Region: California

Immanuel Kant and the California Water Crisis

How Should Individuals Decide How Much Water to Use?

Last week’s rain in southern California will hardly make a dent in the state’s devastating drought, and it raises an important question for individual consumers: exactly how should we decide how much water to use? There are obvious things: don’t hose down your driveway, take shorter showers, do full loads in the washer. But there …

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Abalones and Gulls and Judges, Oh My!

Comparing the Mono Lake Committee with the Abalone Alliance

For several months now, I have been looking for a good comparison case to the Mono Lake Committee, whose work is one of the great success stories of the modern environmental movement. Why did the Mono Lake Committee succeed when other organizations failed? Lots of organizations had good causes and dedicated leaders: what made Mono …

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Tracking Coastal Adaptation

Implementing CA’s Innovative Sea Level Rise Planning Database

Higher sea levels are already affecting California’s 3400 miles of coastline, millions of coastal residents, economy, buildings, and critical infrastructure. Yet, oddly enough for a state that is a worldwide leader in climate change mitigation, California has only recently begun to focus seriously on sea level rise adaptation. Recent reports have cited a lack of preparedness …

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The Climate Rides Again

Support the Emmett Institute in the California Coast Climate Ride!

Regular readers may remember  Ted Parson’s Legal Planet post about his experience on last year’s NYC-DC Climate Ride. Ted described the ride as “beautiful, hard, and moving.” (Pun possibly intended.) Along with fellow riders Andy Sabin and Dan Emmett, Ted raised a ton of money for our program and brought attention to the work of …

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California Sets 2030 Climate Emissions Target

And it looks like the right goal

Today, California Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order setting a statewide greenhouse gas emissions target to be achieved by 2030, at 40% below 1990 levels.  It’s an historic announcement that puts California in the vanguard of jurisdictions who have committed to goals in this 2030 timeframe (it matches the E.U.’s). California’s new 2030 target takes its place alongside, …

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Climate Fatigue

You might be tired of climate change. But climate change isn’t tired of you.

I gather that people are tired of hearing about climate change.  I’m tired of hearing about climate change, too. Sadly, Nature just doesn’t care  that much about entertaining us.  It’s going to be climate change this year, climate change next year, climate change the year after that . . . But don’t worry, it won’t …

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Swinging Between Optimism and Pessimism on Climate Change

good news, bad news

Every day seems to bring new news about climate change, some of it encouraging and some of it so disheartening that doomsday feels around the corner.  Here’s a catalogue of recent climate news, starting with the optimistic stories: Bloomberg news reports that the end of fossil fuels is in sight. The World Bank today announced …

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Yogi Berra Explains the Mono Lake Case

Or — Timing Is Everything

As part of the book I am writing on the Mono Lake case, one question stands out: how was the Mono Lake Committee able to assemble the resources to bring a lawsuit against the powerful Los Angeles Department of Water and Power? At one level, the answer is obvious: it found a Sugar Daddy, in …

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Los Angeles Releases First-Ever Urban Sustainability “pLAn”

Envisioning greener energy, cleaner air, and reduced consumption in LA by 2035

Perhaps no metropolis is better positioned than Los Angeles to pioneer ground-breaking environmental initiatives. As the second-largest U.S. city, and with the country’s largest municipally owned utility, a world-class research university–UCLA, and the blessings of abundant sunshine and a temperate Mediterranean climate, Los Angeles could serve as a global model for urban sustainability. Today, the …

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It’s a Wonderful Law?

A thought experiment about the role of the ESA in California water management

[This post is co-authored by A. Dan Tarlock, Distguished Professor of Law, IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.] Remember the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which shows up on TV every year at Christmas season? In it George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, gets a great gift from Clarence, an angel-in-training who intervenes as George is …

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