The Climate Changes for the Insurance Industry
ThinkProgress reports: Following the most damaging year of climate disasters in the United States in history, the insurance regulators in three states – California, Washington, and New York – announced that all major insurance companies operating in their states will be required to assess and publicly disclose the climate-change related risks they face, both in their underwriting as well as in their investment activities. Because of the consolidation of the insurance...
CONTINUE READINGInformation or Ideology? The Dilemmas of a Property Professor
It often occurs in teaching law school classes that opportunities present themselves for discussing current issues. And that presents a problem: how can a teacher do it without engaging in ideological indoctrination? The easiest way is to avoid the issue entirely. But is that also avoiding the responsibility to actually address important topics? I ran into this dilemma the other day when discussing the classic case of Moore v. Regents of the University of Califo...
CONTINUE READINGCan Incomplete Information Still Be Cause For Alarm?
How much comfort should people take from the remaining gaps in our knowledge of climate change. Not much, is the answer. Scientists have learned a lot about climate, but there are still pieces of the puzzle that are yet to be filled in. Here's a nice picture that Nobel Laureate Mario Molina uses to show why the missing pieces aren't a basis for complacency. Take a close look if you can't immediately spot the subject of the picture. The moral? Sometimes you do...
CONTINUE READINGQuote of the Day: Edward Abbey
A weird lovely fantastic object out of nature, like Delicate Arch, has the curious ability to remind us -- like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness -- that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as a child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover t...
CONTINUE READINGDoes Public Transit Improve Air Quality?
Yihsu Chen and Alexander Whalley of UC Merced think they know. They have analyzed some useful data from the opening of Taipei's new subway, in a recent article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy: The transportation sector is a major source of air pollution worldwide, yet little is known about the effects of transportation infrastructure on air quality. This paper quantifies the effects of one major type of transportation infrastructure—urban rail tr...
CONTINUE READINGInitiative Watch: The Polluter Accountability Act
California's Legislature did manage last year to stanch some of the state's initiative craziness when it passed a law mandating that all initiative appear on the general election ballot, not the primary ballot. Now, our ballot "pamphlets" won't resemble a phone book every election. (The fact that general elections get higher turnout, and thus tend to favor Democrats, was I'm sure totally and completely coincidental). But that also means that we'll get a real wall...
CONTINUE READINGIs Bureaucratic Leadership an Oxymoron?
Harvard political scientist Daniel Carpenter has published a very interesting book about bureaucracy. Bureaucrats don't often get much credit, but he examines how bureaucrats around the turn of the last century were responsible for important innovations: making the post office efficient (and for a time profitable!), conserving our national forests, creating the parcel post, passing the Food and Drug Act, and creating the agricultural extension service. Analyzing thes...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s New Clean Car Rules: How Can They Succeed?
Yesterday, the California Air Resources Board significantly toughened the state's regulations on carbon emissions from automobiles: The package of Air Resources Board regulations would require auto manufacturers to offer more zero- or very low-emission cars such as battery electric, hydrogen fuel cell and plug-in hybrid vehicles in California starting with model year 2018. By 2025, one in seven new autos sold in California, or roughly 1.4 million, must be ultra-clean, ...
CONTINUE READINGAmbivalence Toward Environmental Scientists
Two seemingly unrelated stories on the NY Times webpage reveal the strangely conflicted place of scientists in today's society. One story reveals our respect for those who, despite difficult circumstances, dedicate themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. That story is about Samantha Garvey, a homeless teenager who has found recognition for her study of the effect of invasive crabs on native mussels in Long Island Sound. She received national attention after becoming ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Wall Street Journal Publishes Quite a Piece on Climate Change
This piece is worth reading. It doesn't have that much new content but it does take up a lot of the page. I must admit that I'm envious. It appears that the WSJ has rejected my OP-ED submission. In my piece, I discuss how the rise of charter cities in developing countries could offer individuals new coping strategies to adapt to climate change. I didn't fully realize that the WSJ page is not fully ready to acknowledge the challenge in the first place. So, ther...
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