Getting U.S. Automakers Real
One footnote to yesterday's historic announcement by President Obama on national climate change policy: in signaling that the federal government will reverse course and support California's pioneering efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicular sources, the role of the American auto industry in this debate deserves renewed scrutiny. Since 2002, domestic automakers have worked tirelessly in the federal courts, Executive Branch and in Congress to block C...
CONTINUE READINGA Wavering Federal Policy on Climate Change?
President Obama yesterday made official (sort of) his plan to fulfill a campaign pledge to grant the State of California authority to adopt pioneering greenhouse gas emission controls for vehicular sources. That announcement, while expected, is a breath of fresh air when it comes to state-federal environmental policymaking. It comes after eight frustrating years in which the Bush Administration both refused to address climate change at the federal level and did every...
CONTINUE READINGThe perfect political storm
Co-blogger Dan Farber points to a story in Tuesday's NY Times about a new study by NOAA's Susan Solomon and others of the environmental effects of allowing carbon dioxide to equilibrate at levels much above its current 385 ppm. As Dan points out, the prospects for already dry areas are frightening. There's another important lesson from the Solomon study. Global climate change is the perfect political storm, a problem that combines almost all of the features that make...
CONTINUE READINGDust Bowl Redux
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqiblXFlZuk]According to a story in Tuesday's New York Times: The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects that if carbon dioxide concentrations peak at 600 ppm, several regions of the world -- including southwestern North America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa -- will face major droughts as bad or worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Global sea levels will rise by roughly thre...
CONTINUE READINGEngaging India on Climate
Via the Times of India, along comes the news that the state of Himachal Pradesh, just south of Kashmir, says that it will present a plan to become a carbon-neutral state. I'll believe it when I see it, although the state seems to have a reasonable business strategy: reforest thousands of acres and sell carbon offset credits through the Clean Development Mechanism (which gives carbon emitters the opportunity to purchase offset credits in developing countries.). Even with...
CONTINUE READINGThe Awesome Power of the Blogosphere
Very early this morning, the good folks at the Northwestern Law Review published my article suggesting that the US Trade Representative serve as the lead agency for subsequent international climate change negotiation. A few hours later, President Obama announced that Todd Stern will serve as his international climate change representative, and work under Hillary Clinton at the State Department. I still think it's a decent piece, though. I'm not bitter. Nope. Not me...
CONTINUE READINGNew federal appointees’ sharp differences will make EPA/OMB relationship one to watch
As Dan notes in an earlier post, Cass Sunstein has been selected to direct the White House office that oversees regulation by agencies, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the Office of Management and budget. An in-depth article in today's Los Angeles Times discusses the controversy over his nomination among environmental and labor advocates. From the Times: The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs might sound like a remote bureauc...
CONTINUE READINGLisa Heinzerling to EPA
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has appointed Georgetown law professor Lisa Heinzerling to be her chief advisor on climate change. Heinzerling was editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review and clerked for Judge Richard Posner. She co- authored Priceless, a critique of cost benefit analysis, and also wrote the lead brief for the plaintiffs in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court opinion on climate change. This is a welcome appointment from the ...
CONTINUE READINGGood News for California
According to the Washingston Post: Obama will instruct the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider whether to grant California a waiver to regulate automobile tailpipe emissions linked to global warming, sources said, and he will order the Transportation Department to issue guidelines that will ensure that the nation's auto fleet reaches an average fuel efficiency of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, if not earlier. The car industry has challenged the California regu...
CONTINUE READINGNew research points to the need to build resilience to climate change’s impacts
Except when he does not!
While many among us are working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the climate is already changing and will continue to change for a long while even if we do everything we can to reduce emissions. As a result, we will need to adapt to our new reality, by building the resilience to deal with changing conditions. I (along with co-blogger Dan Farber and many others) just returned from a two-day interdisciplinary conference on adaptation to climate change in the Southwester...
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