PACE Advocates Keep Piling On FHFA
The hits keep coming. As I've been chronicling, the Federal Housing Finance Administration's decision to effectively destroy the energy efficiency and renewable energy financing program called Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) is inviting serious legal and political blowback. First, California Attorney General Jerry Brown sues the feds, and now Sonoma County, the Sierra Club, and Babylon, NY have filed their own lawsuits (and trust me -- you don't want to enrage ...
CONTINUE READINGEPA stands by endangerment finding
EPA today issued its response to the 10 petitions that have been filed asking it to reconsider its December 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions cause or contribute to air pollution that may reasonably be expected to endanger public health or welfare. To no one's surprise, the agency is standing by its earlier finding. As it should. The petitions relied on the "Climategate" scandal, claiming it undermined the global warming science on which the endangerment ...
CONTINUE READINGEnergy storage is key to the success of renewables in California
UPDATE: The bill summary linked below from the California Energy Storage Alliance actually summarizes a former version of the bill. The current bill version, linked below and here, is the best source now. The current version imposes no percentage mandate on utilities. Thanks to Ethan Elkind for pointing that out. UCLA Law and Berkeley Law recently published an important policy paper on the future of energy storage in California, written by co-blogger Ethan Elkin...
CONTINUE READINGELQ’s 2010 annual review
Congratulations to Ecology Law Quarterly on publication of this year's Annual Review of Environmental and Natural Resources Law. Check out these fine articles: Filling the Regulatory Gap: A Proposal for Restructuring the Clean Water Act’s Two-Permit System, by Robert B. Moreno Reasonable Bases for Apportioning Harm under CERCLA, by Robert Guo Energy v. Water, by Olivia Odom Surviving Summers, by Michelle Fon Anne Lee NEPA in the Post-9/11 World, by Amanda Lopez ...
CONTINUE READINGIndirect Land Use Change and Biofuels
Biofuels are a promising way to reduce carbon emissions, but they have a potential side-effect: indirect land use change (ILUC). ILUC is more serious for some fuels than others, but it's a possibility with any biofuel except perhaps algae grown in tanks in the desert. The logic of ILUC seems undeniable: because demand for food is relatively inelastic, less U.S. food production means higher food and fiber prices, which in turn encourage production increases elsewh...
CONTINUE READINGNo national renewable energy goals? Don’t try to tell that to the Pentagon.
The heat wave that has smothered the Eastern seaboard like a heavy, sweaty blanket has apparently done nothing to inspire the U.S. Senate to pass a climate bill, or take major steps on the energy front. Insiders report that Harry Reid’s “stripped down” energy bill will not only dodge the climate debate, but it will also fail to propose a renewable energy standard for the nation’s electric utilities. Reid reportedly says that he just can’t find the 60 votes ne...
CONTINUE READINGUrban Sprawl and the Obama Administration
The American Prospect has an interesting article about Shelley Poticha, the director of HUD's new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. Poticha is working to encourage a suburban nation to live in ways that make it feasible to walk, take public transit, and bike. Her goal is to make suburban sprawl a thing of the past by equipping local governments with the tools to build neighborhoods centered on public transit and walking. In her bureaucratic role, Poticha is...
CONTINUE READINGUsing Disclosure as a Smokescreen: How Behavioral Economics Can Deflect Regulation
A key figure in behavioral economics recently issued a warning about over-reliance on its findings. In a NY Times op. ed, Dr. George Lowenstein raised questions about some uses of behavioral economics by government policymakers: As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expe...
CONTINUE READINGThere’s always a trade-off . . .
Trying to solve or prevent one environmental problem often causes another. The aftermath of the Gulf oil spill continues to illustrate that truism. First, there was the argument between Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and the US Army Corps of Engineers over whether to allow the state to build berms to protect its shores from oiling, a proposal many coastal scientists said would cause more problems than it would solve. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that oysters i...
CONTINUE READINGSenate Fails to Act So What’s New in the World of Geoengineering?
With the depressing news that the Senate will not go forward on a climate bill, I thought it worth revisiting a question I posed a year and a half ago: is geoengineering inevitable? If we assume that U.S. leadership is crucial to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent over the next forty years, and if the U.S. Senate can't act even with a 60-40 Democratic majority and even in the face of the worst oil spill in U.S history, well, the answer seems closer than e...
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