GM Kills the Hummer
Yippee!! The environmental benefits of this move are clear, but it will also make the roads safer. Next up, SUVs? We can hope....
CONTINUE READINGProperty Rules, Liability Rules, Patents, and Climate Change
I suggested a few weeks ago that India and the United States might try foster climate cooperation by having India agree to use climate-friendly technology and the United States asgree not to pursue any legal actions under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property treaty. But of course there is a catch: at some point inventors of climate-friendly technology have to get compensated. Otherwise they won't have the proper incentives to innovate. That might be pa...
CONTINUE READINGJody Freeman Leaving White House Post
Harvard Law School's website has this announcement that Jody Freeman will return to the law school next month after serving just over a year as counselor to Energy Czar Carol Browner: http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2010/02/24_freeman.to.return.html...
CONTINUE READING(Vermont) Yankee Go Home!
You may recall the Supreme Court's decision in the Vermont Yankee case. It was a major administrartive law decision. Prior to Vermont Yankee, the D.C. Circuit and some other courts had been experimenting with an approach to judicial review which focused on helping to improve agency procedures, rather than reviewing the substance of the agency's decision. The Supreme Court ended that experiment in no uncertain terms. The Court also held that the agency did not h...
CONTINUE READINGUCLA Clinic persuades federal Administrative Law Judge to vacate approval of new coal mining permit on Indian land in Arizona
I have some exciting news I can't resist sharing: UCLA's Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic won a major administrative case last month, which is now final now that the time for appeal has run. All twelve of our clinic students spent a significant chunk of this fall working on it, along with me and Cara. We convinced an Administrative Law Judge at the US Dept of Interior Office of Surface Mining to issue a decision vacating an agency action approving a new permit t...
CONTINUE READINGIs EPA backtracking on Clean Air Act greenhouse gas regulation?
UPDATE: Cara discusses in this post some further developments that make the EPA's plans more concrete, and concludes that the EPA is backtracking significantly from its proposed rule by delaying the timetable and by regulating fewer facilities. **** Last fall, our Environmental Protection Agency appeared to be on the verge of moving very quickly to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act's powerful Prevention of Significant Deterioration program, which would ...
CONTINUE READINGIPhone App to Counter Climate Skeptics
Jonathan and I have had a somewhat spirited debate about what to do about Climategate (see here and here). I just found one perhaps small but very smart answer: an IPhone app that lists top arguments from climate skeptics and succinct rebuttals. The arguments are divided into three categories: "it's not happening," "it's not us" and "it's not bad." The arguments are set forth pithily (e.g., "the sun is warming") and answered in a few quick sentences (e.g., "In th...
CONTINUE READINGDOE Bets on Central Station Solar — Is It the Right Horse?
Congratulations to Oakland’s BrightSource Energy Inc. for winning the largest federal loan guarantee for a renewable energy project thus far -- $1.37 billion for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, to be constructed in the Mojave Desert. For an observer like me – one who is most definitely not a financial markets expert – the U.S. Department of Energy’s decision to back the Ivanpah project leaves unanswered questions. Is this the best way for DOE t...
CONTINUE READINGAB 32 Opposition and Truth in Advertising
While some politicians have called publicly for the suspension of AB 32 until the economy recovers (see here and here for details), a more behind-the-scenes effort to undercut the implementation of California's global warming bill is also taking place. The AB 32 Implementation Group ("IG") says it "represents large and small business that are vital to California's economy and that provide hundreds of thousands of jobs." It describes its mission as providing a co...
CONTINUE READINGNew Approaches to Analyzing Uncertainty
Conventional risk analysis is not well equipped to analyze actions with unknown probabilities and potentially disastrous consequences, and uncertainty in these situations is especially dangerous. The precautionary principle provides some guidance about these problems, but lacks specificity. We urgently need new ways of thinking about these issues. Luckily, some new techniques have emerged for appraising potential catastrophic outcomes. These techniques can be ap...
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