Region: California
New CEQA SB 743 Transportation Guidelines Finally Finalized
Critical revisions will be discussed at March 1st Conference in Los Angeles — register now!
It took five years, but California has finally ditched an outdated and counter-productive metric for evaluating transportation impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). With the guidelines finalized on December 28th, a mere half-decade since the passage of SB 743 (Steinberg) in 2013, the state will ditch “auto delay” as a measure of project …
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CONTINUE READINGJerry Brown’s Top Climate Accomplishments
Amazing successes, coupled with unfinished business
Today California inaugurates a new governor, Gavin Newsom, and says goodbye to four-term governor Jerry Brown. Governor Brown made climate change a central issue in his last two terms. Rick already offered an excellent assessment of the governor’s overall environmental accomplishments, so here are (to my mind) his top achievements on the specific issue of …
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CONTINUE READINGTo Be or Not to Be an Energy Utility
Questioning the continued existence of California’s largest energy utility
What can we do to ensure the safety of the massive electric and natural gas delivery systems that we rely on every day? Eight years after the horrific explosion and fire stemming from one of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s (PG&E’s) natural gas pipelines in San Bruno, California, the state’s legislators and utility regulators …
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CONTINUE READINGEveryday Christmas: The Gift of the Commons
Clean air. Clean water. We receive these public goods every day without payment.
Every day, we reach receive bountiful gifts in the form of what economists call public goods. I thought it might be worth reposting some Christmas Eve musings on that subject. After all, the holiday season is a time for watching the same old movies and hearing the same old carols as before, so why shouldn’t …
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CONTINUE READINGLooking Back at the 2018 Elections (Governors Races & California House Seats).
Both sets of elections went well for pro-environmental candidates.
Before the election, I did blog posts on some key governors’ races and California House races. How did those come out? As it turns out, pro-environmental Democrats swept these races, many of which had been rated as toss-ups and some of which did turn out to be very close. I picked these GOP-held seats because …
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CONTINUE READINGA Legal Planet Milestone
The blog has now had more than two million views since its founding.
I’m pleased to announce that the number of hits on Legal-Planet.org has just passed the one million mark. Before we switched to the new site in 2013, we had amassed over a million hits at our previous site, so the blog is now past the two-million mark since the blog was founded in March 2009.. That …
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CONTINUE READINGStreamlining Permitting and Regulatory Processes for Sustainable Freight Projects
New Berkeley Law report for the Governor’s Office details policies to speed up the transition to sustainable freight in California
A new report from UC Berkeley School of Law, Streamlining Sustainability, outlines a set of policy reforms and other measures California leaders can enact at the state and local level to increase the sustainability and efficiency of the state’s freight system. Freight is responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs in California and feeds commerce …
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CONTINUE READINGAre Buses the Silver Bullet to Reduce Declines in Transit Ridership?
Reversing plummeting transit ridership is key to counteracting rising VMT
In my first deep dive into strategies to reduce vehicle miles travelled (VMT), I’m looking at declining transit ridership using Los Angeles as a case study since its ridership numbers drive the overall statewide trends. Investing in public transit is one of the most time-tested strategies for reducing personal VMT, since every car-owner we can …
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CONTINUE READINGDeveloping Policy from the Ground Up
New article provides more detailed data and analysis of housing entitlement in the Bay Area
This blog post (and the underlying article) was co-authored by Moira O’Neill, Giulia Gualco-Nelson, and Eric Biber. Our team has released a new article on land-use regulation and housing in the Bay Area, building on our report from last February that explored the role of local law and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) on …
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CONTINUE READINGOn the present improbability and future necessity of carbon pricing
Mapping a politically feasible roadmap towards a future, rigorous carbon pricing system
Carbon pricing is in the news right now—and not in a good way. Whether it is French protests over gas taxes, political challenges to Canada’s new federal carbon price system, voter rejection of a carbon price in Washington state, or (yet another) Australian government falling because of disputes over carbon pricing, the political challenges of …
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