Exxon Cares!
At this point, we don't know much about Exxon's oil spill near Mayflower, Arkansas -- especially because Exxon doesn't seem to want to let many people look at what's going on. Twitter to the rescue! There's an account called "Exxon Cares", telling you all that you need to know, and...what's that you say? That's not an Exxon account? Yeah, probably: Tar sands is the chunky peanut butter of oil. #Delicious — Exxon Cares, Y'all (@ExxonCares) April 10, 2013 Exxon d...
CONTINUE READINGKing Coal’s Fading Grip
According to a new study from Duke, coal may be on the way out. as "[l]ow natural gas prices and stricter, federal emission regulations are promoting a shift away from coal power plants and toward natural gas plants as the lowest-cost means of generating electricity in the United States." The authors estimate that "the economic viability of 9% of current coal capacity is challenged by low natural gas prices, while another 56% would be challenged by the stricter emission ...
CONTINUE READINGIn memoriam: Joe Feller, much more than a law professor
Today I learned the sad news that Joe Feller, Professor of Law at Arizona State University, has died after being hit by a car. Joe was a fine scholar (coincidentally, I was reading a terrific piece he wrote on The Adjudication that Ate Arizona Water Law when the news came in), but he was so much more than that. Joe, whose father David was a highly respected labor and civil rights lawyer for two decades before he joined the faculty at Berkeley Law, knew firsthand that (...
CONTINUE READINGAre Filibusters of Executive Branch Nominees Constitutional?
President Obama’s announcement today making three nominations to the National Labor Relations Board should remind us that the GOP is the party of permanent constitutional crisis. It has been quite clear from the beginning of the Obama Administration that the Republicans simply have no interest in allowing the NLRB to function. That shouldn’t be much if a surprise: it’s what you believe if you are a plutocrat. Besides, it’s nothing new: Republicans have expl...
CONTINUE READINGU.S. Bureau of Land Management Violated NEPA When Selling Oil and Gas Leases in California
On April 8, a federal magistrate judge issued the first major ruling in a California fracking lawsuit, finding that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to take the necessary “hard look” at the impact of hydraulic fracturing when it sold oil and gas leases in California. The Northern District of California court held that when BLM sold four leases in 2011 for 2,700 acres of federal land in Monte...
CONTINUE READINGBreaking News: Brown Approves California Cap-and-Trade Linkage to Quebec’s System
California Governor Jerry Brown will allow the state's Air Resources Board to link its cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a Quebec cap-and-trade program modeled after California's. Brown sent a letter to CARB today making four findings that he is required to decide before allowing the linkage to go forward. CARB must still take several steps before the systems fully link but has continually expressed its intent to expand its cap-and-trade p...
CONTINUE READINGA Unique Definition of “Interfaith”
Today in the mail appears an interesting program from the Wallage Stegner Center of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law: this coming Friday and Saturday, the Center will host "Religion, Faith, and the Environment" with lots of important guest speakers. Good on them. But then when I looked at the program, something strange popped out at me. The initial panel of the program goes from 8:15 to 11:45 (with a break), and concerns "Ecological Protection, E...
CONTINUE READINGDear Washington Post: Chesapeake Bay *is* unbalanced
An article in the Washington Post yesterday ran with the headline, "Crabs, supersized by carbon pollution, may upset Chesapeake's balance." Not to nitpick, but Chesapeake Bay is unbalanced and has been that way for well over a century. The article references some interesting research from the University of North Carolina that looks at the effects of ocean acidification on blue crab and oyster populations. Ocean acidification is the result of increased carbon levels in...
CONTINUE READINGGood environmental data matters for environmental litigation
If you aren’t reading Dave Owen’s blog posts over at Environmental Law Prof Blog, you should be. His most recent post is about a recent Endangered Species Act (ESA) case in Texas: Environmental plaintiffs sued, arguing that the state of Texas had allowed too many water withdrawals upstream from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, a critical breeding site for the endangered whooping crane. The plaintiffs won in the district court, but Dave does a great job of ...
CONTINUE READINGMy Harvard Business Review Piece on Bullet Trains and Fiscal Tradeoffs
John Lennon sang "Imagine". In this new HBR piece, I "imagine" Philadelphia home price dynamics if an Amtrak Bullet Train reduced its time cost to Penn Station to 30 minutes. Using data from China's experience, we document empirical evidence supporting this prediction....
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