in an area that no one would have expected: parking policy. Shoup's key insight has been that urban form has been grotesquely distorted by the requirement f...
CONTINUE READINGIs Jeb Too Green?
GOP Primary voters may think so.
At this point, the GOP Presidential field looks like Jeb Bush versus Everyone Else. (Of course, there's a big fight over who get's to play Everyone Else when this particular play opens in Iowa and New Hampshire.) It's an open question whether Jeb will turn out to be too green for the average GOP primary voter. Jeb has already been attacked by the Club for Growth on this basis. The Club's communication director complains that "we did see hundreds of millions in...
CONTINUE READINGThe Climate Rides Again
Support the Emmett Institute in the California Coast Climate Ride!
Regular readers may remember Ted Parson’s Legal Planet post about his experience on last year’s NYC-DC Climate Ride. Ted described the ride as “beautiful, hard, and moving.” (Pun possibly intended.) Along with fellow riders Andy Sabin and Dan Emmett, Ted raised a ton of money for our program and brought attention to the work of the Emmett Institute and other excellent groups working on climate change issues. On May 17, the Climate Ride will be coming to Cali...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Sets 2030 Climate Emissions Target
And it looks like the right goal
Today, California Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order setting a statewide greenhouse gas emissions target to be achieved by 2030, at 40% below 1990 levels. It's an historic announcement that puts California in the vanguard of jurisdictions who have committed to goals in this 2030 timeframe (it matches the E.U.'s). California's new 2030 target takes its place alongside, and fits nicely with, the state's existing 2020 and 2050 goals, which were set, respec...
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