Eid Mubarak: Islam and the Environment

This evening, Muslims around the world are celebrating the end of Ramadan. All the talk of political Islam has overlooked the question of what, if anything, Islam says about the environment, and a short blog post can hardly be comprehensive.  My initial reading of the Qu'ran reveals something that should be unremarkable to those who have studied environmental rhetoric in the Bible: the text has resources both for those with an environmental conscience and those who th...

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Climate Lesson #1: It’s a Small World After All

This is the first in a short series of homilies on the lessons we can learn from climate change. Thirty years ago, in the early days of environmental law, it seemed that most environmental problems were local.  Pollution came from cities and bedeviled the residents of those same cities.  Wilderness areas suffered from human incursions, and rare species were endangered by habitat change or over exploitation. What we thought we knew then is true -- but only partly.  A...

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Meg Whitman Would Suspend AB 32

In a rather stunning and little-noticed op ed last week, California GOP gubernetorial candidate Meg Whitman -- former CEO of EBay - called on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to suspend the implementation of AB 32.  Her rationale?  To create jobs in California.  AB 32, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act, cuts California's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.  The bill also contains a provision , Section 38599, that allows  the Governor to susp...

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A third is a third is a third?

On the last day of its term, the California legislature did wind up passing SB 14, the hotly debated bill to boost the state's renewable energy supply requirement to 33% by 2020.  But its prospects don't look good -- the Governor announced within hours that he would veto (SacBee story here).  Presumably in its stead, he has also just signed a new executive order mandating that 33% by 2020 be reached via an alternate route, namely regulation under AB 32, California's...

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Old MacDonald Had a Farm . . .

But unfortunately, the farm wasn't as bucolic as you might imagine, as the NY Times reports: Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of water pollution in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the E.P.A. An estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Reviews of Environmental Con...

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The new and improved EPA

Since I've suggested elsewhere on this blog that EPA might not yet have achieved full vertebrate status with respect to mountaintop removal mining, I should acknowledge some of the positive steps the agency has taken recently. Three  examples: EPA and the Department of Transportation jointly proposed new fuel efficiency/greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and trucks, effective with model year 2012 (fact sheet here, proposed rule and other information here). Acc...

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EPA (indirectly) wins a turf war

Think the executive branch is one big happy family under the benevolent direction of (any) president? Think again. Power struggles over turf and substantive outcomes are frequent, and success in those struggles depends on a lot more than just who has the ear of the president at the moment. Sometimes it takes litigation, which has to be brought by outsiders because executive branch agencies don't run around suing each other. The Ninth Circuit just resolved one such battle...

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It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

Since opponents can’t seem to come up with any new arguments against climate change legislation, they seem determined to recycle the old, discredited ones. Here’s today’s example, straight from the GOP press release: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif, today urged the Environmental Protection Agency to include several relevant studies in its decision-making record for a major finding on climate policy after it was made public that a seni...

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Herein of Regulatory “Czars”

Some conservatives like Glenn Beck are now raising alarms about the power of "czars" within the Obama White House.   Although the rhetoric is ridiculous, there is a serious question here.  A long-term trend has been for Presidents to exert more centralized control over the bureaucracy, and as a practical matter that control has to be exercised through staff. This is a bipartisan trend -- indeed, the most strenuous efforts were made to centralize authority under Bus...

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Delta blues

California's legislature ended its session Saturday morning without doing anything to address the problems of the Bay-Delta, or more generally of the state's dysfunctional water governance system.  As Rick explained last month, water was at the top of the agenda this year for both the Republican Governor and the Democratic leaders of the legislature. This spring, the combination of a third year of drought with widespread agreement that the state's water delivery syste...

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