A Friendly Note to Richard Muller
Richard Muller is a Berkeley physicist who has expressed skepticism over the integrity of some climate science. For example, he suggested that the famous hockey stick might be a distortion because the only sources with temperature readings that go back far enough in time might be located near heat sources. Not surprisingly, climate deniers and their political organ, the Republican Party, jumped all over Muller, lavishly praising his (Koch Brothers-funded) Berkeley...
CONTINUE READINGHighlights from a Property Exam
It's springtime, so a professor's fancy turns to -- grading exams. Well, not fancy, but it is part of the job -- perhaps the most boring. That's why I'm so grateful to those students who inject levity into the task -- whether they intended to do so or not. Students are writing quickly, so sometimes they say things that they don't quite mean. Consider these gems from my Property exam. One student, when discussing the Implied Warranty of Habitability, says that a c...
CONTINUE READINGCredit Where It’s Due: Tim Pawlenty Says We Need to “Phase Out” Energy Subsidies
(UPDATED: See below). I've had a good bit of fun jumping on the Republican Party for its hypocrisy on energy subsidies. So when a Republican does the right thing, it's important to acknowledge it: Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty made a potentially risky move during his campaign launch speech in Iowa: he called for a phaseout of ethanol subsidies. "The hard truth is that there are no longer any sacred programs," said Pawlenty. "The truth about federal energy sub...
CONTINUE READINGAB 32 alive and well after final order issued in AIR v. ARB, the EJ challenge to California cap and trade
On Friday afternoon, Judge Goldsmith of the California Superior Court issued his final order in the case pitting environmental justice advocates against the State's Air Resources Board on the issue of cap and trade (order available here). We've written a lot about the case and about the values conflicts underlying it (see here for access to posts discussing the lawsuit, the court's decision, and views on the plaintiffs' aims). Of particular interest in the final orde...
CONTINUE READINGGlobalizing Public Nuisance
Let's assume, as most of us on this blog do, that the Supreme Court will get rid of the public nuisance climate change when it decides Connecticut v. AEP a few weeks from now. Does that get rid of public nuisance climate cases? Not necessarily. Whatever one may think of the Clean Air Act's displacement of federal common law, and even its potential pre-emption of state common law, it is virtually impossible to argue that the Clean Air Act would pre-empt internation...
CONTINUE READINGWhy Don’t Californians Talk About Politics?
That was the question posed by a Zocalo forum this evening here in Los Angeles. I wasn't there -- I was actually at my daughter's school's ice cream social, talking with other parents about politics, actually. But had I been at the forum, I would have mentioned one partial theory that a friend of mine, a developer in Brooklyn, told me. If you live in New York City, he said, you probably spend a good bit of time on the subway, which means you spend a good bit of ti...
CONTINUE READINGForest Offsets and Fuzzy Math in the Angeles National Forest
I previously posted that Sierra Club wants Governor Brown to re-examine forest offsets under California's cap-and-trade program. One of the commenters to that post wondered if the plan to plant 10,000 acres of trees in the Angeles National Forest was an example of such an offset. Now I don't know if that planting would count for offsets in AB 32's cap-and-trade program, but it is certainly an attempt to offset carbon emissions from Chevron's El Segundo refinery. In ord...
CONTINUE READINGNew White Paper on Reducing Water Use to Save Energy
In California, we're always talking about conserving water, usually because of a drought, and increasingly because of our growing population and likely future of water shortages due to climate change. But research shows another compelling reason: conserving water means conserving energy. Pumping and treating water is energy-intensive -- the state water project, with its big pumps to get water over the Tehachapi Mountains to Southern California, is the state's single b...
CONTINUE READINGClarence Thomas: Nino Scalia Should Resign
Well, not quite. But just look at the quotes. Clarence Thomas, in a recent speech to Georgia attorneys: “This job is a humbling job,” he said. “It’s the end of the food chain. And some people can do it, and some can’t. But what it teaches you is that you don’t have all the answers. The people for whom this is an easy job are those who have never done it.”….. Thomas said one of the most important lessons he learned came early on when Justice Lewis Pow...
CONTINUE READINGPG&E Can’t Show You the Money
The Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the utility whose natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, California exploded several months ago, failed to spend $183 million on pipeline safety that it had been authorized to collect between 1987 and 1999. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. Representative Jackie Speier wants to know what PG&E did with the money. There is one thing that is absolutely clear: she will never find out. That’s the way of utility ratemakin...
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