The problem of stale NEPA reviews
There’s been a mini-boom in uranium mining in the United States, in part because of increased interest in nuclear power as a partial response to climate change. Using nuclear power to reduce greenhouse gases has been quite controversial because of the obvious risks that nuclear power poses (exemplified by the Fukushima disaster in Japan). But uranium mining has its own impacts – both on human health and on the landscape and wildlife. Given those impacts, it’s ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Tea Party, the GOP, and the Environment
According to a recent study, non-Tea Party members of the GOP are actually a bit closer to Democrats than to Tea Party members on environmental issues. That creates a conundrum for the GOP. More than half of Republicans support the Tea Party, and supporters tend to be more active than others. Yet the Tea Party favors candidates with dubious electoral prospects. Consider a couple of recent news items from Political Wire: Ted Cruz is considering a presidential run, a...
CONTINUE READINGLeave Agribusiness Lobbyists ALOOONE!!!
A few weeks ago, I posted about the Obama Administration’s effort to change outrageous and wasteful food aid rules that line the pockets of agribusiness and shipping companies. The more you look at the absurd policy preventing USAID from purchasing food locally for famine relief, the worse it looks: it wastes money, it prevents getting food to people that need it, it undermines local agriculture, and it despoils the environment. I didn’t think it could get an...
CONTINUE READINGOne More For the Supreme Court Scorecard: Chief Justice Roberts Feels Very Sorry for Multinational Corporations
In my view, Dan's helpful post the other day about the Supreme Court's environmental cases neglected one very important case decided just a few days ago: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, about which I have blogged earlier. The "in my view" in the last sentence is more than throat-clearing, for Kiobel raises the question, also flagged by Dan, about what an environmental case is. Kiobel concerned the grotesque human rights violations that occurred against the Ogoni pe...
CONTINUE READINGResearch? We Don’t Need No Stinking Research!
Yes, this post is about the House GOP. How did you guess? Lamar Smith, chair of the House science committee, has opened an unprecedented investigation into five NSF research projects, demanding copies of peer reviews and other information in a letter to the NSF director. I looked up the abstracts for the five projects that Smith is investigating. They make it clear that the GOP is trying to chill certain types of research. In authoritarian regimes, researchers have ...
CONTINUE READINGA Strong OIRA Pick
I was traveling and missed the news about the selection of Howard Shelanski to replace Cass Sunstein as head of OIRA, the White House office that oversees government regulations. Or, regulatory czar, in simpler terms. He's a terrific pick. Howard was on the faculty here when I first came to Berkeley and got to know him over lunches at Steve's Korean Barbecue, a student dive near the law school. He has four traits that augur well for his new position: he's smart, ...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Justice, Metrics & California’s San Joaquin Valley
This week the California Environmental Protection Agency issued a disturbing but worthwhile report on environmental justice issues in California. That report confirms what many environmental justice advocates and state residents already assumed: that the San Joaquin Valley is--far and away--the most environmentally-challenged region of the state. According to the CalEPA press release accompanying the report, the study is "the nation’s first comprehensive statewide env...
CONTINUE READINGSome Good News on California’s Water Planning
Last week at this time, I objected to an Associated Press piece showing how California has left unspent nearly $500 million worth of funds for water projects. At the end of article, there was a little note saying, "oh yes; experts think that California will need nearly $39 billion to update its water infrastructure." Talk about burying your lede! And I said so. One of the great things about Legal Planet is the quality of its readers. Shortly thereafter, I hear...
CONTINUE READINGOT 2012 Supreme Court Scorecard
This Supreme Court Term features a number of environmental cases. We're now about three-quarters of the way through the Term, so I thought it might be helpful to update my earlier post about the Court's environmental agenda. I've also added links to postings about the cases. My impression is that the Court is interested in environmental law to the extent that it seems to impinge on the rights of individual property owners. But the Court doesn't seem take much of a...
CONTINUE READINGGoing Global with CBA
A new book by Michael Livermore and Richard Revesz discusses what they consider the growing use of CBA outside of the United States, where it got its start as a tool for assessing regulations. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book concerns developing countries. Use of CBA in developing countries poses special challenges. Valuation data is rarely available for those countries, so regulatory benefits have to be extrapolated from studies of developed countrie...
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