Law Schools in the Public Interest: Environmental Programs on the West Coast and in the Southwest
Environmental law programs on the West Coast and in the Southwest -- basically, the states in the Ninth Circuit -- are very active in public service. Here are some examples: A continuing legal education program for lawyers on energy and environment. A natural resources clinic that participates in administrative proceedings before federal lands agencies. A clinic that has litigated cases involving the protection of a national park, the regulation of invasive species...
CONTINUE READINGNew paper on California’s cap-and-trade auction revenue
The Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment has just released a new paper that describes how California law may limit the ability of California's legislature to allocate revenue from the upcoming cap-and-trade auctions. Written by fellow bloggers Cara Horowitz, Sean Hecht, Ann Carlson and myself, the paper is titled Spending California's Cap-and-Trade Auction Revenue: Understanding the Sinclair Paint Risk Spectrum. This paper assesses legal constraints ...
CONTINUE READINGHow CEQA Saved Mono Lake
Environmental lawyers and policy wonks know that the California Supreme Court's famed decision in Nat'l Audubon Soc'y v. Superior Court, better known as the Mono Lake case, saved California's second-largest lake from drying up. And to some extent this is true: I am working on a full-length book about the case, and so far that story seems to check out. But as a practical matter, without the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the Mono Lake case would ha...
CONTINUE READINGBreaking Ice, Rising Waters
The latest issue of Nature contains an interesting article about climate change -- not the current warming but the last one, at the end of the Ice Age. Here's the editor's summary: A rapid sea-level rise occurred towards the end of the last ice age, during an event known as meltwater pulse 1A. The precise magnitude and timing of the event have remained obscure, rendering the climate forcings and consequent ice-sheet responses unclear. Pierre Deschamps and colleagues no...
CONTINUE READINGEyes Closed, Minds Shut Tight
According to a recent article in the American Sociological Review, rejection of science is on the rise: Just over 34 percent of conservatives had confidence in science as an institution in 2010, representing a long-term decline from 48 percent in 1974, according to a paper being published today in American Sociological Review. That represents a dramatic shift for conservatives, who in 1974 were more likely than liberals or moderates (all categories based on self-identif...
CONTINUE READINGSagebrush rebellion, version 3.1
Some things never seem to change, including the (interior) West's frustration over the extensive federal land holdings in the region. If you're old enough, you might recall the Sagebrush Rebellion, which peaked about 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, a self-declared sagebrush rebel. (If you want to bone up, the Forest History Society offers a good concise timeline.) In the 1990s there was the County Supremacy movement, which ended when the U.S. successfully sued...
CONTINUE READINGThe Supreme Court Strikes Down the Clean Air Act
Not, not really. Not yet. Dan is a much more generous person than I am, and so it should be unsurprising that he believes that the Affordable Care Act cases do not threaten environmental law. I respectfully dissent. The Affordable Care Act seeks to establish laws for the health insurance industry -- an industry that comprises one-sixth of the American economy. In order to do that, it establishes a number of regulations that even its opponents concede are perfec...
CONTINUE READINGWill California’s Cap and Trade Program Stimulate Innovation?
Holly's latest post about a new study showing that cap-and-trade programs have not led to technological innovation ends with a cautionary note that raises the key question about innovation and cap-and-trade programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: These results [showing no innovation] don't mean that cap-and-trade has no role to play in policies directed at climate change or other problems whose solution requires innovation. But they emphasize one more time the ne...
CONTINUE READINGPollution markets haven’t stimulated innovation
One of the early claims in favor of a cap-and-trade approach to pollution control, as opposed to traditional command-and-control innovation, was that market incentives would better encourage innovation in pollution control techniques and technologies. On the other hand, legal scholars such as David Driesen have long contended that pollution markets can actually reduce innovation incentives. Now an empirical study by Margaret Taylor of Berkeley's Lawrence Berkeley Nation...
CONTINUE READINGNew Forest Service planning rule highlights the tension between flexibility and accountability
The Forest Service has now finalized the new planning rule it proposed a year ago. The final rule with preamble runs more than 240 pages. I haven't yet plowed through it. The blog A New Century of Forest Planning is reporting reactions from a variety of sources. So far, there seem to be a lot of general statements of support, with the unsurprising proviso that the devil will be in the implementation details. The thing that pops out at me about the new rule is the extent...
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