Panel – 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...
CONTINUE READINGEnviro Videos
Public Policy Degree, a site aimed at policy students, has assembled fifty YouTube videos relating to the environment. Besides being fun, it may give the more tech-savvy teachers among our audience some resources to include in presentations. I noticed that one of the videos is by former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who is now teaching here....
CONTINUE READINGStop the Presses: Los Angeles is Public-Transit Friendly (well, sort of)
The Brookings Institute has a new study out (and a really nifty interactive website) that ranks cities around the country on their public transit friendliness. Los Angeles comes out near the top of the list by one important measure: resident access to public transit, defined as living close to a transit stop. 96% of LA residents meet Brookings' criteria on that front, making the city number 2 in the country for access. The figure confirms what anyone living in Lo...
CONTINUE READINGThe Environmental Journalism Issue in the Presidential Race
There is one enormously striking thing about the New York Times article that Dan references in the post below. The article details how virtually all the Republican candidates have essentially declared war on the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming that environmental regulation is responsible for job losses and sluggish growth. It also quotes people from Republicans for Environmental Protection attacking the party's current view. (One wonders whether the memb...
CONTINUE READINGThe Environmental Issue in the Presidential Race
With the partial exception of Mitt Romney, all of the Republican presidential candidates are negative about EPA. According to the NY TImes, Opposition to regulation and skepticism about climate change have become tenets of Republican orthodoxy, but they are embraced with extraordinary intensity this year because of the faltering economy, high fuel prices, the Tea Party passion for smaller government and an activist Republican base that insists on strict adherence to th...
CONTINUE READINGRick Perry Should Be Confined to a Padded Room, Chapter One
Governor Rick "Crotch" Perry is somewhat of an expert at saying inane things, a trend that has accelerated since he declared his Presidential candidacy. He flirts with secession, he accuses the Fed Chairman of treason, he was against cervical cancer before he was for it, he wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, he claims that there is a super-secret Constitutional clause allowing Texas to secede, bank regulation is unconstitutional, Social Security is unconstitutional,...
CONTINUE READING“Please Don’t Murder Me”
Musical accompaniment to Justin's post below. "I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades, but the cards were all the same": [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhqyg_dTaTg] More information here....
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