Nice to know I’m sober
Today the Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case known to that Court as Stewart & Jasper Orchards v. Salazar. So why the headline? This is the commerce clause challenge to ESA protection for the Delta smelt, rejected by the Ninth Circuit this past spring under the name San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority v. Salazar. At the time I expressed confidence that the Court would "leave this case alone." Ten days ago, when co-blogger Rick Frank and I appeared ...
CONTINUE READINGMore On the Republican Anti-Fact Shield
So after I posted my tantrum about George Will the other day, I felt a little guilty. Maybe I had been too hard on The Tory Bowtie. After all, maybe his putting "facts" in scare quotes was just a slip. Then I saw this piece on the Washington Post editorial page by Republican pollster Ed Rogers, on what the Republican base wants from a candidate. His words, not mine: Even though Cain won’t be the nominee, his candidacy tells us a lot about the psychology of GOP ...
CONTINUE READINGA Completely Uninteresting Story
The Wall Street Journal editorial board claims that California's new cap-and-trade regulations will cost each consumer $3,800 a year and calls it creeping Stalinism. As my UCLA (and UCLAW!) colleague Matt Kahn gently and genially points out, the Journal's editors are engaging in cranial-rectal fusion. In other news, dog bites man, the sun rises in the east, and the weather is better in California....
CONTINUE READINGTrolling for Anti-Environmental Plaintiffs
A reader sent me a an email from the Coalition of Energy Users trying to find plaintiffs for a challenge to AB 32 implementation. CEU claims to be a grassroots group that does not have a deep-pocket funding source, and that may be true. On the other hand, its interests are so precisely aligned with the oil and coal industries that it's hard not to wonder a bit. (For example, they want to abolish the California air board entirely, and they are vehemently opposed to ...
CONTINUE READINGWhen Can We Attribute Extreme Events to Climate Change?
Moscow suffered from a severe heat wave in the summer of 2010, with temperatures reaching 101 degrees and an average temperature 14 degrees higher than normal for July. What are the odds that the heat wave was due to climate change? RealClimate presents the results of an analysis that was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The analysis indicates that there was an 80% probability that climate change caused the heat wave. A previo...
CONTINUE READING(What Remains Of) The Conservative Mind Melts Down
Once upon a time, George Will had a reputation as the thinking person's conservative. No more. He's not only a climate denier, but a couple of weeks ago he smeared Elizabeth Warren with a kind of red-baiting that I haven't seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now he's at it again, sort of. And what says speaks volumes about what remains of the conservative mind. His October 28 column has him in right-wing enforcer mode, attacking Mitt Romney for being an u...
CONTINUE READINGHow Plaintiffs Can Win More Takings Cases: A Proposal for California
I've never been particularly sympathetic to regulatory takings claims; like many on the left of center, I'm wary of expanding a constitutional doctrine with the potential to severely injure good land-use planning and reconstitute Lochnerism. That said, it's hard to look at the reports of many takings cases without getting a strong sense that a lot of property owners are, to use a technical term, getting screwed. One might find a good example in Landgate v. Califo...
CONTINUE READINGNew Voices in Environmental Law
This blog features some work by some junior scholars and some established ones. One thing that we've tried to do, from time to time, is to direct attention to new electronic sources on environmental law. In that spirit, here some blogs and twitter feeds featuring junior scholars that we think are worth a look: Matt Festa and Ken Stahl: The Land Use Profs blog Brigham Daniels, Blake Hudson, Dave Owen, Lincoln Davies, Hannah Wiseman: The Environmental Law Profs bl...
CONTINUE READINGUCLA Emmett Study Says Cool Roofs are Way Cool (and Bring Lots of Environmental Benefits)
UCLA Law's Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment released a new report today called Bright Roofs, Big City: Keeping L.A. Cool Through an Aggressive Cool Roof Program. The report is the second Anthony Pritzker Environmental Law and Policy Brief issued by the Center. Cara Horowitz, the author of the report, used a dataset of Los Angeles rooftops and estimated energy savings the city could achieve simply by using roofing surfaces that "reflect ... more o...
CONTINUE READINGAssessing the California Environmental Quality Act at 40
On Friday, November 4th, the U.C. Davis School of Law's California Environmental Law & Policy Center will host an important conference: "CEQA at 40: A Look Back, and Ahead." This year marks the 40th anniversary of California's influential environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Modeled on and inspired by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), CEQA over the past four decades has evolved into a far more powerful environmental assess...
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