Region: International
Food safety in China, or is that rat meat in my lamb?
I posted a short piece at Chinafile.org last week on China’s food safety challenges. The occasion for the post was the arrest of 63 people in China for selling fake lamb meat made of rat, fox, and other meats. The “conversation” includes comments/responses from Isabel Hilton (ChinaDialogue.net), John Balzano (BU Law), Alexa Oleson (formerly of …
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CONTINUE READINGWaiter, What’s This Fly Doing In My Soup?
This is the sort of thing that gives environmentalism a bad name: The UN has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of …
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CONTINUE READINGSome Overdue Environmental Justice In Time for Shavuot
The Jewish festival of Shavuot, which begins at sundown this evening, commemorates the Israelites’ receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Shavuot is thus the paradigmatic lawyers’ holiday given its focus on law and justice. This connects nicely with the other two great pilgrimage holidays found in the Jewish Bible, giving us a trinity (so …
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CONTINUE READINGAlberta, Open Sewers and the Keystone Pipeline
Al Gore raised the hackles of the Canadian government this week when he criticized the country’s large scale extraction of oil from the Alberta tar sands. The tar sand oil reserves are among the world’s largest but are particularly energy intensive to extract. That means that extracting oil that will then be burned will emit significantly …
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CONTINUE READINGChina’s New Environmental Courts
Pollution in China has been much in the news recently, from premature deaths caused by air pollution to news of thousands of dead pigs found in a Shanghai river. Could law help solve China’s environmental problems? My recent post on China Dialogue takes a look at what China’s new environmental courts have been able to accomplish so far.
CONTINUE READINGLeave Agribusiness Lobbyists ALOOONE!!!
A few weeks ago, I posted about the Obama Administration’s effort to change outrageous and wasteful food aid rules that line the pockets of agribusiness and shipping companies. The more you look at the absurd policy preventing USAID from purchasing food locally for famine relief, the worse it looks: it wastes money, it prevents getting food to people …
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CONTINUE READINGOne More For the Supreme Court Scorecard: Chief Justice Roberts Feels Very Sorry for Multinational Corporations
In my view, Dan’s helpful post the other day about the Supreme Court’s environmental cases neglected one very important case decided just a few days ago: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, about which I have blogged earlier. The “in my view” in the last sentence is more than throat-clearing, for Kiobel raises the question, also …
CONTINUE READINGGoing Global with CBA
For those who are not fans of CBA, its international spread may seem like a worrisome possibility. But for environmentalists, CBA may work out better than it has in the United States.
CONTINUE READINGChinese Willingness to Pay for Clean Air
In joint research with several of my friends, in this recently published paper we use cross- Chinese city data on real estate prices and ambient air pollution to measure the rent premium in cleaner cities. The benefits of any environmental regulation hinge on its causal impact on ambient pollution and on how much people value …
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CONTINUE READINGFinally Cleaning Up In the Galilee
Residents of northern Israel got a welcome victory a couple of days ago: the nation’s High Court held that Eitanit Construction Products, a politically well-connected firm that polluted cities across the region with asbestos, must pay half the cost of cleaning it up. Friable asbestos contaminating whole cities might be a dim memory in the United …
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