A “thank you” to legislators who exempted the proposed L.A. football stadium from California’s environmental review law?
Last fall, I wrote about the California Legislature's effort to exempt the proposed football stadium in the City of Industry from further environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). I didn't follow up on that post, but the Legislature ultimately approved the exemption in a special session in the fall. Now, Los Angeles Times journalist Patrick McGreevy reports that the stadium's developer, Ed Roski's Majestic Realty, treated three ke...
CONTINUE READINGThree New Perspectives on Environmental Issues
Three recent books provide fresh and interesting perspectives on environmental law. The authors all graduated from law school in the past twenty years, and they all have most of their careers ahead of them. All of this augurs well for the future of environmental scholarship. The first book is Doug Kysar's Regulating from Nowhere. Kysar argues that we need to replace reliance on cost-benefit analysis with an ethic of responsibility. He emphasizes responsibilities t...
CONTINUE READINGIt’s the little things
People tend to pay a lot of attention to large animals and plants, which we find interesting and attractive. We know that bias affects policy decisions; we preferentially protect "charismatic megafauna." But the big appealing creatures wouldn't exist without the tiny, uncharismatic ones that form the base of the food web. And those little things may be disappearing unnoticed. A new study in Nature (subscription required) by Boris Worm and colleagues at Dalhousie Unive...
CONTINUE READINGIs the Western Climate Initiative Constitutional?
Brad Plumer in The New Republic rightfully celebrates the emergence of the Western Climate Initiative, which establishes a cap-and-trade system among several US states and three of the most important Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. "Cap-and-trade is coming to the United States," he notes, "and there is nothing that the Senate can do about it ." But maybe lawyers can, because it's not clear that states and provinces can actually enact these s...
CONTINUE READINGPACE 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...
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