Dear Washington Post: Chesapeake Bay *is* unbalanced
An article in the Washington Post yesterday ran with the headline, "Crabs, supersized by carbon pollution, may upset Chesapeake's balance." Not to nitpick, but Chesapeake Bay is unbalanced and has been that way for well over a century. The article references some interesting research from the University of North Carolina that looks at the effects of ocean acidification on blue crab and oyster populations. Ocean acidification is the result of increased carbon levels in...
CONTINUE READINGGood environmental data matters for environmental litigation
If you aren’t reading Dave Owen’s blog posts over at Environmental Law Prof Blog, you should be. His most recent post is about a recent Endangered Species Act (ESA) case in Texas: Environmental plaintiffs sued, arguing that the state of Texas had allowed too many water withdrawals upstream from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, a critical breeding site for the endangered whooping crane. The plaintiffs won in the district court, but Dave does a great job of ...
CONTINUE READINGMy Harvard Business Review Piece on Bullet Trains and Fiscal Tradeoffs
John Lennon sang "Imagine". In this new HBR piece, I "imagine" Philadelphia home price dynamics if an Amtrak Bullet Train reduced its time cost to Penn Station to 30 minutes. Using data from China's experience, we document empirical evidence supporting this prediction....
CONTINUE READINGPracticing Environmental Law: The World of New Lawyers
The National Council of Bar Examiners has just finished a fascinating survey of what lawyers do in their first three years of practice. Some of the most interesting findings relate to environmental law. About five percent of new lawyers report that their practice areas are environment or natural resources. As of a couple of years ago, according to the New York Times, there were 26,000 jobs for new lawyers, so apparently there were about 1300 new environmental law job...
CONTINUE READINGHow the Pacific Rivers Council case could affect environmental law
As Rick has already noted, a couple of weeks ago the Supreme Court granted cert to review the Ninth Circuit’s decision in U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council. Rick expressed pessimism about whether the Ninth Circuit’s decision would be upheld in the Supreme Court. I think he’s probably right about that, but there are different grounds upon which the Court might reverse, and it will matter a lot which grounds the Court chooses. The issues in this cas...
CONTINUE READINGFinally Cleaning Up In the Galilee
Residents of northern Israel got a welcome victory a couple of days ago: the nation's High Court held that Eitanit Construction Products, a politically well-connected firm that polluted cities across the region with asbestos, must pay half the cost of cleaning it up. Friable asbestos contaminating whole cities might be a dim memory in the United States, but in Israeli cities like Nahariya, it remains all-too-common: "As far as disease levels are concerned, Nahariya i...
CONTINUE READINGOn the politics of the Keystone pipeline
This article from the New York Times a couple of days ago describes how President Obama, on a fundraising visit here in the Bay Area, made clear how difficult environmental politics are for a President in the midst of a recession – especially the Great Recession: Appearing at the home of an outspoken critic of the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama on Wednesday night told a group of high-dollar donors that the politics of the environment “are tough.” Mr. O...
CONTINUE READINGUS Food Aid Rules: If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention
The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it wants to change US food aid rules to allow for more "local procurement" of food aid in the countries that need it. Predictably, the special interests are aghast. But the administration is right: current food aid rules are among the most egregious special interest legislation in the world right now, preventing this country from stopping starvation, often helping it, wasting taxpayer money, increasing greenhouse gas ...
CONTINUE READINGWho’s Afraid of Environmental Regulations? (Not Small Businesses)
There has been a lot of chatter about the burden of regulations on small businesses. It turns out that small business owners do worry about regulations a lot -- but not so much environmental regulations. According to a new survey, what they really care about are licensing and tax regulations. Environmental regulations just don't matter much. The Thumbtack internet site provides services to small businesses and conducts a business climate poll with support from th...
CONTINUE READINGPoll Shows Vast Majority of Americans Favor Sea-Level Rise Adaptation. Now, Time to Start Planning.
Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions recently released the results of a survey finding that the majority of Americans favor proactive sea-level rise adaptation actions. According to the survey results (margin of error: +/- 4.9% at the 95 percent confidence level), 82 percent of the Americans surveyed said that people and organizations should prepare for the damage likely to be caused by sea level rise and storm...
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