When gas pipelines explode, who is at fault?
It is almost a year since a natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California killed 8 people and destroyed 38 homes, and the National Transportation Safety Board has now issued it report. The Board found that pipeline owner Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), as well as state and federal regulators, were responsible for “a litany of failures.” The basic questions are still not fully resolved – How could something like this happen? How can we p...
CONTINUE READINGWhat Is Green Kosher?
"Green Kosher" is the new advertising tag for Empire Kosher food processors, based in rural Pennsylvania. But what does it mean? There is an important backstory here. Empire is the nation's leading kosher poultry producer, which has aggressively pursued a progressive image in the media (and particularly the Jewish media). It has done this even more aggressively in light of the shameful behavior of Agriprocessors, previously the nation's leading producer of kosher ...
CONTINUE READINGIs Cap and Trade Unfair?
I should probably start by putting my cards on the table. I'm not really an advocate of cap and trade as compared with other forms of regulation. What I care about is getting effective carbon restrictions in place, whether they take the form of cap and trade, a carbon tax, industry-wide regulations, or something else. The big advantage of cap and trade from that perspective is that some systems are already up and running, and unlike a carbon tax, it doesn't di...
CONTINUE READINGMurder, Pollution, Illegal Drugs & Our Public Lands
The murder this past weekend of Fort Bragg, California City Councilman Jere Melo puts an all-too-human face on a long-festering environmental crisis. Melo was shot and killed in a remote area in Mendocino County by a squatter who was reportedly growing marijuana on forest lands there. Councilman Melo, whose day job was to manage 150,000 acres of Mendocino forest lands owned by an investment firm, was shot to death as he investigated reports of illegal pot growing on t...
CONTINUE READINGA Judicial Win for PACE Clean Energy Financing
Finally, some good news from the courts for advocates of PACE financing for energy efficiency and renewables. Federal Judge Claudia Wilken in the Northern District of California issued a ruling late Friday on the Federal Housing Finance Authority's (FHFA) motion to dismiss a challenge from the Sierra Club, Placer and Sonoma Counties, Palm Desert, and the State of California. These plaintiffs sued the agency over its decision not to underwrite mortgages on residential ...
CONTINUE READINGQuest for the Best
Public Health Degree has a list of the twenty cities in the world with the cleanest air. (I was pleased to see my prior home Minneapolis on the list -- not surprisingly, my current home in the Bay Area didn't qualify.) That got me interested in looking for other listings of high environmental quality. There are some interesting rankings out there. I found an NRDC ranking of beaches with clean water. New Hampshire was ranked #1, a bit of a surprise since I didn...
CONTINUE READINGPanel – Environmental Law in China: Implications for Bay Area Business (September 27, 2011)
China Dialogue, Asia Society, K&L Gates, and the Business Council on Climate Change are sponsoring a panel on Environmental Law in China: Implications for Bay Area Business on September 27, 2011 in San Francisco. I will be on the panel with a terrific group of speakers who work on climate change, environmental law, and green/clean-tech businesses. We will discuss recent developments in environmental law relevant to businesses managing supply chains and seeking gr...
CONTINUE READINGLibertarians for Environmental Red Tape!
Libertarians have long castigated environmental review statutes, such as NEPA and CEQA, for trampling private property rights, the theory being that they make developing property so difficult and expensive that they are tantamount to disrupting those right. That's why it was so odd to see the Pacific Legal Foundation advocating for more prolix environmental review in Save the Plastic Bag v. Manhattan Beach, a case decided a few weeks ago by the California Supr...
CONTINUE READINGUCLA Emmett Center Assessment of California’s Cap and Trade Regulations
In the wake of the financial market meltdown and liquidity crisis of 2008, some opponents of a cap and trade program to regulate greenhouse gas emissions have argued that such a system could lead to the kind of market manipulation that led to the 2008 crash. The UCLA School of Law Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment today released a report, Rules of the Game: Examining Market Manipulation, Gaming and Enforcement in California's Cap and Trade ...
CONTINUE READINGLost in the Ozone Again
Particularly given Governor Perry's presidential candidacy, I thought it would be interesting to see how Texas is doing on air pollution. Perry's record has been controversial, but the Texas environmental quality agency has a graph showing improvement in ozone levels over the past decade: However, in considering this graph, it's important to realize that over the preceding fifteen years, LA had drastically reduced the number of bad ozone days (from 150 days per year...
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