They Tripped Through Its Wires
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase, "The Joshua Tree"? I'm just back from a week at Joshua Tree National Park. I was enormously fortunate to attend a fabulous Jewish Wilderness Spirituality program of Torah Trek, the brainchild of Rabbi Mike Comins. Comins' book, A Wild Faith, is the fundamental starting point for examining the connection between religion and wilderness. If you are interested at all in the relationship between nature and spirituality, To...
CONTINUE READINGU.S. Supreme Court Justices Are on USEPA’s Case
You can't blame the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of late for feeling it's under siege. All of the current Republican presidential candidates are regularly excoriating EPA on the campaign trail, and Congress has conducted oversight hearings and threatened all sorts of legislative action designed to clip EPA's regulatory wings. Now the U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to get into the act. The justices heard oral arguments on Monday in the most important environm...
CONTINUE READINGGuest blogger Vera Pardee: Clearing the Runway for Carbon Pollution Reduction — a Better Way to Fly
This post, by Vera Pardee of the Center for Biological Diversity, is part of an occasional series by guest bloggers. In the absence of international agreements on climate change, important state, regional and national efforts are forging ahead on their own to tackle greenhouse gas pollution. Despite the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions, the business-as-usual fossil fuel industry mounts legal challenges to these efforts wherever possible, focusing on claims of l...
CONTINUE READINGRick Santorum: The Second-Most Anti-Environmental Candidate
This is one of a series of posts describing presidential candidate's views. I didn't cover Santorum earlier because his poll numbers were so low, but that has obviously changed. Santorum's website does not have a page dedicated to energy or environment but does make a number of pledges: Rick Santorum is committed to reviving our economy, restoring economic growth, and creating jobs in America again . . . . He also will roll back job killing regulations, restrain our sp...
CONTINUE READINGGlocalizing Garbage
"Glocalize" is a new term for me. I got it from an article in the Economist about garbage. It means "dealing with big global problems through myriad small or individual actions." For instance: The movement complements other efforts such as a United Nations-backed campaign, now in its 19th year, called Clean Up the World. . . . The central team at World Cleanup does not issue top-down edicts; it relies on local groups to direct their litter-blitzes in a way that sui...
CONTINUE READINGCommerce Clause Challenges and State Climate Policy
As Rick previously blogged, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District struck down California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) last month on the grounds that the standard discriminates against out-of -state ethanol producers in violation of the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution. The decision -- Rocky Mountain Farmers Union v. Goldstene -- is likely to be only the first of several court decisions that grapple with the extent to which states c...
CONTINUE READINGPreemption and Prescription Drugs
I've been reading a lengthy history of the FDA by Harvard political scientist Dan Carpenter. I'm planning to post later about some his observations regarding the political dynamics of drug regulation. But I was also struck by the implications of his description of drug regulation with regard to preemption of state torts claims. At first impression, the argument for preemption seems very plausible. The FDA has much more expertise than any jury. If the FDA consi...
CONTINUE READINGAnother regulatory success story
A few days ago, Dan posted about some positive EPA achievements. In the same spirit, and since the natural resource agencies get bashed for supposedly over-zealous and ineffective regulation close to as much as EPA does, I wanted to highlight another regulatory success story: turtle excluder devices, often referred to by their acronym, TEDs. The National Marine Fisheries Service developed TEDs in the early 1980s to reduce the bycatch of threatened and endangered sea t...
CONTINUE READINGThe Insanity Behind Urban Parking Requirements
Los Angeles Magazine ran a nice profile of UCLA Professor Don Shoup, pioneer of the parking reform movement to eliminate off-street parking requirements and modernize parking meters to charge performance-based prices. In Shoup's vision, local governments would dedicate any parking revenue increases to improving the neighborhood from which they came. Few other reforms could do more to enhance the sustainability and convenience of urban design and discourage unnecessar...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists versus Economists: Time for a Truce?
Environmentalists and economists have always had a troubled relationship. In the 1970s, some notable economists described environmentalism as a quasi-religious, irrational approach to policy. Environmentalists reciprocated by dismissing economists as narrow-minded bean-counters who ignored environmental values, ecological realities, and distributional issues. Of course, I'm oversimplifying a bit, but you get the idea about the general attitudes. Environmentalists ...
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