Standing for trees, redux
The Sunday Boston Globe includes this lengthy piece by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow on the revival of arguments first made in the 1970s that nature should be granted legal rights and perhaps even standing in court. USC law professor Chris Stone argued in a celebrated 1972 article that places like the Mineral King valley should be allowed to stand as plaintiffs in their own right, with the help of human attorneys or guardians ad litem. He managed to convince Supreme Court Justice...
CONTINUE READINGNate Silver’s Challenge to Climate Denialists: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Nate Silver, the well-known statistical and polling guru, has issued this challenge to climate change denialists on his website: The rules of his challenge are as follows: 1. For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe him $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, he owes you $25. 2. The challenge proceeds in monthly intervals, with the ...
CONTINUE READINGWater wars, eastern style
Those of us in the west have grown used to thinking of water wars as a regional specialty. But they happen in the east too. Florida, Alabama, and Georgia have been in court for nearly 20 years fighting over the waters of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River system, popularly known as the ACF. On Friday, a federal judge handed the downstream states, Florida and Alabama, a major victory in the latest battle. The Army Corps of Engineers manages a series of federal ...
CONTINUE READINGIs India Going Green?
According to a story in today's NY Times, India is making a major push toward renewable energy: "We need to get our act together," said Gauri Singh, joint secretary in India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, which was set up 26 years ago, "because India is growing faster than anyone can imagine. Renewable energy will have to supplement conventional power supply. "Our priority is to achieve energy security and self-reliance. Climate change is not the main driver ...
CONTINUE READINGFour Years Later, and Still No Real Plan
A new report by the National Research Council gives "thumbs down" to the Army Corps' plans for preventing another Katrina disaster. This is the kind of planning that we simply have to learn to do right-- not just for the sake of those immediately at risk, but because rising sea level and more extreme weather events due to climate change will require similar planning elsewhere. The NRC pans the Corps' plan in no uncertain terms: Despite being given authority from the U...
CONTINUE READINGCronkite on Climate
Some people are calling him "the last journalist" because his breed of even-handed, fact-based report seems to be an endangered species. Be that as it may, it's interesting to note that he spoke out on the subject of climate change a few years ago in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Not surprising, his perspective was different from that of the Bush Administration, which made a practice of scoffing at the "reality-based community": The contempt of the Bush adm...
CONTINUE READINGDeputy Director Named for CEQ
The White House has announced that Gary S. Guzy, former general counsel and counselor to the administrator of EPA during the Clinton administration and previously a senior attorney in DOJ's environmental division, will be named deputy director of the Council on Environmental Quality. Guzy has also been a partner at Foley Hoag, a consultant to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and a Visiting Scholar at the Environ...
CONTINUE READINGWaxman Markey, the Clean Air Act and State Climate Legislation
As I suggested last week, the prospects for the Waxman-Markey bill passing Congress this term don't seem particularly high. President Obama is expending significant political capital on health care reform. The Senate is occupied with the Sotomayor Supreme Court hearings. And the politics of climate legislation may be even tougher in the Senate than in the House. All is not lost, however. Groundwork laid by states and environmental groups during the long years of...
CONTINUE READINGBirthing Respect
I was a whale lawyer for years (or, more correctly, a lawyer for people working to protect whales and their habitat). I therefore can't resist the urge to link to this terrific piece in the NY Times magazine on the developing relationship between gray whales and their human fans in Laguna San Ignacio, one of the few remaining gray whale nurseries in the eastern Pacific. Each year, whales migrate thousands of miles down the coast of North America, from Alaska to ...
CONTINUE READINGBack to the future in northwest federal forests
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today announced the withdrawal of the Bush administration's last-minute revisions of the Northwest Forest Plan. Interior will also ask a federal court to vacate the 2008 modification of critical habitat for the northern spotted owl, and will review the 2008 spotted owl recovery plan, heavily criticized by outside scientists, which was used to justify the changes to critical habitat and the Northwest Forest Plan. Salazar explained that the B...
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