Another Senator paddling backwards on climate (are we up a creek yet?)
News reports yesterday have the moderate Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), at a meeting in his home state, expressing firm opposition to EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases. Here's a link to the short video clip on YouTube. Up in the air is whether this means he will support any of the formal measures being considered by the Senate to strip EPA of some regulatory powers under the Clean Air Act, such as Sen. Rockefeller's proposal for a two-year delay in regulating GHGs...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Change and the Royal Society
There seems to be a story going around that the Royal Society has backed down on climate change. I've seen several internet comments to this effect, and there's a posting making this claim at something called IPCC News. I dutifully went to look at the Royal Society's guide to climate science. The main conclusion of the report is There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity, such as the b...
CONTINUE READINGUpdate on Mountaintop Removal: Gov. Manchin Sues EPA
West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin announced Tuesday that West Virginia is filing suit to, as the Governor put it, stop EPA's "attempts to destroy the coal-mining industry and our way of life." The Charleston Gazette has a good summary of the suit. The suit seeks to invalidate EPA's recent review of Clean Water Act permits for mining and block EPA from implementing a stricter water quality standard. Front and center will be the Spruce Mine mountaintop removal (MTR)...
CONTINUE READINGJonathan’s Crazy: Prop. 23 Is the Most Important Environmental Initiative
Jonathan claims in this post that Prop. 23 -- the California ballot initiative that would prohibit the state from implementing its climate change legislation -- is NOT the most important environmental initiative on the California ballot this fall. That honor, he says, goes to Prop. 25. Prop. 25 reforms California's rules for passing a state budget. I agree with Jonathan that Prop. 25 is crucial for restoring a modicum of budget sanity to the Golden State. But he...
CONTINUE READINGYes on Proposition 21
Proposition 21 on next month's California ballot seems like a pretty easy call: it would raise the state's Vehicle License Fee by $18, with the money being dedicated to the state's park system (it would also end parking and user fees to enjoy those parks). That system remains one of the nation's best but is in serious trouble because of the state's permanent budget crisis: it faces a $1 billion backlog of deferred maintenance, and Governor Schwarzenegger closed several...
CONTINUE READINGThe Most Important Ballot Measure for the California Environment
...might not be Proposition 23, although I'm cheating somewhat because climate change is more about the global environment than the state's. So maybe you're thinking of Proposition 21, which raises the Vehicle License Fee by $18 in order to fund state parks? Important, yes, but not the most important. Proposition 19, which supports the growing of, uh, weed? Nice try, but no. The most important initiative is Proposition 25, which reduces California's archaic and dy...
CONTINUE READINGA Prop 23 Op. Ed.
Two of us (Rick Frank and myself) have just published an op. ed in the LA Times on Prop. 23. In a nutshell, Proponents of Proposition 23 argue that going forward with AB 32 in the midst of the current recession would further damage the state's economy and eliminate jobs. But a study we recently coauthored reveals major pitfalls in Proposition 23. The study, sponsored by the UC Berkeley law school's Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, concludes that the ini...
CONTINUE READINGThe New Yorker on Climate Legislation
Read the whole thing. Really. Because if you don't, and all you do is read the subtitle -- How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change -- or just read the tag line -- "Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change" -- then you will get a totally distorted view of the piece. The article makes it abundantly clear that from the start, only a miracle could have gotten c...
CONTINUE READINGDoes the Earth Need Chemo?
In a recent conversation, a Berkeley climate scientist compared geoengineering to chemo: you may find out it's your only choice, but it would be better not to get cancer in the first place. Likewise, we might need geoengineering, but it would be better if we didn't pump the atmosphere full of carbon. Nevertheless, it's important to know our options. Today's Washington Post has a useful article that describes the current state of play: "We're getting a sense that ...
CONTINUE READINGWelcome to our new environmental law fellow Rhead Enion
A few weeks ago, we gained a new colleague here at UCLA Law: Rhead Enion. Rhead, a graduate of Duke University Law School, Stanford, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is our new Emmett/Frankel Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy. He has worked as a research fellow at Duke's Nicholas Institute and has interned with Oceana, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and the ACLU of North Carolina. Rhead will be working with us on all sorts of projects...
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