Breathless in Bombay
...is not just the name of a terrific volume of short stories by Murzban Shroff (mandatory reading if you come here): it is a condition that most residents here deal with daily. But the government is actually beginning to do something about it, which should be highly embarrassing to their US counterparts. This is a city full of taxicabs -- 55,000 of them. Municipal regulations mandate that every cab use CNG fuel, and as far as I can tell, the taxis actually abide by...
CONTINUE READINGExecutive Branch Agreement on Mountaintop Removal: A Positive Step, but Only a Step
Cross-posted with permission from CPRBlog. Over the past few months, the Obama Administration has sent mixed signals on mountaintop mining, the practice of blowing the tops off mountains containing coal and piling the left-over rubble in valleys and streambeds. Early on, things seemed to be going well for the environment. First, EPA objected to the issuance of two specific permits for mountaintop removal under Clean Water Act section 404, and announced that it would rev...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia and clean-tech jobs
Pew is out with a study measuring clean-energy jobs, businesses, patents and venture capital investments by state, and California ranks first on all fronts. The study also concludes that the number of jobs in America’s emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs between 1998 and 2007. While California's number 1 ranking isn't all that surprising given the state's size and economic mix, it's a sign that we're doing at le...
CONTINUE READINGMisfiring on fire policy
A centerpiece of the Bush administration's national forest management policy was the claim that vegetation management projects would be targeted to places where wildfire poses high risks to human communities -- the "wildland-urban interface." According to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required) led by Tania Schoennagel at the University of Colorado, that claim was a bunch of hot air. But the Forest Service isn't entirely to ...
CONTINUE READINGGreen Buildings: LEEDing to Trouble?
Green construction is all the rage among legislatures, regulators and the building industry. Incentives and mandates abound at the federal, state and local level, but so too do risks of failure to meet the certification standards when all the dust settles after construction is complete. The Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy Clinic recently released an interesting white paper regarding the legal risks arising in the construction of green buildings, incl...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia environmental justice advocates sue Air Resources Board over climate scoping plan
UPDATES: California Air Resources Board Chair (and former UCLA colleague) Mary Nichols comments below. The Complaint in this action is available here (caption page separately available here). A coalition of California environmental justice advocates has filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the California Air Resources Board's scoping plan for AB 32, the landmark climate change law enacted in 2006. The plaintiffs include Communities for a Better Environmen...
CONTINUE READINGMore Nominations
Sam Hamilton, a career federal biologist, to head the Fish and Wildlife Service. Bob Abbey, a longtime Bureau of Land Management official before becoming a private consultant, as director of BLM. Both of them seem to be accomplished professionals. However, E&E News reported (subscription req'd), GOP Senators seem to be sitting on many Obama nominations for no announced reason, perhaps as retaliation for the decision to schedule the Sotomayor hearings earlier than ...
CONTINUE READINGScientific integrity at EPA
Lisa Jackson was up on Capitol Hill yesterday, telling the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works how her EPA will protect scientific integrity. The webcast is available here. In her written testimony, Jackson said: While the laws that EPA implements leave room for policy judgments, the scientific findings on which these judgments are based should be arrived at independently using well-established scientific methods, including peer review, to assure rigor, ac...
CONTINUE READINGRebutting the Economic Attacks on Waxman-Markey
The first line of defense against climate regulation was that climate change didn’t exist. The next line of defense was that maybe it was real, but it wasn’t caused by humans. Now we’re up to the third line of defense: it does exist and it is caused by humans, but it’s too expensive to fix. For example, the Heritage Foundation estimates that Waxman-Markey would cost society a whopping seven trillion dollars by 2035. These estimates fail to ask a critical questio...
CONTINUE READING11th Circuit stirs the NPDES pot
Cross posted at CPRBlog. In a decision that shows the power of Chevron deference, Friends of the Everglades v. South Florida Water Management District, the 11th Circuit has upheld EPA’s water transfers rule, which provides that the act of moving water from one waterway to another does not require a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit under the Clean Water Act. The question of whether water transfers are subject to CWA permitting has been litigated...
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