Better 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...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Review of Free Trade Agreements
Why aren't we talking about climate change?
Last week, the period for public comment on an interim environmental review of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement closed, marking perhaps the last significant opportunity for public input on the environmental impacts of the proposed agreement. The review was conducted to identify potential environmental effects of the TPP, as required by an Executive Order signed by President Clinton in 1999. Since the Order was issued, the Office of the U.S. Tr...
CONTINUE READINGA new treaty on global mercury: not much, but better than nothing
Next week in Japan, an international diplomatic meeting will sign and adopt a new environmental treaty, the Minamata Convention on Mercury Pollution, which was finalized in negotiations earlier this year. In its name – and in locating the conference in Minamata and the nearby city of Kumamoto, in Kyushu– the convention commemorates the victims of Minamata disease, mercury poisoning suffered by thousands of residents in Minamata and nearby areas in the 1950s and 19...
CONTINUE READINGCarbon Budgeting
The IPCC highlights the importance of the carbon budget, the total amount of CO2 emitted during this century.
The first volume of the latest IPCC report is now public. It's a very lengthy document, and since it's written by physical scientists rather than journalists, it's not an easy read. One important concept that seems to be a lot more important in this version of the IPCC is the carbon budget. The key facts: First, the total temperature change is roughly proportional to the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Second, the precise sequence of the e...
CONTINUE READINGThe Federal Government Shutdown and Environmental Enforcement
No government employees means less environmental enforcement
There’s lots of news coverage about the federal government shutdown. Here’s an environmental angle to the impact of the shutdown. Most of the employees for the various environmental agencies are “non-essential” personnel – including many of the enforcement personnel. Here’s a local example from the Bay Area. It seems a bunch of folks are taking advantage of the absence of federal enforcement personnel to do some extra fishing without permits. It’s...
CONTINUE READINGU.C. DAVIS LAW SCHOOL CONVENES “ESA AT 40” CONFERENCE
U.C. Davis School of Law's California Environmental Law & Policy Center to host major conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the federal Endangered Species Act
This Friday, October 4th, the U.C. Davis School of Law's California Environmental Law & Policy Center (CELPC) will convene a major conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the federal Endangered Species Act. "The ESA at 40: Examining Its Past and Exploring Its Future" will bring to King Hall a broad array of ESA experts, including government policymakers, scientists, economists and academics. Keynoting the all-day conference will be former U.S. Secretary ...
CONTINUE READINGNew Chemical Regulations Go Live in California
Making Prevention Real?
Today, after years of discussions and drafts, California's new Safer Consumer Product regulations take effect. They create a comprehensive chemicals regulatory scheme having three steps: identification and prioritization of consumer products containing chemicals of greatest concern (“product-chemical combinations”); performance of “alternative analyses” by the manufacturers of those high priority product-chemical combinations; and selection of regulatory respo...
CONTINUE READINGThe New IPCC Assessment, Carbon Budgets and the Role of the U.S.
National Academy Study Used the Carbon Budget Approach Taken in New IPCC Report to Show How the U.S. Could Limit Emissions
Today's major environmental news is, of course, the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 5th Assessment Report addressing the physical science basis for climate change. The findings are strong and alarming: warming of the climate system is unequivocal and unprecedented; atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions "have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years" and "human influence o...
CONTINUE READINGWelcome to the New Legal Planet
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