Berkeley Environmental Alum to Head Vermont Law School
We're delighted to report that Marc Mihaly, a graduate of Berkeley Law School, will be the next dean of Vermont Law School. Before his move to Vermont, he was a partner at Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, a law firm specializing in government, land use, natural resource and environmental law. Vermont is best-known for its environmental law program, and we are confident that the program will make further progress under his leadership....
CONTINUE READINGGoing Beyond the “Design-Basis Event”
A conventional approach to safety is based on the concept of design events. A building code might say, for example, that a building should be able to survive a 7.0 earthquake. This approach has been basic to the regulation of nuclear reactors. As the interim report of the post-Fukushima NRC task force explains: [The regulation[ also requires that design bases . . . reflect (1) appropriate consideration of the most severe of the natural phenomena that have been hi...
CONTINUE READINGSeismic Uncertainty
What happened last March 11 wasn’t supposed to be possible. The seismic hazard maps didn’t entertain the idea of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the Tohoku coast of Japan. But the Earth paid no heed to scientific orthodoxy. A massive slab of the planet’s crust lurched 180 feet to the east. It rose about 15 feet, lifted the ocean and tipped the Pacific’s waters onto the Japanese coast. That's the opening of a Washington Post story about the pitfalls of predicting ...
CONTINUE READINGDebunking the Denialists
William Nordhaus, the distinguished climate change economist, has written a response to the Wall Street Journal's latest exercise in climate skepticism. He does an excellent job of responding to many of the standard claims of climate skeptics. For one thing, the WSJ op-ed misrepresented Nordhaus's own findings. According to the op-ed, Nordhaus's research supported "a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls." That t...
CONTINUE READINGWhy did EPA tackle interstate air pollution?
In my last post, I noted that one reason for the recent GOP backlash against the EPA has been the Bush and Obama Administrations’ surprising efforts to tackle a politically difficult subject: interstate air pollution. One question is why an environmental problem that for many years was a political loser finally got the attention it deserved from regulators, and why White House staffers (from very different political persuasions) allowed EPA to take on such a politica...
CONTINUE READINGOne reason for anti-EPA riders
There’s been a lot of (appropriate) outrage over the efforts in the past year and a half by House Republicans to gut environmental protections through the use of appropriations riders. Those efforts might well continue in the next appropriations cycle, especially since bashing the EPA is apparently a popular election-year activity for Republicans. One of the targets of those riders [pdf]has been the efforts by EPA to deal with interstate air pollution (predominantl...
CONTINUE READINGTunnel vision in environmental law and policy
One of the reasons that environmental law and policy is so interesting, and so challenging, is that it is very, very difficult to reduce what we mean by “environmental quality” to one single metric. A couple of recent posts by a leading progressive policy blogger (Matt Yglesias) make this point very well. First in December, and then a few days ago, Yglesias made the argument that the environment would be far better off if the population density of California came ...
CONTINUE READINGCharter Cities Offer Climate Change Adaptation Benefits
Brandon Fuller and I have published a short piece arguing that another benefit of charter cities is to increase the set of coping strategies for people who live in less developed countries and face new climate shocks due to global warming. Starting with my 2010 book Climatopolis, I have consistently argued that global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise and thus we have to prepare to adapt to climate change. While many people hope and believe that wise gove...
CONTINUE READINGHeat Waves, Droughts, and the Energy System
According to the IPCC, it “is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves, and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.” For instance, by midcentury, the number of heat wave days in Los Angeles is expected to at least double over the late twentieth century, and quadrupling is expected by the end of the century. This doesn't mean that the average temperature will increase dramatically, but the number of extreme events will go up sharply. Th...
CONTINUE READINGClimate “skepticism,” ideology, and sincerity
There's an interesting discussion about a whole lot of things -- for example, the sincerity of climate scientists and think tanks, the behavior of scientists, the relative funding of "skeptics" and climate scientists and others who believe climate change is happening and is caused by human activity -- between my colleague Ann Carlson and Professor Jonathan Adler in the comments on Ann's recent post Peter Gleick and the Heartland Institute Expose. I have some thoughts, i...
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