PG&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...
CONTINUE READINGLeave ExxonMobil ALOOOOOONE…..
The next time a conservative tells you that he believes in the free market and balanced budgets, just show him this: Republicans senators who in the past have supported ending tax subsidies to big oil companies are prepared to vote Tuesday night with their party leadership to keep those subsidies in place. "I'm going to vote with my party," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) during a Senate vote Tuesday afternoon. "I just think oil subsidies have to be part of a bigger pac...
CONTINUE READINGScholastic drops industry-funded pro-coal 4th-grade curriculum, but still maintains other programs that threaten public health
Last week, I posted an item about Scholastic, Inc.'s partnership with the coal industry to produce "The United States of Energy," an energy curriculum that promoted coal without disclosing its considerable public-health and environmental drawbacks. The controversy over this partnership, publicized widely by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, went as far as a chiding editorial from the New York Times. Now, after a firestorm of publicity, Scholastic has anno...
CONTINUE READINGMay 23rd Sacramento Lunchtime Panel on Meeting California’s Renewable Energy Goals
For Legal Planet readers who will be in the Sacramento area next Monday, UCLA and UC Berkeley Schools of Law will be hosting a free lunchtime panel on policies to help California meet its renewable energy goals. The keynote speaker will be Ken Alex, Governor Brown's Senior Advisor and Director of the Office of Planning and Research (of course Ken's most significant accomplishment is his stint as a Legal Planet guest-blogger). The event highlights research and white pa...
CONTINUE READINGGood news, bad news on understanding climate science: WaPo and Los Alamitos ed boards
You can't get to good climate policy if policymakers don't believe (or don't profess to believe) that there's a problem to fix. With this truism in mind, it's kind of a "two roads diverged in the woods" morning for understanding climate science and policy. First we have the editorial board of the Washington Post, not always known for its embrace of scientific consensus on this issue, with a pretty terrific editorial covering the National Research Council's final repor...
CONTINUE READINGYou want political theatre? I’LL show you political theatre
This should be right up there in the annals of political chutzpah: ExxonMobil, the biggest international oil company, accused the US administration and Congress of “political theatre” in targeting the industry with discriminatory tax proposals that are due to be promoted at a Senate panel on Thursday. The "discriminatory tax proposals" that gullible FT correspondents Sheila McNulty and James Politi noted are calls for eliminating the generous tax subsidies ...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalism Versus Science
The French National Assembly yesterday voted to ban "fracking," which extracts shale gas and oil by injecting water, chemicals, and sand into rock formations, and has received strong criticism from the environmental community. So you would think that the action, taken by a conservative government, would have pleased environmentalists. Apparently not: Far from claiming victory, environmentalists and opposition Socialists accused the government of yielding to ind...
CONTINUE READINGSierra Club asks Gov. Brown to re-examine AB 32 cap-and-trade
On May 9, Sierra Club requested that Governor Jerry Brown "re-evaluate" the cap-and-trade rule promulgated by the California Air Resources Board. The Sacramento Bee has some initial reactions and you can read the original letter here. As noted in our earlier posts, CARB's cap-and-trade rule has come under judicial scrutiny and its status is somewhat unclear. Sierra Club raises two main objections. First, it questions the role of offsets in the rule. According to...
CONTINUE READINGScholastic, Inc. publishes pro-coal curriculum for fourth graders, apparently paid for by coal industry
Yesterday, I wrote about a satirical campaign in which anti-coal activists spoofed a Peabody Energy website in order to publicize the link between burning coal and childhood asthma. The satirical campaign included fake child-oriented games and discounted asthma inhalers. But all satire aside, the coal industry really is marketing its product directly to children. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a fabulous organization that works to address negative ...
CONTINUE READINGAnti-coal satire (with My First Inhaler) punks Peabody Energy
Peabody Energy -- last seen on this blog as the real party in interest whose proposal to mine more coal on Indian land in Arizona had to go back to the drawing board because of this UCLA environmental law clinic case , and immortalized in the John Prine song "Paradise" -- has been punked. (I've never actually used that word before; the Forbes article I've linked here actually came up on the first page of a Google search on the word "punked" a few minutes ago.) T...
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