Pricing Carbon: How Would It Affect the Poor?

Putting a price on carbon – whether through a trading system, a carbon tax, or otherwise – will increase energy costs.  These increases are regressive because the poor spend a larger portion of their budgets on gasoline, heating and power.  But determining the ultimate distributive impacts of pricing carbon is not straightforward.  Pricing carbon has a host of indirect effects that may affect wages and return on capital, which themselves will impact income distrib...

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Nevada Re-Discovers the Public Trust Doctrine

The Nevada Supreme Court was the source of a pleasant surprise earlier this month, when it issued a decision formally "adopting" the public trust doctrine as Nevada law. The opinion, Lawrence v. Clark County, involved a proposed transfer of land in and adjacent to the Colorado River near Laughlin, Nevada to Clark County officials. Nevada state legislation directed the state land agency to acquire federal land within Clark County limits and then transfer it to the county...

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LA Times Climate Reporter Laid Off

Just got a forwarded email from Margot Roosevelt, the LA Times' terrific climate and energy reporter, sharing the news that she's been laid off. She and her work will be missed....

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Post-Tsunami Japan Teaches the World About Energy Within Limits

Earlier this summer, I accompanied a class of renewable energy law students to a home in Vermont that is “off the grid”.  The family lives quite comfortably – television, microwave oven, electric washing machine, sizable refrigerator.  With the exception of a small diesel generator, which they use once or twice a year, they derive all of their electric power from a set of photovoltaic panels and a series of lead acid batteries, protected by a wooden box in the ba...

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California’s Role in the New Fuel Economy Standards

Dan rightly praised the good news about newly agreed to federal fuel economy standards for the 2017-2025 time frame that will reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 (though there will be a review at midpoint and a possibility for readjustment if the 54.5 mpg standard proves too tough).   In all of the press coverage about the new standards the Obama Administration gets high marks for pushing hard for the standards.  Moreover the standards, virtually everyone acknowledge...

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Some Good News, For a Change

The NY Times reports: On Friday, when President Obama is scheduled to announce even stricter standards — in fact, the largest increase in mileage requirements since the government began regulating consumption of gasoline by cars in the 1970s — the chief executives of Detroit’s Big Three are expected to be in Washington again. But this time they will be standing in solidarity with the president, who will also be surrounded by some of Detroit’s highest-tech — an...

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Is Climate Denial Like Appeasing Hitler?

  Britain's Energy Secretary thinks so: World leaders who oppose a global agreement to tackle climate change are making a similar mistake to the one made by politicians who tried to appease Adolf Hitler before World War Two, British Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Huhne said on Thursday.... "This is our Munich moment," he added, referring to the Munich Agreement, a 1938 pact that gave Hitler land in the former Czechoslovakia as part of a failed attem...

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New UCLA Report Takes on California’s Groundwater Management

It's still the wild west in California when it comes to groundwater management. California depends heavily on groundwater as a source of water supply, but is one of only two western states--the other being Texas--that allows for the withdrawal of groundwater without a permit or any other means of tracking and regulating users.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the overuse of groundwater in California threatens the reliability of the State’s future water supply. A new repo...

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California suction dredging moratorium extended

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed into law an extension of the existing moratorium on suction dredge gold mining. I confess that the appeal of recreational mining in any form escapes me, and that I don't even like to vacuum my own living room. So it mystifies me to learn that there are people who like nothing better than running giant vacuum cleaners over the beds of rivers in their spare time, in the hope of catching a little gold. But it's true, especially ...

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Marcilynn Burke appointed Acting Assistant Secretary

Marcilynn Burke, who is on leave from her environmental law teaching gig at the University of Houston, has been named Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Department of Interior.  Burke has been at Interior since August 2009, when she was appointed Deputy Director for Policy and Programs at the Bureau of Land Management.  In her new post, she will oversee BLM, BOEMRE, and the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. Congrat...

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