Of Corn and Climate
Trouble may be brewing in the corn belt.
We continue to gain a better understanding of the impacts of climate change, which are sometimes subtle and unexpected. Two articles in Science report significant new research. The first report comes from two researchers at the University of Illinois. Corn, like other plants, needs to pull CO2 from the air for photosynthesis. But the same tiny pores in leaves that allow the CO2 to come in also allow water to evaporate and get out. In warmer weather, evaporat...
CONTINUE READINGWhat Will India’s New Regime Do About Climate?
Modi Will Make Solar-Powered Trains Run On Time
When the world's largest democracy goes through a political earthquake, people around the world notice, even in the United States. So the victory of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and its authoritarian leader Narendra Modi, has the pundits scurrying to explain what it all means. Much of the early analysis is pessimistic, and with good reason. The BJP in general, and Modi in particular, endorses a reactionary form of Hinduism that targets...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s Infill Backlash
It's here, and it needs to be addressed
For environmental and economic reasons, we want jobs and people to move back to our cities. People living in cities pollute less because they don't drive as much and tend to live in smaller homes. Economically, they can save a lot of money on transportation and energy costs, while thriving neighborhoods can create cultural and economic hotspots with the innovation that comes from frequent and diverse human interactions. The trends so far have been good for "infill" li...
CONTINUE READINGRaisins D’Etre?
Further proof that takings law is a mess, from a case involving government support for raisin growers.
Horne v. USDA might well have been a law professor's hypothetical. In order to smooth out raisin prices, the federal government has a program of taking "surplus" raisins off the market and diverting them to "non-competitive markets" like foreign countries and school lunch programs. The effect is to keep up market prices for raisins. The plaintiffs naturally wanted the benefit of higher market prices without having to give up any raisins, so they disobeyed the law. ...
CONTINUE READINGThom Tillis, the GOP Establishment, and the Environment
Tillis is not a Tea Party extremist on regulatory issues, but he's also been no friend of environmental protection .
Thom Tillis's victory in the North Carolina primary for U.S. Senate was widely seen as a victory for the Republican Establishment over the Tea Party. What does this mean on environmental issues? In other word, where do "Establishment Republicans" stand on the environment? In Tillis's case, lowering regulatory costs seems to be the highest priority. According to his website, Tillis is dedicated to regulatory rollback: As a businessman who led the reform movement tha...
CONTINUE READINGAn Opening for Climate Adaptation?
Marco Rubio seems willing to admit that climate change exists and is causing real problems. That's a start.
During an interview with ABC's Jonathan Kent, Marco Rubio made a very interesting statement about climate change. He took the standard anti-science position about the causes of climate change. "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," he said. He went on to reject the idea of limiting emissions: "I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything abou...
CONTINUE READINGEmissions Trading and the Supreme Court
Advocates of cap-and-trade should find support from the Supreme Court's opinion in the cross-state pollution case.
In a number of areas, including climate change regulations, a key question is EPA's power to control compliance costs. A particularly important method is the use of cap-and-trade systems. For instance, there has been considerable discussion of whether EPA could authorize states to use cap-and-trade to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, as opposed to imposing uniform standards on all power plants. Although it did not rule directly with emissions trad...
CONTINUE READINGJustice Scalia’s Puzzling Dissent
Justice Scalia's dissent in EME Homer contains a number of unusual lapses in substance and tone.
As I've been studying the opinions in EME Homer, I'm increasingly struck by the oddities of Justice Scalia's dissent. There was a flap last week about his blunder, later quietly corrected, in describing one of his own past opinions. But that's not the only peculiarity of the dissent. As a quick reminder, EME Homer involved EPA's effort to deal with interstate pollution under the clean air act. Figuring out how to allocate the clean-up responsibility betw...
CONTINUE READINGNot nonsensical at all
The main State Capitol columnist for the Sacramento Bee wrote a piece today on whether California should encourage or discourage additional oil development in the state. This has been a major debate politically, with Governor Brown resisting calls by many environmental groups to ban fracking. Brown has noted the potential economic benefits from tapping into the possibly huge oil reserves in California that could be unlocked with various advanced oil and gas recovery tech...
CONTINUE READINGA summer course for foreign lawyers interested in US environmental law
This summer Berkeley Law is providing an exciting opportunity for lawyers around the world who are interested in learning more about US environmental law. Our seventeen-day course in late June and early July provides a thorough grounding in all the major issues in US environmental law (ranging from air pollution to natural resources, water rights to environmental justice). The course will be taught by the excellent teachers and scholars here at Berkeley using a ranging o...
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