Call for Cabinet Nominations!
With all the heat generated by the nominations for the Secretaries of State and Defense, it is easy to overlook that President Obama must make nominations for four agencies critical to environmental policy: EPA, Interior, Energy, and USTR. And it says something that there do not seem to be obvious, strong candidates that environmentalists can support for these posts. Consider Interior, for example. Most of the speculation now centers on outgoing Washington State G...
CONTINUE READINGBicameral Congressional Task Force on Climate Change Formed Today
In the days that have followed the President's strong statement on climate change in his second inaugural, many have speculated about what role Congress will play, if any, in moving forward on this issue. (See Greenwire's story here, for example, covering the question and writing about signs from WH press secretary Jay Carney that the President "will pursue both legislative and executive authority actions to address climate change," perhaps with a legislative empha...
CONTINUE READINGCan We Make a Deal on Keystone XL?
Well, no, we probably can't. But President Obama might be well advised to try. Republicans are currently trying to force the White House into approving the pipeline. Nebraska's Governor recently flip-flopped and supported Keystone, saying now that he trusts TransCanada to do the necessary environmental work to protect the state's econoloigcally sensitive Sandhill region. In response, the State Department has delayed making the decision until March. All the pol...
CONTINUE READINGThe Case Against CEQA “Reform” — San Diego’s Lame Transportation Plan
The movement to “reform” the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a citizen-enforced law that requires public agencies to analyze environmental impacts of significant proposed projects, is gaining strength in 2013. Everyone from the Governor to the Senate President to business groups to public agencies are joining forces, singing the same anti-CEQA song. Their evidence that CEQA is broken? A heaping of random anecdotes of CEQA abuses, and one misleading ...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Change in the Second Inaugural
From the prepared text: We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sou...
CONTINUE READINGThe Political Path to Federal Climate Legislation
Grist has a number of very interesting posts discussing why the effort to pass climate change legislation failed in 2010 and how to succeed next time. The exchange was prompted by a major new paper by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist. She concludes: Ideological advocates, carbon industry dead-enders, and populist anti-government forces are the ones who hold sway in the GOP right now, including billionaire elites and grassroots activists fiercely opposed to ...
CONTINUE READINGAn Introduction to Environmental Economics
I'm a quirky teacher. I don't use textbooks and I try to focus on real world examples. Here are 30 short videos about environmental economics. Here are all of my course materials for my Winter 2013 Environmental Economics undergraduate course at UCLA. I focus on incentives and empirical hypothesis testing....
CONTINUE READINGTheda Skocpol on Federal Carbon Policy Design
Harvard's Theda Skocpol provides a compelling narrative and analysis of why Waxman-Markey didn't become law. In terms of my own empirical work, Kotchen and I document using Google Trends that interest in "global warming" fell in states with rising unemployment rates. Gurney, Zhou, Michael Cragg and I document that Conservative Representatives from high carbon and poor districts do not vote in favor of carbon regulation. Here is the published version of this ...
CONTINUE READINGIs CEQA “Greenmail” A Problem?
Via PropertyProf blog, here’s an article on the real estate blog LA Curbed in which they disclose a previously secret settlement agreement between an LA neighborhood group and a local developer. The agreement resolved potential CEQA litigation by the neighborhood group against a possible condo development proposed by the developer. In particular, Curbed is outraged that (a) the agreement is secret; (b) the agreement gives the neighborhood group $250,000 for “moni...
CONTINUE READINGThe Mystery of Koontz: “Why Are We Here?”
Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog reports that the plaintiff's argument in the Court's highest-profile Takings case of the year, Koontz v. St. John's River Water Management District, did not go well. Both Rick and I have blogged about the case before, and the more I think about it, it seems to me that the case has been conceptualized incorrectly. Supposedly, Koontz is about a "failed exaction": in exchange for granting Koontz a permit, the Water District insisted on a mon...
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