Memo to EPA: It’s Illegal to Respond to Letters from Senators (at least in the Eighth Circuit)
I thought about entitling this post "Lamest Judicial Opinion of the Year." The case is called Iowa League of Cities v. EPA. This Eighth Circuit opinion says that two letters from EPA to a U.S. Senator are legally binding agency rules, The court then solemnly invalidates the letters because EPA failed to get public notice and comment before responding to the Senator's questions. Also, apparently, EPA is supposed to publish its responses to letters from Congress in the ...
CONTINUE READINGCan We Replace HFCs?
What was supposed to be an informal meeting between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping has yielded something substantive: an agreement to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol, and thus an agreement by both nations to reduce their use: As some environmental analysts had hoped, President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China found room to maneuver on global warming in their California desert retreat. They sidestepped the su...
CONTINUE READING“The Past Isn’t Dead…”
"...it's not even past." -- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. After its excellent special issue on "Oil in American History," the Journal of American History has done it again. Its new issue includes a State Of The Field Symposium on American Environmental History, with an interpretive essay by the University of Georgia's Paul S. Sutter, with comments from leading scholars in the field. The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History Since the Journ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Cost of Carbon Revisited
In 2010, an inter-agency task force provided a series of estimates of the “social cost of carbon” to guide government cost-benefit analyses. The estimates vary with the discount rate and the date. For instance, using a 5% discount rate, it would be worth spending hardly anything -- only $4.70 -- to eliminate a ton of CO2 in 2015. On the other hand, with a 3% discount rate, the amount rises to $23.80, and at 2.5%, it rises again to $38.40. An alternative estima...
CONTINUE READINGNEPA Saves the World!
Well, not really. But in some circumstances it might have helped. Consider the civil unrest now roiling Turkey. It began over protests against the government's plan to turn a much-beloved, historic urban park into a mosque and shopping mall. But as many news reports have indicated, the point was not simply the plan, but the high-handed and authoritarian way in which the government, and particularly Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, simply decreed that it was...
CONTINUE READINGWhich City Has the Best Parks? Trust for Public Lands Releases Annual ParkScore Ranking.
The Trust for Public Land (TPL) recently released its annual ParkScore index, which ranks the park systems of the fifty largest U.S. cities. As with all scorecards, the methodology is imperfect and the metrics are somewhat crude; but seeing how U.S. cities compare across uniform parameters is a good starting point for a larger conversation about what is important to us as a society in urban planning, parks, recreation, and environmental justice. In the ParkScore inde...
CONTINUE READINGNot Enough Money in the Pipeline
When regulators approve rates for a utility such as Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), they are making their best guess as to how much money the company will need to cover various kinds of activities. The utility starts out the process by offering its position on how much it will need for things like salaries, or rent, or activities designed to ensure gas pipeline safety. Pipeline safety has been the subject of especially close scrutiny for the last two years...
CONTINUE READINGThe Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council’s “Draft Comprehensive Plan for Restoring the Gulf Coast’s Ecosystem and Economy” does not actually include any restoration projects.
Everyone knows that life is just a little bit slower in the South; as it turns out, so is ecosystem restoration. On this date three years ago, you likely were continuing to monitor distressing television footage of the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, wondering if the millions of barrels of oil gushing out of the Macondo Well would ever stop. A headline from the June 3, 2010 edition of the New York Times read Plan for Relief Wells Spurs Hope ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Curious Case of Positive Train Control
In a recent column, George Will uses positive train control as a poster child for the evils of government regulation, while also complaining about the "democracy deficit" of agency regulations. Actually, his two points contradict each other. Positive train control is really an example of democracy in action rather than bureaucratic excess -- an automated safety system specifically mandated by Congress and moving forward in its present form only because Congress gav...
CONTINUE READINGAlex Hall’s Work on Climate Change and Los Angeles
My UCLA colleague Alex Hall has developed a model for predicting future climate conditions across Los Angeles areas such as Venice vs. Pasadena. Take a look at Tables 2 and 3 of this report. As an economist, I'd like to make a point for lawyers to think about. Take a look at Table 3 and note that Professor Hall predicts very few extra 95 F degree days in Venice and Santa Monica relative to other parts of Los Angeles. This suggests that the land zoning codes in ...
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