Remedial Education for Berkeley Law Faculty
Or at least for John Yoo, who argues: Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn't the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein's family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are unwilling to consider that remedy, aren't you conceding that on balance, the benefits of the war outweigh the costs? Uh, that would be no and no. This is first-year Tort Law. The point of ...
CONTINUE READINGCongress Increases Climate Research Funding!
...even if they didn't intend to. The Republican War on Science has morphed into a more general war on knowledge. As Dan has pointed out previously, the GOP has now declared war on social science funding, and particularly on political science. Last night, the Senate accepted the amendment of Senator Tom Coburn (R - Olduvai Gorge) forbidding the National Science Foundation from funding political science research. This provision, which will undoubtedly be accepted ...
CONTINUE READINGWhat Can and Should the President do About Climate Change Without Congress?
President Obama made clear in his State of the Union that he would do everything within in his power to combat climate change even if Congress refused to go along. Here are his words: I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive...
CONTINUE READINGBreaking News: PACE Dies in the Ninth Circuit
The West Coast PACE litigation party appears to have ended. After favorable rulings from the California Northern District Court for PACE backers, the Ninth Circuit today dismissed the case outright. As background, Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs allow municipal governments to finance residential and commercial energy improvements, with property owners repaying the governments via property tax assessments. The program was just taking off in states across t...
CONTINUE READINGU.S. Supreme Court Grants Review in Pacific Rivers Council Case
Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in a major forestry and NEPA case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council, No. 12-623. The case will be argued and decided in the Court's next (2013-14) Term. The issues the justices have agreed to consider in Pacific Rivers Council are threefold: 1) whether the environmental challengers to the 2004 Forest Service Plan directing USFS's management of the 11 national forests...
CONTINUE READINGThe Impact of China’s Bullet Trains
Siqi Zheng and I have just published our bullet trains paper in PNAS. Here is the gated paper. Our empirical paper is based on the following piece of deep math; distance = speed*time. Given how fast bullet trains move relative to cars and conventional trains, the time cost between cities that are 80 to 200 miles apart shrinks sharply (time=distance/speed). The bullet train effectively creates new suburbs for Shanghai and Beijing and this relieves costs o...
CONTINUE READINGWhy I’m Boycotting Coke
Why Coke, you might wonder. Why not Pepsi? The answer is that diet coke is my soft drink of choice. It's easy for me to boycott other soft drinks since I don't drink them anyway. I like diet coke, so that's the subject of my boycott. But why boycott soft drinks at all? Answer: Because I'm concerned about their contribution to obesity, especially childhood obesity, and I'm disgusted by the tactics of the industry is using to fight sensible regulation. It turns ou...
CONTINUE READINGClimate engineering: new proposals for governance of research
In a paper published Friday as a Science Policy Forum in Science magazine, David Keith and I put forward some proposals to advance the debate over governance of climate engineering (aka geoengineering) research. Climate engineering means actively intervening in the climate to offset some of the global heating and climate disruption caused by elevated CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Many different methods have been proposed -- some that alter the global carbon cycle to...
CONTINUE READINGOR-7 returns to Oregon
As we reported here, a gray wolf designated as OR-7 crossed from Oregon into California in December 2011, marking the first time a wolf had been confirmed in California in more than 75 years. More than a year and many travel miles later, OR-7 this week crossed back into Oregon. Both states' wildlife agencies have web pages devoted to gray wolves that provide periodic updates but not (for good reason) real-time tracking. Oregon's is here, California's here. It's inter...
CONTINUE READINGWaxman/Whitehouse carbon tax draft
On Tuesday, Representative Waxman, Senator Whitehouse, Representaive Blumenauer and Senator Schatz released their proposal for a carbon tax bill. They are currently seeking feedback on the draft proposal, which is accordingly short on details. The Waxman/Whitehouse proposal is to require downstream emitters (mainly power plants and other emitters) to purchase annual "carbon pollution permits" per ton of carbon-equivalent emissions in a given year. These permits will s...
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