Region: California
Second California cap-and-trade auction sells almost $225 million worth of allowances
Results are in from California’s second cap-and-trade auction. California Air Resources Board (CARB) offered 12.9 million 2013-vintage allowances along with 9.56 million 2016-vintage allowances. CARB sold all of the 2013 vintage at $13.62 per allowance and almost half (4.44 million) of the 2016 vintage at $10.71 per allowance. In total, that amounts to a bit …
CONTINUE READINGRubio Resigns: Was CEQA “Reform” Just About Fracking?
With the news that CEQA “reform” champion and State Senator Michael Rubio resigned today to lobby for Chevron, I have to wonder if his push for CEQA reform was really just to benefit oil and gas fracking. Sure, CEQA reform proponents liked to trumpet how a weakening of the law will help businesses and infill …
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CONTINUE READINGGina McCarthy, climate policy, and states
Blogs and news outlets are widely reporting today that President Obama is very close to nominating Gina McCarthy to be the new EPA administrator, replacing Lisa Jackson (WaPo post here). Since 2009, McCarthy has been the head of EPA’s division handling air pollution, a division that’s taken tremendous fire in recent years for issuing rules to limit climate emissions …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists Sue Over New Lake Tahoe Plan: Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good?
The Sierra Club and a local neighborhood group recently sued the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, challenging TRPA’s just-adopted Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin. That development strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive. Let me briefly explain why. The Lake Tahoe Basin, which straddles the California-Nevada border, has since 1968 been governed under a bistate Compact negotiated …
CONTINUE READINGIs California Fracking Regulation Out of Focus?
I’ve long been skeptical of the push that some on the left have made to ban hydraulic fracturing of natural gas. From an environmental perspective, I’d much rather have a natural gas-based fuel mix than one based on coal, and in any event, if there is that much money in the ground, people are going …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s AB32 as a Field Experiment
In modern academic economics, many scholars are running field experiments. I can point you to researchers such as John List of University of Chicago or Esther Duflo of MIT. In this 8 minute video, I sketch the simple economics of why it is very important for someone to run this field experiment for learning how …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Law and Policy Events for Couch Potatoes
UC Berkeley and UCLA School of Law’s joint Climate Change and Business Research Initiative has produced a number of public events featuring experts on pressing environmental law and policy issues. We now have on-line video recordings of many of them, for those of you who prefer not to leave the comfort of your home or …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia cap-and-trade offsets challenge rejected
Breaking: California has successfully weathered (at least in the lower court) another challenge to its cap-and-trade program. A state court has affirmed ARB’s significant discretion to design offsets protocols that rely on standardized additionality mechanisms, denying a petition that had sought to invalidate those protocols. Argus has the first story on this that I’ve seen. …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Case Against CEQA “Reform” — San Diego’s Lame Transportation Plan
The movement to “reform” the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a citizen-enforced law that requires public agencies to analyze environmental impacts of significant proposed projects, is gaining strength in 2013. Everyone from the Governor to the Senate President to business groups to public agencies are joining forces, singing the same anti-CEQA song. Their evidence that …
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CONTINUE READINGIs CEQA “Greenmail” A Problem?
Via PropertyProf blog, here’s an article on the real estate blog LA Curbed in which they disclose a previously secret settlement agreement between an LA neighborhood group and a local developer. The agreement resolved potential CEQA litigation by the neighborhood group against a possible condo development proposed by the developer. In particular, Curbed is outraged …
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