Getting Set for Durban
Along with two students from our environmental law clinic, Rhead Enion and I are traveling to Durban, South Africa today as observer delegates to the annual meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dan noted in a recent post that the Durban meeting has been largely flying under the radar of public attention, especially as compared with the UN Copenhagen meeting two years ago (which I am told was, for a brief moment, the most Googled subject in the world)...
CONTINUE READINGPilgrims versus Vikings: A Thanksgiving Fable
Once upon a time, there were two places that people settled from a great distance. But they had very different histories. You could call them the "Tale of Thanksgiving" and the "Tale of the Un-Thanksgiving." The first story is about religious dissenters who fled their homeland. We all know the story: they nearly starved until they learned from the local indigenous people the skills they needed to survive. In gratitude, settlers held a feast in honor of their in...
CONTINUE READINGIn Memory: UC Berkeley Chancellor and Professor Ira Michael Heyman
It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Ira Michael Heyman, Chancellor of UC Berkeley from 1980 to 1990 and Professor Emeritus at Berkeley Law, where he had been a faculty member since 1959. He passed away on Saturday at the age of 81. A tremendously wise, kind, and generous soul, Professor Heyman was one of Berkeley's first land use and environmental law professors and taught property at Boalt until 2004. He leaves a legacy of more than five decades o...
CONTINUE READINGRescuing Baby Penguins
More than 2000 sea birds died following an oil spill off New Zealand. However, over forty blue penguins have been cleaned of oil and released. The photo shows little sweaters that people knitted to help keep them warm....
CONTINUE READINGPoll Results on Cap and Trade
I thought people might be interested in the results of our poll of readers on cap-and-trade: California has just adopted a cap and trade system. All things considered, do you think that cap and trade is the best strategy for controlling greenhouse gases? No, a carbon tax would be better. 56% Yes, cap and trade is the best approach.20% No, regulations of individual sources would be better. 13% Other 6% No, it would be better to invest in developing new technologies ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Local Role for Promoting Energy Efficient Homes and Businesses
One of the most cost-effective ways to fight climate change is to make homes and businesses more energy efficient. Yet this is also one of the most difficult goals to achieve. In UC Berkeley and UCLA Law's 2010 report "Saving Energy," we found the key barriers to be the highly individualized nature of retrofitting buildings (given their diverse form, age, and conditions), owners' reluctance or inability to provide the up front cash for the work, and the hassle of hiring ...
CONTINUE READINGGingrich & The Environment
Given Newt Gingrich's current spurt in the polls, it's worth taking a bit of a closer look at his environmental views. He favors dismantling EPA, which should make him popular with the tea party. But apparently he has problems in that quarter: The reaction from some conservative commentators was swift and harsh. “Intellectually incoherent,” said Myron Ebell, the director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Asinine,” a...
CONTINUE READINGFaster Than the Speed of Light
Good environmental policy requires knowledge of the latest scientific developments. Thus, from the NYT today: Two months after scientists reported that they had clocked subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, to the astonishment and vocal disbelief of most of the world’s physicists, the same group of scientists, known as Opera, said on Friday that it had performed a second experiment that confirmed its first results and eliminated...
CONTINUE READINGJane Jacobs, Edmund Burke, and the New Urbanism
Jason Epstein's Introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities makes this powerful intellectual connection: Death and Life ... [is] about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them...Her sympathies are with the slow accretion of custom and skills, of social norms and ingenious solutions to practical problem...
CONTINUE READINGCap-and-Trade is Alive and Well
Comprehensive climate policy is going nowhere at the federal level. That's obvious. But U.S. inaction doesn't mean that the rest of the world is following the U.S. lead. Instead, around the world, countries are adopting policies to transition to cleaner energy sources and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And cap-and-trade systems are as popular a policy option as ever. Consider the following: Domestically, California has now adopted rules and regulations to...
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