Schwarzenegger’s REAL Test on Climate
Like any Hollywood actor, and like any politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk a good game. And on climate, he talks a lot. He loves to promote inconsequential gab-fests like the Governors Global Summit on Climate Change. But when the rubber hits the road, will he actually, you know, do anything about it? Whether a bill on his desk gets a signature will tell us whether he is real or all puffery. That bill is SB 406, by state Senator Mark Desaulnier. SB...
CONTINUE READINGDelivering on Reform?
It seems that TSCA reform is heating up for this and next year, but the form it will ultimately take is still quite hazy. Senator Lautenberg and Representatives Waxman and Solis introduced the Kid Safe Chemical Act (KSCA) twice before, and the Senator is about to take a third swing at it very soon. In its last iteration, the placed the onus for testing and demonstrating safety on industry, but still essentially retained a conventional risk management approach to chem...
CONTINUE READINGHey planet, we owe you one!
According to the Global Footprint Network, today is Earth Overshoot Day. We have already used up as many resources in 2009 as the planet can produce in a single year. The rest of the year represents deficit spending. “It’s a simple case of income versus expenditures,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. “For years, our demand on nature has exceeded, by an increasingly greater margin, the budget of what nature can produce. The urgent t...
CONTINUE READINGHow useful are “planetary boundaries”?
The latest edition of Nature has an interesting article and accompanying commentaries (freely available here; longer version of the principal article here) on the concept of boundaries, or limits, or thresholds if you prefer, for the planet. The principal article, which has 27 authors led by Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center, is called "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity." It purports to identify and quantify "planetary boundaries that must not be tra...
CONTINUE READINGThe Kennedy seat, resolved
Just closing the loop on this earlier post, which discussed the uncertainty over whether the late Sen. Kennedy's seat would be filled in time to get Dems back to 60 seats for the crucial fall legislative season. Today, MA Governor Deval Patrick appointed a longtime aide to Kennedy as his temporary replacement, pending a special election on January 19(NY Times story here). The fate of climate and energy legislation in the Senate this fall will certainly depend on ...
CONTINUE READINGWishful thinking doesn’t justify grizzly delisting
Federal Judge Donald Molloy in Montana has ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to restore grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area to the list of endangered and threatened species. Judge Molloy refused to allow FWS to delist the grizzly on the basis of unsupported wishful thinking about the bear's future. Grizzly bears once roamed across most of the North American west, but the population in Yellowstone is one of the few remaining remnants in the lower 48. The grizzly ...
CONTINUE READINGConnecticut v. AEP: Three Comments
The Second Circuit's recent decision in Connecticut v. AEP, in which a coalition of state attorneys general sued electric power producers to cap and then reduce their carbon emissions, allows the public nuisance case to proceed and gave the environmental plaintiffs virtually everything they wanted. It should also give pause to those of us tempted to see judges as purely political: it was decided by Judges Peter W. Hall, a George W. Bush appointee from Vermont, and J...
CONTINUE READINGA promising step toward a national ocean policy
In June, President Obama created an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, and directed it to make recommendations for a national ocean policy. The Task Force got right to work. Now, after convening two dozen expert roundtables, inviting public comment, and holding the first of six public sessions, the Task Force has issued an Interim Report recommending key elements of a national policy. The Interim Report is very encouraging. If the Task Force follows this bluepri...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Change Lesson #2: Watch Out for Those “Unknown Unknowns”
This is the second in a short series of homilies on the lessons we can learn from climate change. Donald Rumsfeld famously distinguished between knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. He didn't take the occasion to provide sharp analytical distinctions, but the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns is very much like a difference drawn by some economists between risk (which can be reasonably quantified) and uncertainty (which can't be). In te...
CONTINUE READINGSecond Circuit Remands Connecticut v. AEP
In climate change news, the Second Circuit has (finally!) issued its decision in the case of Connecticut v. AEP, where a bunch of states sued electric power producers, saying that their carbon emissions constitute a common-law "public nuisance." The appellate court overturned the trial court's (completely unsupportable and poorly reasoned) decision that such a lawsuit was a nonjusticiable "political question." This potentially could add some force to the climate chang...
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