Is NJ Governor Christie Running for President? He’s Backing Out of RGGI and Moving Toward Climate Denialism
On the bad-news-for-climate-policy front and in the ever-expanding category of Republican-officials-who-do-an-about-face-on-climate-change, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced today that he's pulling the state of New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) by the end of the year. RGGI is the only up and running cap and trade program in the United States focused on greenhouse gas emissions. Ten northeastern states are part of RGGI, which h...
CONTINUE READINGInterior releases “regulatory look-back” plan
In January, President Obama issued an executive order calling on all federal agencies to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned. Last week marked the deadline for agencies to submit preliminary plans for review of their regulations to the White House. Today the first wave of plans were publicly released, i...
CONTINUE READINGThe new BOEMRE – NOAA MOU: a good start, but more is needed
Cross-posted at CPRBlog. I was excited to read this story in the LA Times, saying that BOEMRE and NOAA had reached an agreement that would give NOAA more say in decisions to approve offshore drilling. (Draw whatever conclusions you like about what my geeky excitement says about how boring my life must be.) This agreement is certainly needed, as the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission has noted, and as I've written in this paper forthcoming in Boston College's Environ...
CONTINUE READINGTMDL Fight Brewing in Chesapeake Bay
On December 29, 2010, EPA finalized a plan to reduce nutrient pollution in Chesapeake Bay by implementing a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) budget using its Clean Water Act authority. That plan will require a 25% reduction in nitrogen, a 24% reduction in phosphorus and a 20% reduction in sediment throughout the watershed. This includes reductions in Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and DC. These reductions will come from stricter limi...
CONTINUE READINGA Friendly Note to Richard Muller
Richard Muller is a Berkeley physicist who has expressed skepticism over the integrity of some climate science. For example, he suggested that the famous hockey stick might be a distortion because the only sources with temperature readings that go back far enough in time might be located near heat sources. Not surprisingly, climate deniers and their political organ, the Republican Party, jumped all over Muller, lavishly praising his (Koch Brothers-funded) Berkeley...
CONTINUE READINGHighlights from a Property Exam
It's springtime, so a professor's fancy turns to -- grading exams. Well, not fancy, but it is part of the job -- perhaps the most boring. That's why I'm so grateful to those students who inject levity into the task -- whether they intended to do so or not. Students are writing quickly, so sometimes they say things that they don't quite mean. Consider these gems from my Property exam. One student, when discussing the Implied Warranty of Habitability, says that a c...
CONTINUE READINGCredit Where It’s Due: Tim Pawlenty Says We Need to “Phase Out” Energy Subsidies
(UPDATED: See below). I've had a good bit of fun jumping on the Republican Party for its hypocrisy on energy subsidies. So when a Republican does the right thing, it's important to acknowledge it: Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty made a potentially risky move during his campaign launch speech in Iowa: he called for a phaseout of ethanol subsidies. "The hard truth is that there are no longer any sacred programs," said Pawlenty. "The truth about federal energy sub...
CONTINUE READINGAB 32 alive and well after final order issued in AIR v. ARB, the EJ challenge to California cap and trade
On Friday afternoon, Judge Goldsmith of the California Superior Court issued his final order in the case pitting environmental justice advocates against the State's Air Resources Board on the issue of cap and trade (order available here). We've written a lot about the case and about the values conflicts underlying it (see here for access to posts discussing the lawsuit, the court's decision, and views on the plaintiffs' aims). Of particular interest in the final orde...
CONTINUE READINGGlobalizing Public Nuisance
Let's assume, as most of us on this blog do, that the Supreme Court will get rid of the public nuisance climate change when it decides Connecticut v. AEP a few weeks from now. Does that get rid of public nuisance climate cases? Not necessarily. Whatever one may think of the Clean Air Act's displacement of federal common law, and even its potential pre-emption of state common law, it is virtually impossible to argue that the Clean Air Act would pre-empt internation...
CONTINUE READINGWhy Don’t Californians Talk About Politics?
That was the question posed by a Zocalo forum this evening here in Los Angeles. I wasn't there -- I was actually at my daughter's school's ice cream social, talking with other parents about politics, actually. But had I been at the forum, I would have mentioned one partial theory that a friend of mine, a developer in Brooklyn, told me. If you live in New York City, he said, you probably spend a good bit of time on the subway, which means you spend a good bit of ti...
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