You Want a Free Market? I’ll Show You a Free Market
NIMBYism's intellectual collapse is on view in California.
After patiently requesting, begging, insisting, pleading, and incentivizing local governments to plan for more affordable housing, the California Department of Housing and Community Development, armed with new powers from the state legislature, has had enough. It is cracking down on local governments that simply refuse to do their fair share in alleviating the state’s housing crisis. One of the worst is Huntington Beach in (of course) Orange County, which not on...
CONTINUE READINGThe Presidency Under Siege
The current Justices are no friends of presidential power.
As recent scholarship has shown, the Supreme Court has been increasingly aggressive in countering exercises of presidential power. From the environmental perspective, West Virginia v. EPA is the most relevant example of the Court’s efforts to cut the presidency down to size. True, the Court purported to be chastising EPA, part of the bureaucracy. Yet everyone. including the Justices, knew that the EPA was implementing presidential policy under the close supervision o...
CONTINUE READINGThis Climate Debate is a lot of Hot Air
Geoengineering is having a moment. But much of the media coverage is failing to capture the actual debate.
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about geoengineering – the various scientific theories and governance ideas that could eventually lead to technological interventions to help cool the planet. A weather balloon stunt in Mexico by a small startup called Make Sunsets generated a lot of hot headlines, even though that solar geoengineering “experiment” was so tiny that it couldn’t possibly have yielded any physical effects. After the MIT Technology Review brok...
CONTINUE READINGCongressional Cancel Culture
Once again, the Congressional Review Act rears its ugly head.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) provides a fast-track process for canceling regulations if they hit an ideological nerve or offend a powerful special interest. Congressional Republicans are busily trying use it to cancel environmental regulations. Earlier this month, the target was a regulation encouraging pension managers to consider the impact of climate risks on their investments. Now, Congressional Republicans are rallying to defend dangerous pollution from trucks...
CONTINUE READINGSt. Valentine’s Other Assignment
Along with lovers, couples, and marriage, he has a more environmental domain.
St. Valentine is associated with love and romance. He is also the patron saint of beekeepers. It’s unclear why. Maybe it’s the association of honey with happiness and affection, especially in the age before chocolate reached Europe. Or maybe it’s because of the “birds and the bees” as models for explaining sex to children. Whatever the reason, the honey bees and their wild cousins need his protection more than ever. Indeed, In 2021, the federal government began...
CONTINUE READINGTwo Cheers For CEQA
A recent case shows why the law is so important - and how it can be abused
Even the best and conscientious developers gnash their teeth at CEQA, California's environmental review law, and one can see why: it can allow NIMBYs to block useful housing and supercharge exclusion. But there's a reason why the law was passed and why it has persisted, and we saw it three days ago: Trees of Los Angeles can let out a deep breath of fresh oxygen after a recent court ruling halted the City of L.A.’s plan to chop down as many as 13,000 shade trees ci...
CONTINUE READINGThe Buildout Begins
New billion-dollar factories to produce EVs and their batteries are popping up across the country, with important political implicationss.
There’s been a surge of new EV and battery manufacturing projects in the past year. According to NPR, “In 2022 alone, companies announced more than $73 billion in planned projects — more than three times the previous record, set in 2021.” We read a lot about the rapid expansion of EV and battery manufacturing. It seems a lot more real if you look at specific construction projects. Below, I’ve listed sixteen announced projects drawn from a November 2022 ass...
CONTINUE READINGHow California (and the World) Get to 30×30
COP15 in Montreal ended with a pledge to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030. UCLA student analysis shows what we can learn from California’s own plan.
By Ashley Anderson, Elana Nager, and Madeline Ward As 2022 wound down, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) convened in Montreal. The conference ended with around 190 of the world’s nations adopting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which establishes four goals and twenty-three targets to be achieved by 2030. The most prominent of these was a “30x30” commitment: to conserve thirty percent of the earth’s lands, oceans, coast...
CONTINUE READINGWhat Is Water Use, Anyway?
We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Us
We all know the story, and the percentages: of water used by human beings in California (i.e. not going to environmental uses), agriculture uses a whopping 80%. So it makes little sense to call on urban users to conserve, so the story goes, until ag goes first. Certainly nonprofits like Food and Water Watch think so: As drought and climate change continue to wreak havoc on California’s water supply, an environmental advocacy group is calling on the state to li...
CONTINUE READINGWhen Bad Things Happen to Good Regulations
The GOP's effort cancel a pension reg illustrates the evils of the Congressional Review Act.
In their crusade against “wokeness,” congressional Republicans are taking aim at Labor Department rule about pension plan investments. The rule’s transgression is apparently that it makes easier for pension plans to consider how climate-related risks might affect a company’s bottom line. To avoid being woke, the GOP would apparently prefer pension managers to close their eyes to financial realities, sleepwalking their way through the climate crisis. The real fear...
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