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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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Get Out the (Green) Vote

A pile of green buttons featuring the word VOTE in bold black letters and white stars on a green stripe.

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

Paying people for their vote in the midterms was one of those bizarre ideas that Trump floated and even some Republicans dismissed. But there is actually an incentivized Get Out the Vote effort happening right now that makes more sense (and is legal). Patagonia, a longtime corporate supporter of environmental activism, is offering customers a …

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I Skipped NY Climate Week and Read These Books Instead

Two books side by side: The Carbon Wave by Leah C. Stokes with a blue wavy cover, and Brought to You By by Amy Westervelt with an orange cover featuring coiled tentacles.

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

  Climate World descended on New York City this week for the annual mad dash of panel discussions, press briefings, newsmaker interviews, influencer gatherings, and sponsored parties that is NY Climate Week, but I stayed home and read books instead. To be more specific, I went to my local bookstore (Village Well in Culver City!) …

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The Bottleneck in Forest Monitoring Isn’t in Orbit

Satellite image of Bosawás Reserve outlined in white, showing deforestation in colored dots: yellow (2020), orange (2021), red (2022), dark red (2023), and black (2024). Scale and north arrow included.

Groups on the frontlines fighting deforestation are held back by institutional constraints – not just technological barriers – according to a new study from UCLA, NYU, World Resources Institute, and the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force.

There are 16,000 satellites circling the Earth right now, and a growing share of them capture images of our planet in unprecedented detail at every moment of the day. One of the many things they measure, monitor, and observe are forests. Being able to measure forests is the foundation for protecting them and for decades …

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Rough Sailing

A classic sailing ship with large white sails and an American flag glides on the ocean under a clear blue sky, carrying a group of people on its deck.

The Clearwater, the Coast Guard, and the First Amendment

The Coast Guard forced a sail boat to leave a maritime parade because it had environmental slogans pinned to its mast. This sounds like outright censorship, but we need more facts to be sure of what was going on. This interview explains the issues.

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