Ninth Circuit corrects itself on gold mining and the ESA
Cross-posted at CPRBlog. The en banc 9th Circuit issued its opinion Friday in Karuk Tribe v. US Forest Service. This opinion brings a welcome reversal of a panel opinion from last April which had ruled in a split decision that the Forest Service did not have to consult with the wildlife agencies before authorizing suction dredging on the Klamath River. Judge Milan Smith wrote for the majority in the panel decision, with Judge William Fletcher in dissent. Those roles we...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Protection and Conservative Values
Tom Friedman had an interesting column yeserday about conservatism and the environment. As he points out, the current wave of anti-environmentalism is out of line with Republican traditions: "Teddy Roosevelt bequeathed us national parks, Richard Nixon the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, Ronald Reagan the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer and George H. W. Bush cap-and-trade that reduced acid rain." He might also have noted that George...
CONTINUE READINGRent-seeking and property rights in environmental law
Jonathan Adler is guest-posting over at the Atlantic on conservative approaches to environmental law. In general, I can only support someone who is valiantly trying to make arguments about why conservatives should support efforts to address climate change, and developing climate change policies that are consistent with conservative and libertarian principles. But I want to address another argument that Jonathan made in his introductory post, an argument that I’ve s...
CONTINUE READING“The Devil’s Excrement”
That was the phrase used in 1975 by OPEC co-founder and Venezuelan Oil Minister Juan Perez Alfonso to describe crude oil: Perez predicted that it would bring wealth, but also ruin. Fortunately for the rest of us, the Organization of American Historians has devoted the most recent issue of the Journal of American History to pursue its scatological interests. The result is a terrific symposium, "Oil in American History," that anyone interested in the environment s...
CONTINUE READINGIs Environmentalism Bad for Fighting Climate Change?
Sure, it sounds like a paradox. The environmental movement has done a lot of good for the planet and for pollution. But in the face of the greatest environmental threat of our time, the movement may be fundamentally ill-suited to tackle the climate crisis. For most of its history, environmentalism has essentially been about stopping things, or at least slowing them down. Whether it’s sprawling subdivisions, industrial development on sensitive habitat lands, or f...
CONTINUE READINGA Run of Bad Luck
A Brookings report, The Year that Shook the Rich: A Review of Natural Disasters in 2011, points out that 2011 was the worst year in history in terms of costly natural disasters: 2011 was the most expensive year in terms of disaster losses in history, mostly because of a spate of disasters affecting developed countries. Globally, the economic cost of disasters in 2011 was $380 billion, of which $210 billion were the result of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This was ...
CONTINUE READINGThe filibuster and environmental law
The filibuster in the U.S. Senate has been (rightfully) in the news quite a bit over the past few years. The use of the filibuster has dramatically increased in those years, to the point where there is currently a de facto 60-vote supermajority requirement to pass legislation in the Congress. That has led to a number of commentators (not all of them on the left) arguing that the filibuster has led to dysfunctionality in Washington, and that filibuster reform is one o...
CONTINUE READINGIt’s All Greek to Me
Via E&E News, here's a leading climate skeptic's explanation of his qualifications to pass judgment on climate science: While he acknowledged he had no scientific credentials that would allow him to speak with authority on climate science, Monckton said he was uniquely qualified to explain the various logical fallacies that supporters of man-made climate change had engaged in to attack their critics "because I was classically trained." Yup, a knowledge of Ancient Gre...
CONTINUE READINGCarbon Auctions & Prop 13
California is planning to auction some of the carbon allowances in its new cap-and-trade system. There's an interesting question about whether the auctions should be considered a "tax" under state law, which may turn in part on what the money is used for. If the auctions are considered a tax, they would run into trouble under California's famous anti-tax initiative, Prop 13. Berkeley's Center for Law, Energy and Environment has released a new report 0n this issue....
CONTINUE READINGUsing a Carbon Tax to Decrease the Deficit
A carbon tax would provide an incentive to reduce the use of fossil fuels, fostering the growth of clean energy. But it would have another benefit as well: providing revenue to help cut the deficit. Much the same effect could be produced by auctioning allowances within a cap-and-trade system. According to Resources for the Future, a carbon tax of $10 per ton of CO2 could generate annual tax revenues of $60 billion, and a carbon tax of about $25 could raise roughly $12...
CONTINUE READING