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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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Quiet Climate Policy

Just because climate change isn’t salient for most voters doesn’t mean policy isn’t important

This Substack post from Matthew Yglesias on climate policy gets, I think two things right and one thing wrong.  And getting those three components of climate policy correct is, I believe, important to long term, politically sustainable success in addressing climate change. First, as Yglesias correctly notes, climate change is not a priority for most …

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How broad does Clean Water Act 401 certification sweep?

Recent disputes over infrastructure projects highlights the importance of the question

Another issue for ping-pong governance over the past few years has been certification under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.  For those of you who are not deep into the weeds of the Clean Water Act, Section 401 requires (a) federal agencies that are issuing licenses or permits that (b) result in discharges to …

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Some Good News About the El Segundo Chevron Explosion

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

When the state’s second-largest refinery emitted a fireball into the heavens last week, it was bad. But it wasn’t all bad. The “incident” at the Chevron refinery in El Segundo was a good reminder that air pollution is present during the entire life cycle of oil and gas products, from when it comes out of …

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How to Dissent? Learn American History

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

It sounds cliché, but when you face a crisis, it helps to remember times that you’ve overcome adversity. That’s the power of history. And it’s one of the reasons I think the new PBS documentary “Clearing the Air: The War on Smog” is crucial to share right now. In the 1940s, dark, smoky clouds crept …

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