Legal Responses to the Santa Barbara Refugio Oil Spill
Exploring potential penalties and damages
Last Tuesday, a 24-inch underground oil pipeline on the beautiful Santa Barbara County coastline burst for reasons as of yet unknown. Over the course of several hours, an estimated 101,000 gallons of crude oil spilled down a storm drain, on the shoreline, and into the Pacific Ocean. As of late last week, oil had spread over 9.5 square miles of ocean and almost 9 miles of shoreline, from Arroyo Hondo Beach to Refugio State beach. Sadly, coastal and marine oil spills ar...
CONTINUE READINGA (Sometimes) Beautiful Equilibrium
John Nash's contribution to game theory illuminates environmental issues.
John Nash and his wife died yesterday in a cab crash while returning from a trip to Norway to receive a major mathematical prize. He is best known to the public because of the movie "A Beautiful Mind", which described his struggle with mental illness. His concept of the Nash Equilibrium is basic to a great deal of economic theory. It also has a lot to tell us about environmental issues. The fundamental idea is very simple. Consider a situation where a finite n...
CONTINUE READINGImmanuel Kant and the California Water Crisis
How Should Individuals Decide How Much Water to Use?
Last week's rain in southern California will hardly make a dent in the state's devastating drought, and it raises an important question for individual consumers: exactly how should we decide how much water to use? There are obvious things: don't hose down your driveway, take shorter showers, do full loads in the washer. But there are a lot of other decisions to make, and it isn't clear to me how to go about choosing. So consider this as an example: As my wife n...
CONTINUE READINGGermany-California Climate Cooperation?
Lecture By Winfried Kretschmann, Baden-Württemberg Minister-President, tonight at UC Berkeley, could be a start
Germany and California represent two global leaders when it comes to addressing climate change. For example, Germany has been on a renewable energy spree, despite its relatively minimal solar insolation, while California has committed to reducing greenhouse gases and incubating emerging clean technology industries, like energy storage, electric vehicles, and renewables. But at the sub-national level, certain states within Germany are pushing the envelope even more...
CONTINUE READINGDistrust of Congress (And Why It Matters)
It's easy to joke about Congress's public ill-repute, but it's a serious problem.
A recent poll shows that public approval of Congress is still in the basement (though perhaps not flat on the floor, as it was before). This graph shows the trends: But this poll on public "approval" doesn't tell the whole story. Here's one that asks instead whether Americans have confidence in key institutions: The configurations are different in an interesting way. The "approval" measure had a long downward slide until 2006 and since then has been pre...
CONTINUE READINGThe 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...
CONTINUE READINGJoin Our Mailing List
Climate policy is changing rapidly. Stay in the loop with expert analysis via email Monday - Friday.
