Search Results for: feed

Requiem for a Bottom-Feeder

UCLA’s Don Shoup Has Transformed Urban Planning

Every scholar wants to do good, productive, important work, but I suppose all us secretly would like to redefine our fields — to go down in academic history, so to speak. Virtually none of us do. But UCLA’s Don Shoup, who is retiring this year from the Urban Planning department, is one who has. And …

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Readers: We Need Your Feedback

Dear Readers, We are engaged in an exciting process of redesigning Legal Planet.  We would appreciate if you could lend a few minutes of your time to answer 15 simple questions about how you use the blog, what you enjoy, and changes you would like to see going forward. Please complete our short survey here. …

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What Happens When You Feed Garbage Data to a Nobel Prize Winner? — The Bizarre Story of the Phantom Job Gains from Romney’s Deregulation Plan

Deregulation is one of Romney’s five steps in his plan to add jobs.  But how do we supposedly know that deregulation will add jobs?  It’s a fascinating story, featuring a Nobel laureate’s economic model.  The model is very fancy, lots of complex math, but it’s justified on the basis of data from a discredited study.  …

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Romney Calls for a Fossil Fuel Feeding Frenzy

The Washington Post reports that Mitt Romney will announce a new energy plan centering on explosive increases in oil and gas development, combined with greater use of coal.  I’ve read the staff briefing paper, and the Post’s account is an accurate summary: Mitt Romney on Thursday will outline a plan that he projects would achieve …

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Tipping Points and Feedback Effects

From the title, this could be a posting about the election results.  It isn’t — although I do wonder whether the relatively rapid changes we’ve seen in the House over the past decade are a sign of increased feedback effects.  My topic, however, is climate science. The curve at the left shows how feedback effects …

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It’s All About the Feedback

A fairly common reaction to climate science is to wonder how changes in the concentration of a trace gas can have a substantial effect on the world’s climate.  As it turns out, this is exactly the right question to ask. There’s a great post at RealClimate working through the logic. The direct effect of increased …

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The Energy Secretary Pushes Pseudoscience

The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.

Remember alternative facts? That catch phrase from Season 1, Episode 1 where Trump officials lied about the size of his inauguration crowd has now metastasized into a governing philosophy for how federal agencies plan to ignore, and ultimately exacerbate, the climate crisis. Trump 2.0 is pushing alternative science. Late last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright …

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The Animal Agriculture Industry Undermines Climate Action

Guest Contributor Alexander Wood, a UCLA Law student, writes that lessons learned from Big Oil can be applied to animal agriculture.

The case for decarbonization to address climate change is often, understandably, directed toward the fossil fuel industry. Public opinion toward the oil and gas industry has shifted in recent years, driven in part by public protests and litigation. Why hasn’t there been more movement against greenhouse gas emissions caused by animal agriculture? Emissions from Animal …

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World’s Biggest Court Opinion on Climate

The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.

For more than 24 hours last week, my social media feeds were a wall of jubilant reaction to the World Court’s big climate opinion. People who work on, and care about, the climate crisis needed some good news, clearly. That begs the question, is the advisory opinion really as big a deal as people wanted …

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Global Energy Trends

Trump or no Trump, the global economy is shifting toward clean energy.

Globally, fossil fuels aren’t disappearing but they’re not gaining a lot of ground, while renewables have been booming. Trump can’t do much to change this: right now China is a big player than we are.

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