Disaster Law

Disaster issues have several links to environmental law.  Perhaps the most obvious is that climate change is likely to cause a sharp increase in the number of extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves.  Less obviously, disaster law is the flip side of environmental law, concerned with how nature impacts us rather than how we impact nature.  It raises many of the same issues as environmental law about risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis, the precautiona...

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Educational Equality as an Environmental Issue

This is the first in an occasional series about surprising dimensions of environmental problems. Today's thesis is that  promoting educational equality in developing countries would be a good thing for the environment.  In other words, environmentalists should favor directing more educational funds to girls rather than following the norm in many countries, which is to spend those funds on boys.  Here's why: First, increasing female literacy is one of the best ways...

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Relist Yellowstone’s grizzlies?

Grizzly bears in the Yellowstone region were removed from the ESA list in 2007 on the grounds that they had recovered to the point that they no longer needed protection. Now Doug Peacock argues in Environment 360 that Yellowstone's bears should be returned to the ESA's protected list. His piece highlights three key challenges for delisting decisions. First, it can be difficult to predict the extent to which relaxing regulatory protections will result in increased huma...

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New court ruling requires City, Wal-Mart to re-analyze GHG impacts of development and consider a more climate-friendly alternative

Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), local governments and state agencies in California must analyze the environmental impacts of any permit to approve a new development project, and must identify and promise to implement mitigation to the extent feasible, before approving the project.  Over the last two years, it has become clear that climate change impacts - specifically, a project's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change ...

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Who will pay for the costs of foreign carbon dioxide in our consumer goods?

I discussed in this post the problem of GHG emissions from imported consumer products.  We import and buy more and more goods from China and other countries that rely heavily on greenhouse gas-intensive coal-fired power.  As a result, our consumer habits are responsible for a large and growing proportion of GHG emissions in other countries.   These GHG emissions aren't included in US GHG inventories, as evidenced by the sources cited in my prior post.  At what poin...

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Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Carter?

When Paul Simon famously asked his nostalgic question about the whereabouts of Joe DiMaggio, it was only 16 years after Joltin’ Joe had retired from baseball.  It's 28 years since President Jimmy Carter left office.  Is it time to become a little nostalgic about his energy policy?  The question is prompted by Carter’s testimony, this week, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he declared, “I would guess that our entire status as a leading nation ...

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Good News for Air, Climate, Traffic?

Two recent interesting and potentially related articles in the LA Times  suggest an encouraging trend.  California drivers are consuming less gasoline, a trend that began in 2006.  And U.S. car buyers may begin to look more like European consumers, buying smaller, more fuel efficient cars and keeping those cars longer. As the Times reports in High Gas Prices Drive Changes in California Gas Consumption , California gasoline consumption has dropped eleven consecutive q...

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Tracking state climate policy

The New America Foundation has released a new tool for tracking state climate planning and policy efforts. The Foundation's State Climate Policy Tracker compiles publicly available information about the measures states are implementing, the degree of progress, and their potential GHG emission reductions. According to the Foundation: Since 2006, 33 U.S. states have created climate action blueprints to guide greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions efforts. These blueprints, often ...

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Climate change threatens human health

A new report in The Lancet (registration required to access the full document), a leading international medical journal, provides more backing for EPA's proposed finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health as well as public welfare. From the multi-authored report's executive summary: Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Effects of climate change on health will affect most populations in the next decades and put the live...

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Honorary Degree for Joe Sax

We were delighted to learn that Joe Sax, the eminent environmental law scholar, will receive an honorary degree on May 20 from Columbia University. Congratulations, Joe!...

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