Deploying Large-Scale Solar on Marginal Agricultural Land: A New Berkeley / UCLA White Paper
With California committed to achieving 33 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, some solar and wind developers are rushing to propose large-scale installations on California farmland. These sites can be attractive because they are close to existing transmission lines and substations and have good sun exposure. However, proposed projects on farmland tend to spur opposition from agricultural interests worried about the loss of productive farmland in ...
CONTINUE READINGBirds and your coffee
Jonathan has been going after Peet’s for not actually selling very much coffee that is environmentally friendly or that supports social justice. Among all of Peet’s coffees, he reports that only one is fair trade certified and only one other is organic certified. (And apparently, you have to pick between helping people and avoiding pesticides!) Let me pile on with Jonathan and note yet another important environmental issue relating to coffee consumption that Pee...
CONTINUE READINGFinding the Right Words (Judicially)
I recently posted about when various key environmental terms surfaced in the law review literature. It occurred to me that it would be interested to compare with the courts, so I did a similar search of Westlaw's database for all state and federal court opinions. Here is how the results compare: Term Law reviews Courts Environmental law 1970 1971 Air pollution 1949 1949 Water pollution 1920 1906 Endangered species 1970 1970 Cost-benefit analysis 1963 196...
CONTINUE READINGA dangerous bill (ctd.)
Recently the California state legislature passed a series of measures that provided for accelerated judicial review for challenges to the CEQA review process for certain projects. (CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act. It requires review of the environmental impacts of many kinds of development projects in California.) The projects to be exempted were those over $100 million in size, not yet initiated, that met minimum environmental requirements (such a...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Adopts Landmark Cap-and-Trade Program
Defying the trend in the rest of the country to ignore the perils of climate change, the California Air Resources Board voted today to establish the country's first economy-wide cap-and-trade program covering greenhouse gas emissions. The vote comes five years after the state passed sweeping legislation -- AB 32 -- to roll California's carbon emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. The cap-and-trade measure is one of a series of initiatives to help the state meet it...
CONTINUE READINGThe Golden Anniversary of Death and Life
I'm happily addicted to audiobooks. Anyone from Los Angeles really should be, because getting the best ones means that a traffic jam isn't a waste of time: it's just an opportunity to read a few more chapters! And even those with short commutes could profitable make their way through lots of good books if they spend 20-30 minutes exercising or working out. So I was delighted and surprised to see the release, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Jane Jacobs' cl...
CONTINUE READINGWhen We Found the Right Words
It's hard to talk about something if you don't have the right words to designate it easily. So it's interesting to look for the first appearance for some of the key words in the legal literature. Presumably, this words were in non-legal use a bit earlier, but their first use in law reviews tells us something about when concepts first received legal attention. Based on Westlaw searches of the law journal database (JLR), here's what I found: "Environmental law" firs...
CONTINUE READINGPeet’s Coffee’s Weak Attempts to Rebut Greenwashing Charges
An energetic reader noticed my post last week on Peet's Coffee's seeming alliance with the California Chamber of Commerce, the most reactionary anti-environmental force in state politics. He forwarded it to Peet's PR department and demanded an explanation. Here's what he got back: We're disturbed by the blog posting you sent to us which "effectively" concluded that our participation in the California Chamber of Commerce means Peet's doesn't care about the environme...
CONTINUE READINGDealing with Escalating Global Resource Demands
Matthew Yglisias has a generally free market orientation and doesn't usually focus on environmental issues. He recently had a very interesting posting, however, about a problem that U.S. policymakers need to start thinking about: Over time, we’ve seen more and more countries engage in spurts of “catch-up” growth in which they rapidly narrow the gap in living standards between themselves and the rich countries. What’s more, countries seem to be getting better at...
CONTINUE READINGTwo tales of environmental ignorance
Citizens in Tokyo have discovered patches of radiation that are comparable to some of the evacuated areas near Chernobyl, radiation that presumably came from the recent nuclear power plant accident. The EPA has recently reported that the number of waterways in California that exceed water quality standards are 170 percent higher today than in 2006. In both cases, the results contradict prior findings by government agencies. In Japan, the government has contended that...
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