What Does Justice Scalia’s Death Mean for the Clean Power Plan?

Basically, everything

I am very sensitive to the emotions surrounding the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia and feel deep sympathy for his family, many friends and colleagues.   He was a towering intellectual force and we will be dissecting his influence for years to come.  Yet the death of a public figure -- especially one as important and significant as Scalia -- has obvious and immediate ramifications far beyond the pain and loss his loved ones feel for him.  And on environmental i...

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Mitch McConnell’s “War on Coal Miners”

McConnell seems to care more about political payback than the miners' welfare.

Mitch McConnell's website trumpets that last fall he received  an award from the Washington Coal Club "for his work to defend Kentucky’s coal jobs, miners and their families."  His concern for miners turns out not to be so deep.  As the Washington Post reported last week, he single-handedly blocked a measure to rescue health and pension benefits for over a hundred thousand retired and disabled miners nationally. It would be unfair to say that McConnell hasn't ...

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Justice Scalia and Environmental Law

Scalia's decisions were almost unremittingly anti-environmental.

Over the past three decades, Justice Scalia did much to shape environmental law, nearly always in a conservative direction.  Because of the importance of his rulings, environmental lawyers and scholars are all familiar with his work.  But for the benefit of others, I thought it might be helpful to summarize his major environmental decisions.  The upshot was to restrict EPA's authority to interpret environmental statutes, make property rights a stronger bulwark agains...

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Reflections on the Coastal Commission’s Implosion

The Implications of the Decision to Fire Charles Lester - and the Decision Not to Explain It

As Rick Frank insightfully discussed earlier this week, the California Coastal Commission has fired its former executive director, Charles Lester. Readers interested in more background information and analysis should read Rick’s post, as well as the excellent reporting by Tony Barboza and others from the LA Times. (And anyone who wants to hear about it can also listen to this archived podcast from earlier this week, in which I discussed it on KPCC-FM.) I won’t rehash...

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The Supreme Court Stay and the Dog That Didn’t Bark

EPA's Requirements for New Plants Remain Intact

The Supreme Court's stay of the Clean Power Plan was a surprise to almost all observers, maybe even to the lawyers requesting the stay.  We can only speculate on what the five majority Justices had in mind, since there was no written opinion. The practical impact of the decision is also unclear. E&E news reports that the stay "doesn't amount to much for many of the nation's electric utilities, as they were already planning to close down their older coal-fired gene...

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California Coastal Commissioners Fire Executive Director Charles Lester

Personnel Dispute is Commission's Biggest Political Controversy in Over a Decade

Following months of public controversy and a marathon 10 1/2 hour hearing Wednesday in Morro Bay, a closely-divided California Coastal Commission voted to fire its Executive Director, Charles Lester.  The Commission vote to remove Lester was 7-5. Lester, who as Executive Director has led the Commission staff for the past 4 1/2 years, is the first Executive Director to be terminated in the 44-year history of the Commission. Over the past two months, several unnamed...

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The Decision to Halt the Implementation of the Clean Power Plan is Outrageous

And Inconsistent with the Law

As I wrote earlier today, there is nothing good to be said about the U.S. Supreme Court decision today that halted the implementation of the President's Clean Power Plan.  The decision is a huge blow to the President's climate agenda, it's a setback for the Paris Agreement and it is a bad sign that the Court may ultimately strike the plan down.  But I should also emphasize that the decision is way outside the bounds of normal Supreme Court practice and is, to put it bl...

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Initial Thoughts on the Supreme Court Staying the Clean Power Plan

Short Answer: There's Nothing Good to Say About it

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 half-page order, dealt the Obama Administration a big blow today by preventing its Clean Power Plan from going into effect until the case can be heard on its merits.  We know from the order that the Court split in the usual way, with the four more liberal members of the Court voting to allow the CPP to go into effect and the 5 conservatives -- importantly including Justice Kennedy -- "staying" the plan (the legal term for preventing t...

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The Puzzling Persistence of Takings Litigation

Litigation rates dropped by only a little even when the real estate market collapsed.

Takings litigation is a bit of a puzzle. You would expect the amount of litigation to go up and down depending on the situation in the real estate market.  If there's a lot of new construction, there are more opportunities for conflict between developers and regulators.  And if prices are high, so are the economic stakes, which should make litigation more appealing for developers.  But the housing bubble seems to have done only a bit to increase litigation, and the ...

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Public Prosecutors Zero In on SoCal Gas, Porter Ranch Disaster

California Attorney General, L.A. District Attorney File New Enforcement Prosecutions

The massive leak from Southern California Gas Company's Aliso Canyon natural gas field in northwestern Los Angeles County was discovered on October 23rd of last year and, more than three months later, shows no sign of abating.  Public prosecutors have pretty clearly lost patience with SoCal gas and its ineffective remediation efforts to date.  This week, those prosecutors have "gone to the mattresses," filing two major environmental enforcement actions against the ...

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