D.C. Circuit Affirms Polar Bear Listing
In an opinion released earlier today, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected challenges to the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Read the full opinion, In re: Polar Bear Endangered Species Act Listing and Section 4(d) Rule Litigation - MDL No. 1993. Holly has discussed the ongoing litigation over the polar bear listing in depth here and here. As I mentioned in a previous post, the polar bear is one ...
CONTINUE READINGThe US wins the latest round in the Casitas saga
In 2008, the Federal Circuit surprised a lot of legal academics by ruling that the Casitas Municipal Water District's takings claim, which arose from a requirement that the district construct and operate a fish ladder to allow endangered steelhead to pass its diversion dam, should be analyzed using the physical takings test. That didn't resolve the case, because the District had not yet established that it had any property right. The US had conditionally accepted the Dis...
CONTINUE READINGThe First Day of Spring, 2013
...was today, February 28th. At least in my non-scientific, highly qualitative opinion. When I was in college during the 1980's, spring break occurred during the second and third weeks of March. I would fly back to Los Angeles from New England, to be greeted by a southern California winter, which of course wasn't much of a winter at all: cool and temperate, not cold at all, but not warm, either. Something always happened, however, during the third week of March. During...
CONTINUE READINGDoes the President Even Need the Senate to Confirm Appointees?
Damn. I suppose that it's an occupational hazard of law professors that they kick around an idea, only to find that someone has beaten them to the punch. Well, Harvard's Matthew Stephenson has done that to me, sort of, with an essay in the most recent volume of the Yale Law Journal entitled, Can the President Appoint Principal Executive Officers Without a Senate Confirmation Vote? Here's the abstract: It is generally assumed that the Constitution requires the ...
CONTINUE READINGWho Is Ernest Moniz?
And why should you care? Moniz is a nuclear physics professor at MIT, the director of the MIT energy project, and at least according to a lot of reports, President Obama's first choice to head the Energy Department. Anything not to like about that? Well, lots of environmentalists don't seem to. The Daily Beast reports that "environmental organizations are girding for a fight over a Moniz appointment. The objection seems to be that Moniz has in the past, advoca...
CONTINUE READINGNewsflashes from the B-School
You might think that business schools would take the same views of policy as the Chamber of Commerce, but that's not necessarily true. The Haas School here at Berkeley has a very interesting energy blog. I don't always find their conclusions congenial but they're always interesting. Here are some recent posts: Information and energy use. This post reports a study showing that consumers respond vigorously to improved information about the costs of energy use. V...
CONTINUE READINGSecond California cap-and-trade auction sells almost $225 million worth of allowances
Results are in from California's second cap-and-trade auction. California Air Resources Board (CARB) offered 12.9 million 2013-vintage allowances along with 9.56 million 2016-vintage allowances. CARB sold all of the 2013 vintage at $13.62 per allowance and almost half (4.44 million) of the 2016 vintage at $10.71 per allowance. In total, that amounts to a bit more than $223 million. For two auctions in a row, California sold all available current-year vintage allowance...
CONTINUE READINGIgnorance as Political Bliss: The Republican War on Social Science
Several recent posts on this blog have been about the political process, discussing issues like political polarization, congressional deadlock, and special interest groups. The discipline of political science is in large part the study of how collective decisions get made. It would seem to be in everyone's interest to have a better understanding of collective decision-making. But sadly, having already written off the theory of evolution and climate science, Republi...
CONTINUE READINGThe Ever-Growing Crisis Over the Nation’s Nuclear Waste Non-Solution
The Associated Press reports that six underground storage tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are leaking a witches' brew of high-level nuclear wastes into the soil that threatens regional groundwater supplies. This news highlights a crisis of national proportions that has for too long gone unaddressed. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the nation. Built during World War II, the federally owned and operated facility produced the p...
CONTINUE READINGCasting a Shadow on the Future of Shale Gas
Current projections for shale oil and gas are huge. But are they realistic? An article in the February 21 issue of Nature suggests that these projections may be too optimistic: Wells decline rapidly within a few years. Those in the top five US plays typically produced 80–95% less gas after three years. In my view, the industry practice of fitting hyperbolic curves to data on declining productivity, and inferring lifetimes of 40 years or more, is too optimistic. Exis...
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