Judging the Environment
It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. Covering the Senate Republicans' continuing obstruction of judicial nominees is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but the good folks at Defenders of Wildlife, one of the nation's most venerable environmental organizations, have decided to invest in doing it, with their vital blog, Judging The Environment. It's run by staff attorney Glenn Sugameli. Senate obstruction thrives in darkness: no one knows what is happe...
CONTINUE READINGD.C. Circuit’s biofuels mandate ruling
The D.C. Circuit issued an opinion last Friday in American Petroleum Institute v. EPA, concerning EPA's biofuels mandate. (N.Y. Times; slip opinion). The part of the mandate at issue required refiners to incorporate higher levels of cellulosic fuel into transportation fuel. Cellulosic biofuel is in the class of "advanced biofuels" that could actually offset greenhouse gas emissions, as contrasted with corn-based ethanol, which generates approximately the same level ...
CONTINUE READINGThe NAACP and the Politics of Race and Regulation
There's a bit of a kerfuffle going on about the NAACP's defense of over-sized soft-drinks. In an amicus brief challenging New York City's new ban on the super-size, the NAACP (joined by the Hispanic Federation and an association of Korean grocers) takes a surprisingly libertarian stance against government regulation. It laments that the ban is "a slippery slope towards government-mandated regulations that curtail consumer choice and unfairly threaten small businesse...
CONTINUE READINGCan Anyone Stop the Filibuster?
The DC Circuit's outrageous opinion on Friday essentially banning recess appointments has brought further chaos to the Age of Dysfunction. Now, President Obama will confront potentially dozens of new filibusters without recourse; it didn't help that less than 24 hours beforehand, the Senate scotched the efforts at meaningful filibuster reform. So what to do now? It seems too late for this session, but you don't win political battles by giving up after one round. ...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia cap-and-trade offsets challenge rejected
Breaking: California has successfully weathered (at least in the lower court) another challenge to its cap-and-trade program. A state court has affirmed ARB's significant discretion to design offsets protocols that rely on standardized additionality mechanisms, denying a petition that had sought to invalidate those protocols. Argus has the first story on this that I've seen. Court opinion here. At the heart of the case is the contention that ARB's offsets protocols ...
CONTINUE READINGA Case of Intellectual Bankruptcy
It pains me to say this about a fellow alum of my high school, but George Will has apparently reached the point of intellectual insolvency. A case in point: his recent Washington Post op. ed. about climate change. Will begins by setting up a straw man. He slams climate advocates like Obama for supposedly basing their claims on Hurricane Sandy and the unusual hot weather of 2012, and he then implies they're idiots for using U.S. events as evidence of global chang...
CONTINUE READINGThe Rise of the Low Carbon Consumer City
Matthew Holian and I have just released a new NBER Working Paper. The "big idea" is that similar to a REESE'S Peanut Butter Cup we merge together two separate economics literatures. Glaeser and I have written about low carbon cities in the United States and China. Glaeser has published on "consumer cities" and I've written about ranking city quality of life. My new paper with Holian unites these two literatures. Downtown quality of life (funky restaura...
CONTINUE READINGSunstein on Climate Change
Should the U.S. take action on climate change prior to a global treaty? Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein argued against unilteral action in a well-known paper. The argument received more extensive discussion in a book by Eric Posner and David Weisbach (with Sunstein dropping out because of government service). I've argued (see this paper) that this position is misguided. Now that he's back at Harvard Law School, Sunstein is free to speak out, and he now endorses un...
CONTINUE READINGWe Interrupt This Blog…
...and outsource it to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns, and Money, who sets forth succinctly the meaning of Neoconfederate David Sentelle's DC Circuit opinion today regarding recess appointments. Specifically, this controversy concerned recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, and the right-wing Republican panel struck them all down, which I am sure is completely coincidental. But obviously it has vast implications for environmental law, especially i...
CONTINUE READINGNapoleon Bonaparte, Zoning Administrator
This semester, I am teaching Land Use, and in the casebook I came across this evocative and meaningful quote from Tony Arnold: The real law of land use regulation exists mostly in zoning codes and regulatory procedures, as well as in the actions or decisions of local land use regulatory bodies. Consider all the zoning, planning, and regulatory permitting decisions (e.g., conditional use permits, variances, subdivision maps or plats, site plans, planned unit developme...
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