Congratulations to Rick Frank!
California Lawyer has honored our Legal Planet colleague Rick Frank with a California Lawyer Attorney of the Year (CLAY) award. Rick was honored together with Richard Drury for their work on behalf of Communities for a Better Environment in a challenge to the South Coast Air Quality Management District's approval of changes to an oil refinery. The pair won an important opinion from the California Supreme Court (Sean explained the decision and its significance here) affir...
CONTINUE READINGA Little-Noticed Toxic Provision of the House’s Continuing Resolution
From Grist: On Feb.17, in a 250-177 vote, the House of Representatives approved an amendment by Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) to deny any funds to EPA to "implement, administer or enforce" mercury and other toxic air pollution standards for all cement plants in the country. The EPA standards that the House voted to block would reduce cement plants' mercury emissions nationwide by 16,600 pounds, a 92 percent reduction from projected 2013 emission levels. . . Were these tox...
CONTINUE READINGSaving Redevelopment In California
As Rick chronicled, California Governor Jerry Brown has pushed for the elimination of redevelopment agencies to help close the state's budget gap. While Rick alluded to the mismanagement problems that plague some redevelopment agencies, most advocates for infill development view redevelopment as critical for revitalizing neighborhoods and creating more walkable, transit-friendly communities. Without the upfront investments provided by redevelopment funds to upgrade inf...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s Delta Stewardship Council Gets Down to Business
Today California's Delta Stewardship Council begins its deliberations on a Delta Plan that promises to be a big part of the answer to one of that state's most pressing environmental questions: can California's Delta be saved? Creation of the Delta Stewardship Council was a key element of landmark 2009 California legislation designed to address the myriad ecological, water supply, economic and public safety crises facing the Delta. A new state agency with broad powers ...
CONTINUE READINGGreat Sources on the BP Oil Spill
The National Commission has added some valuable additional material to its cite: A multi-media resource, especially useful for students and journalists. For those who want to dive deeper, the Chief Counsel's report is a great resource. It presents a good deal of evidence unfavorable to BP, but also significant criticism of Transocean and Halliburton. Of course, there's a lot of material out there on the web already, but one-stop shopping is always nice....
CONTINUE READINGWho is John Collins Rudolf? And why is he questioning the shape of the earth?
Apparently, he’s a free-lancer for the New York Times, a generally straight-up environmental reporter – and today, he is Ken Cuccinelli’s publicist. Cuccinelli is Virginia’s wingnut attorney general, who has decided to make a name for himself by filing baseless lawsuits against climate scientists, running to the courthouse before the ink was even dry on the Affordable Care Act, and strongly suggesting — before walking it back — that President Obama was born ...
CONTINUE READINGSupreme Court won’t hear critical habitat cases
Cross-posted at CPRBlog. The Supreme Court today denied certiorari on two Endangered Species Act cases, Arizona Cattle Growers Association v. Salazar and Home Builders Association of Northern California v. US Fish and Wildlife Service. The cases were considered together because they raise the same issue: how the economic impacts of critical habitat designation should be calculated. Development and extraction interests hoped the Court would use the cases to force the U.S...
CONTINUE READINGCounting the Time (A Whimsical Thought Experiment)
Our economic and political institutions press us to take the short view. So does our culture: our calendars go out only one year. Would our psychology of time change if we adopted another measure? As a thought experiment, imagine changing the basic unit from a year to millenium, which we could abbreviate as an M (pronounced "em"). Then we'd have the following system of units: 1 kiloM is a million years. 1 M is a thousand years. 1 deci-M is a century. 1 centi-...
CONTINUE READINGGood news? Yes, even this week
It's been a pretty bad week from an environmental perspective. The House Republicans have dominated the news, passing a continuing resolution for the rest of FY '11 that would gut environmental programs, block implementation of anti-pollution and species protection requirements, yet make essentially no dent in the national debt. (For commentary on the continuing resolution see Peter Lehner's post at NRDC's Switchboard blog.) But it's not all doom and gloom out there. ...
CONTINUE READINGWild horses in Ecology Law Currents
Ecology Law Currents, the online companion to Ecology Law Quarterly, has just published an article sharply criticizing the Bureau of Land Management's implementation of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. Here's the editors' synopsis: Currents has just published a touching and fascinating article on wild horse and burro removal from federal lands entitled "A National Injustice: the Federal Government's Systematic Removal and Eradication of an American Icon" by...
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