Legal Planet reviews the IPCC
Congratulations to our LP colleagues Sean Hecht and Dan Farber for having been designated as expert reviewers of the IPCC 5th assessment report, to be published in 2014. They will be reviewing the drafts issued by Working Group II, which assesses climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. The IPCC's assessment reports, written every five to seven years, have not been without controversy but remain the most authoritative and prominent summaries of ...
CONTINUE READINGLearning About Renewable Energy in Dialogue with Al Gore and Steve Chu
Two of my colleagues, Jennifer Granholm and Steve Weissman, offered an exciting new course this semester, culminating in a visit with the chair of FERC and with Energy Secretary Chu. Each student examined the renewable energy programs and opportunities in one particular state and then worked as part of a regional team to design an initiative to attract a hypothetical pool of federal grants to their region. The result was series of state-specific reports and five compr...
CONTINUE READINGMourning An Uncommon Student of the Commons
Elinor Ostrom, winner 0f the Nobel economics prize, died earlier today. She is best known for her work on how groups manage common resources such as fisheries. The "tragedy of the commons" is a theory that these common resources will inevitably be destroyed unless they are privatized or regulated by governments. Professor Ostrom showed that communities have managed to create and enforce social norms to protect common resources without recognizing private property r...
CONTINUE READINGEJ Advocates Renew Efforts to Block Cap and Trade
Environmental justice advocates continue their campaign to halt a key portion of California's proposed climate regulations. According to Greenwire, they have recently filed a complain with U.S. EPA claiming that the proposed cap-and-trade regulation is discriminatory. Specifically, their complaint is this: "Cap and trade allows them to buy allowances from other facilities or offsets from out of state or even internationally, denying communities next to refineries a...
CONTINUE READINGI’m Too Sexy for this Chimp
Growing up, I had always heard of Jane Goodall, knew that she had something to do with primate research, and that she was famous. So when my second-grader came home from school and announced that she had chosen to do a presentation about Goodall, I thought it would be a nice opportunity for me to learn something, too. And did I ever. I learned that Goodall discovered that chimpanzees use tools, which had previously been thought to be an exclusively human capacity....
CONTINUE READINGA New Report on the Governor’s Local Renewable Energy Initiative
Last July, I reported on a conference convened at UCLA by California Governor Jerry Brown to further his efforts to increase the amount of local renewable electric generation in California to 12,000 megawatts of installed capacity by the year 2020. Berkeley Law's Center for Law, Energy and the Environment provided the substantive support for that event, which was attended by Governor Brown and 270 others, and has now issued a comprehensive report on the conference. The ...
CONTINUE READINGOut With the Old, In With the New
A recent GAO report pulls together a lot of information about electricity generators, which shows how much of our air pollution problems are due to aging plants: Older electricity generating units—those that began operating in or before 1978—provided 45 percent of electricity from fossil fuel units in 2010 but produced a disproportionate share of emissions, both in aggregate and per unit of electricity generated. Overall, in 2010 older units contributed 75 percent of...
CONTINUE READINGA Brief Survey for U.S. Environmental Law Professors
At the AALS midyear meeting, as part of the Workshop on Torts, Environment, and Disaster, Bruce R. Huber, John Copeland Nagle, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Kalyani Robbins, Hari Osofsky and I will be co-presenting and co-moderating a session on "Generations of Environmental Law." To help focus that discussion, we have prepared a brief survey for U.S. environmental law professors on their mentoring experiences. (It's limited to the U.S. because other professors opera...
CONTINUE READINGWho Took the “Think” Out of Think Tanks?
The American Enterprise Institute is an interesting organization, often shrilly ideological but also scholarly from time to time. I was curious to find out what kind of research they were doing on climate change. I did find some interesting policy papers on their webpage on the topic of climate policy. But here's the surprising part: the latest paper on the subject is dated June 23, 2010. Of course, AEI has continued to produce a stream of op-eds on the subject, but ...
CONTINUE READINGNinth 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...
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