Still Waiting For Supreme Court Decision on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cert Petition
We May Learn This Week Whether Court Takes Up Important Climate Change Case
Court watchers are still waiting to learn whether the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the second most important federal case involving greenhouse gas emissions, Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA. The Court is closed today for a federal holiday (not because of the shutdown) but any day we should hear about whether it will take up the case involving a series of Clean Air Act (CAA) rules that regulate greenhouse gas emissions from big industrial plants, kno...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Denial and the First Amendment
The First Amendment protects even the right to support demonstrably false positions like climate denial.
The editors of the L.A. Times won't publish letters by climate deniers, on the ground that they don't want to take up valuable space with false information. Which raises the question: what does the First Amendment have to say about climate denial? Nothing in constitutional law is 100% clear, but here's a stab at the answers to some key questions: 1. Can a newspaper ban letters by climate deniers? Absolute yes, because the First Amendment applies only to the gov...
CONTINUE READINGNot all drones are weapons of war
Scientists promote low-cost aerial drones as conservation tools
Speaking of visualizing environmental problems, they are hidden for different reasons and therefore can be revealed by a variety of different mechanisms. Drones are one tool with a great deal of potential. Aerial drones have gotten a lot of attention as weapons of war or counterterrorism in the U.S. arsenal. Whatever you think about the use of heavily armed unmanned military craft to "wag[e] war on individuals," though, it's worth noting that drones can take many ...
CONTINUE READINGCalfiornia Bans Lead Ammunition
New Law Is Welcome, But Probably Won't Take Full Effect Until 2019
California Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation that will ban the use of lead ammunition in California by hunters. In approving AB 711 (Rendon), Brown withstood furious lobbying efforts by the National Rifle Association and some (but not all) hunting organizations, who had urged the Governor to veto the legislation. AB 711 was supported by a broad coalition of conservation groups, including the National Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife. The lead amm...
CONTINUE READINGHappy Birthday, TSCA!
With the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) celebrating its 37th birthday today, I was thinking what we should get it as a birthday gift. Here’s one idea; how about a little respect. I’ve blogged before about how the statute has become one of the most denigrated environmental laws on the books. It seems that every other year or so, the General Accounting Office, Congressional Research Service, an NGO, or law professor (myself included) issues yet another conde...
CONTINUE READINGDenial As a Way of Life
Climate denial is closely related to debt-ceiling denial.
As it turns out, many of the same people who deny that climate change is a problem also deny that government default would be a problem. No doubt there are several reasons: the fact that Barack Obama is on the opposite side of both issues; the general impermeability of ideologues to facts or expert opinion; a general suspicion of elite views. But I’d like to suggest that there is also a deeper belief about the invulnerability of systems to outside shocks, either ...
CONTINUE READINGProgress In Biosolids Management Illustrates Challenges For Innovation
Cross-posted at the ReNUWIt blog. A pilot project to convert biosolids from Delta Diablo Sanitation District’s wastewater treatment plant will begin next year in Antioch. The prize would be recovery of energy content from biosolids that, if successful and expanded to a national scale, will move the entire wastewater treatment industry in the direction of producing more energy than is currently required to treat sewage. Energy recovery from wastewater during the a...
CONTINUE READINGThe Debt Ceiling and the Environment
The House GOP plans to require a rollback of environmental regulations as a condition for raising the debt ceiling. This would be a massive power-grab by the House at the expense of the President and the Senate.
It slipped under the radar screen due to all the furor over the impending government shutdown, but the NY Times ran an important article two weeks ago about the debt ceiling. The Republican plan is apparently to condition their agreement to raise the debt ceiling and save the country from default on a massive regulatory rollback. This effort, if successful, would mark a huge power shift from the Senate and the President to the House of Representatives. Here ar...
CONTINUE READINGBetter Standards for Designing City Streets That Work for People and the Environment
In 2010, Berkeley Law's Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, through its City Streets Project, and the Berkeley School of Environmental Design's Center for Resource Efficient Communities issued a report that looked at the ways in which industry standards for street design can interfere with efforts to make streets more pedestrian-friendly and the encourage greater use of mass transit. We asked why cities often felt compelled to rely on standards that emphasize...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Enacts Nation’s First Comprehensive Fracking Law—And Everyone’s Unhappy
Controversial But Promising, SB 4 Constitutes Tangible Progress on the Fracking Front
Late last month the California Legislature passed, and Governor Jerry Brown signed into law, the nation's first comprehensive system of regulating hydraulic fracturing, the oil and gas drilling technique more commonly known as "fracking." It turns out that no one--the oil and gas industry, surface landowners or environmentalists--is particularly happy with the new law. And that actually suggests that, on balance, the new California fracking law represents a positive deve...
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