A new environmental law prof blog
Jason Czarnezki, who teaches environmental and natural resources law at Vermont Law School, has a new blog, Czarnezki.com: Life, Law, and the Environment. Jason often has interesting things to say about the relationship of everyday life to environmentalism and environmental law. His blog is sure to be worth checking out....
CONTINUE READINGHeat Waves? Get Used to Them.
Last week the east coast sweltered. Berlin reached 99 degrees and China experienced a heat wave through much of the country. This week it's our turn in Southern California as temperatures reach triple digits. As I argued last week, when asked if these heat waves are related to climate change, the answer should be yes. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters led by Stanford professor Noah Diffenbaugh confirms my point. The study's results are alarming in two re...
CONTINUE READINGIndia Puts US Climate Policy to Shame
While US policymakers -- particularly Republicans and those in coal states -- are busy complaining about developing countries not capping their carbon emissions, New Delhi is busy actually doing something about climate change. Two weeks ago, India instituted a tax on coal, instituting a form of carbon tax that talented advocates (such as the good folks at the Carbon Tax Center) have been pushing for a while, and have been unable to get through Congress. The tax is ...
CONTINUE READINGUtilities-Only Carbon Cap
According to this morning's NY Times, Senate Democrats have agreed to include a utilities-only cap-and-trade program in their energy bill. That's certainly not ideal -- it excludes a large number of industrial sources, which limits its environmental effectiveness. The utilities-only program will also be less economically efficient, since it precludes taking advantage of possible low-cost reductions available in the industrial sector. Opinions will always differ abou...
CONTINUE READINGBreaking News: Jerry Brown Sues FHFA and Fannie & Freddie over PACE
As I suspected, we've got a lawsuit over the Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA) and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's position on Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE). (Background on PACE and the controversy here.) California Attorney General Jerry Brown announced today that his agency is suing these entities in federal court over their unwillingness to guarantee mortgages on properties with PACE assessments. You can read the complaint here. The Attorney Ge...
CONTINUE READINGPhilip P. Frickey — A Life in the Law
I am sad beyond words to have to report the death of my friend and colleague Phil Frickey. His death is a great loss to Berkeley and the legal academy more generally. In terms of his scholarship, Phil was a major figure in constitutional law, but was probably best known among legal academics for his work on theories of statutory interpretation. His casebook with Bill Eskridge is commonly considered to have created the modern field of Legislation scholarship. He ...
CONTINUE READINGInterior hits the pause button again
Cross-posted at CPRBlog. As he had promised, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today issued a new decision memorandum suspending certain deepwater drilling operations. Today's decision replaces the moratorium that the federal District Court in New Orleans enjoined on June 22, and which the Fifth Circuit declined to reinstate last week. As I made clear in my post on the Fifth Circuit decision, I think both the District Court and the Fifth Circuit were wrong on the first ...
CONTINUE READINGTravel Is Broadening–2010 Edition
Having just returned from a trip to Northern Europe, a couple of experiences resonate with me that, I hope, are worthy of sharing here. The first relates to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, British Petroleum, and the distinct ways in which BP's role and responsibility for the spill are viewed, depending on one's geographical roots. My recent travels took me to Great Britain and then on a journey to the Baltic region of Northern Europe, during which I was accompanied by ...
CONTINUE READINGGood crisis, bad crisis
The Gulf oil spill illuminates two aspects of crisis response: the strength and the limits of its power to motivate reflexive, rapid action. Crisis can motivate too much or too little. Consider first the limits of crisis as a driver of action. It's long been commonly thought that high-profile events were important in catalyzing the adoption of strong environmental legislation -- killer smogs for air pollution regulation, the Santa Barbara oil spill for water pollution...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Property Rights (Part IV)
Previous posts have introduced the concept of environmental property rights, given a number of examples of such rights, and explained how various kinds of EPRs that appear quite different are actually closely related. Today's post argues the EPRs could actually change constitutional rulings in favor of the environment. I develop this argument in detail in a recent paper, but here is the basic argument for three important constitutional issues: standing doctrine...
CONTINUE READING