The Melting of Mount Everest
A spectacular and frightening graphic from Christina Larson over at James Fallows' Atlantic blog: Larson posts a photograph that allows you to compare a picture of Mount Everest from 1921 with one from today. Don't look if you don't want to see something sad; as Larson notes, the glacier atop Everest has lost 320 vertical feet of ice sheet in the last 90 years. Take a look. But climate change isn't happening. Nope; not at all....
CONTINUE READINGMight recent events allow Governor Brown to consider a new direction for AB 32 implementation?
My colleague Jonathan Zasloff suggests that environmental justice groups are using litigation to try to get leverage for some sort of compensation or other measures, rather than to actually stop the state's cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases. I doubt that. But what I do wonder -- with no evidence, but I can speculate wildly on a blog, can't I? -- is whether this litigation actually might start the state on a path away from cap-and-trade. EJ groups have been ve...
CONTINUE READINGCan the Air Resources Board continue to implement measures to reduce greenhouse gases?
One interesting feature of the court decision preventing the state from moving forward with AB 32 is that the court's decision seems to halt implementation of the entire scoping plan. As I'll explain, this is an odd result, and one that may be legally required but doesn't make practical sense. The legal flaw the court found in the scoping plan - and the part of the plan the frustrates the environmental justice organizations that filed the lawsuit - is that the Air Res...
CONTINUE READINGName That CEQA Plaintiff!
The recent environmental justice lawsuit on AB 32 carried with it a typical CEQA characteristic: the plaintiff is a community organization formed for the purpose of a lawsuit whose name is usually a play on the issue. Thus, this case was Association of Irritated Residents v. CARB: "AIR," get it? Cute. But not even close to my favorite. That would have to be the group formed to file a lawsuit concerning the "Pocket" district of Sacramento, called -- of course -- th...
CONTINUE READINGTwo Cheers for Environmental Justice Cynicism
Ann is a little puzzled about what the environmental justice community hopes to achieve by suing the state over cap-and-trade: why would a carbon tax be better? she asks. Sean says that we need to understand that the EJ community is deeply committed to a series of process-oriented goals, and believe that these goals have been violated. Still, as he notes, it's hard to see why a carbon tax or direct regulation would solve the problem. And Dan suggests that the EJ...
CONTINUE READINGReflections on environmental justice and AB 32’s emissions trading program
I have a few thoughts on environmental justice and the new court decision halting implementation of the AB 32 scoping plan, inspired by my colleague Ann Carlson's post, and the comments on that post. Reflecting on the environmental justice community’s successful (at least temporarily) attack on greenhouse gas emissions trading in California – and on the EJ advocates’ loathing of market-based solutions generally – I don’t believe their positions are int...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Dump Trucks v. CARB
The California Dump Truck Owners Association ("CDTOA") filed suit in February 2011 against the California Air Resources Board ("CARB"). The suit alleges that CARB's Truck and Bus Regulation, which is part of the suite of regulations under AB 32 to address greenhouse gas emissions, is unconstitutional. CARB's Truck and Bus Regulation sets stricter emissions standards for dump trucks and other diesel-fuel vehicles. The regulation requires particulate matter retrofi...
CONTINUE READINGEducation and Views About Climate Change
A political science blog called the Monkey Cage (the name is a reference to an irreverent remark by H.L. Mencken) has an interesting post about education and views about climate change. As you would expect, education is positively correlated with a better understanding of the science -- but only for liberals. Educated conservatives are no more convinced, and perhaps less convinced, by the science than less educated conservatives. The following figure tells the stor...
CONTINUE READINGAB 32 Lawsuit: Assessing the Environmental Justice Arguments Against Cap and Trade
As Cara wrote yesterday, a California court has put AB 32 on hold temporarily on the grounds that in preparing its scoping plan, the California Air Resources Board failed to assess alternatives to its plan with appropriate detail. In particular, the court took issue with CARB's failure , under the California Environmental Quality Act, to assess carbon taxes as an alternative to an economy wide cap and trade scheme (though as both Cara and I have written, the court case...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Adaptation Across the Pond
In the U.K., climate adaptation is mandated by statute, with primary responsibility in a single government agency and specific implementation requirements for local authorities. In the U.S., we can only envy the extent to which even the current Conservative government is taking the issue of climate change seriously. A 2005 Climate Change Programme report helpfully assembled available information about climate impacts in England. The discussion of coastal flooding illu...
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