Redevelopment and the Future of Infill in California
As Rick blogged, the California Redevelopment Association inadvertently committed suicide at the state Supreme Court last week. Convinced by their lawyers that they would ultimately win in court, the Association's leaders had played hardball last year at the legislature in the face of attempts to end redevelopment. But the California Supreme Court ended up immolating the very compromise measure that would have salvaged some redevelopment, using the same voter-approved ...
CONTINUE READINGMigration and Natural Disasters: Evidence from the Past
This is my first post at Legal Planet and I'm happy to be here. I'm an environmental economist at UCLA and I'm proud to hold a courtesy appointment at UCLA Law School. In this brief post, I want to advertise a new paper of mine. Leah Boustan, Paul Rhode and I look at young men's migration patterns within the United States during the time period 1920 to 1930 and from 1935 to 1940. This is a time period when natural disasters were taking place in specific geo...
CONTINUE READINGThe Privatization of State Parks & Ocean Management in California–And Why That’s a Good Thing
California boasts the nation's largest state park system--over 1.5 million acres of natural, historical and cultural resources contained in 278 separate, state-owned parks that attract over 80 million visitors annually. But California's extensive system of state-owned parks, beaches and marine reserves is in crisis--a victim of draconian budget cuts, chronic under-staffing and over $1 billion in deferred maintenance. Recently, an unlikely, potential solution has emerg...
CONTINUE READINGWhy Critics Should Stop Bashing EPA (And What They Should Talk About Instead)
Bashing EPA is apparently a good political tactic, at least if you're in a red state, but it's also a smokescreen -- what is presented as an attack on the agency is actually an attack on the mission assigned by Congress. In terms of carrying out the mission, EPA is no different than the Defense Department or the FBI -- it more or less does what it has been told to do, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes less so, occasionally ineptly. But blaming EPA because you don't like...
CONTINUE READINGFederal Court Halts Implementation of Important Air Pollution Program
The Obama Administration's cap-and-trade program to control air pollution that crosses state lines (explained in detail here) will not go into effect this month as planned. Instead, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has halted the program's implementation temporarily until it decides on its legality. The program, known as the cross state air pollution rule, caps nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide pollution in 23 states in the eastern half of the country. ...
CONTINUE READINGEPA’s Achievements
You're going to be hearing a lot from certain quarters about EPA and what a terrible agency it is. Despite shortcomings in the statutes, repeated assaults on its budgets, and political harassment, the agency's accomplishments have been quite remarkable. As this chart shows, the volume of air pollutants has gone done very substantially in the past thirty years, even though everything else (population, energy use, GDP, etc.) has gone up: The decline is pretty remark...
CONTINUE READINGOn This Date in History
Exactly forty-two years ago, President Richard M. Nixon signed the National Environmental Quality Act into law on January 1, 1970. Among other remarks, he had this to say: [A] major goal, when you talk about New Year's resolutions, I wouldn't say for the next year but for the next 10 years--and I don't mean that I intend to run for a third term--for the next 10 years for this country must be to restore the cleanliness of the air, the water, and that, of course, means m...
CONTINUE READINGEnd of the year good news
Three recent items of good news for California wildlife: For the first time in almost 90 years, a wild gray wolf has been roaming in California. The California Department of Fish and Game reported on December 29 that OR-7, a young male wolf from a pack in northeastern Oregon, had crossed into California. According to DFG, the last confirmed wild wolf in California was killed in 1924. Officials have been tracking OR-7's movements since February 2011, when he was fitte...
CONTINUE READINGWhat’s in the final 2012 spending bill?
I've just finished plowing through H.R. 2055, the2012 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which was signed by President Obama last week. I was curious to see how many anti-environmental riders made it into the final bill. I haven't seen much news coverage of the details of the final bill, and the White House offered no comment when the President signed. So I headed over to Thomas (the Library of Congress's web page, which has among other things links to all Congressional bi...
CONTINUE READINGFederal Court Invalidates California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard
U.S. District Judge Lawrence O'Neill has ruled that the California Air Resources Board's pioneering Low Carbon Fuel Standard, a key component of California's multifaceted strategy to reduce the state's aggregate greenhouse gas emissions under AB 32, is unconstitutional. In his December 29th ruling in Rocky Mountain Farmers Union v. Goldstene, the Fresno-based federal judge issued an injunction preventing CARB from implementing the LCFS. But that same ruling allows CA...
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