California

Guest Blogger Ken Alex: Political Will to Address Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Post #9 in a Series on California Climate Policy by Ken Alex, Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown

[This is the ninth post in a series expressing my view of why California’s actions on climate change are so important and how they will change the world. The introductory post provides an overview and some general context.] I said at the outset of these blog posts that political will and the issue of scale are bigger …

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Guest Blogger Ken Alex: Reducing Emissions is Not Enough

Post #8 in a Series on California Climate Policy by Ken Alex, Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown

[This is the eighth post in a series expressing my view of why California’s actions on climate change are so important and how they will change the world. The introductory post provides an overview and some general context.] Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to hold the increase in the global average temperature to “well below 2°C …

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Progress on California water data

Michael Kiparsky and Alida Cantor

Water data has become quite a hot topic in California, and rightly so: throughout the state, decision-makers desperately need better information to guide their efforts to better manage this resource. Recent legislation has gotten us to the starting line, but how well new data platforms ultimately serve water management will depend on clear thinking and …

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Guest Blogger Ken Alex: Resilience and Adaptation

Post #7 in a Series on California Climate Policy by Ken Alex, Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown

[This is the seventh post in a series expressing my view of why California’s actions on climate change are so important and how they will change the world. The introductory post provides an overview and some general context.] Climate change has arrived.  Our fire season never ends; we no longer know if we will have a rainy …

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Surveying the Landscape of Local Zoning and CEQA

First report from Berkeley/Columbia research project shows how Bay Area residential developments negotiate land-use and CEQA review

A group of interdisciplinary researchers from law and planning (which I am part of) just released its first report on how CEQA and land-use law shape the process of regulating and approving residential developments in five Bay Area cities.  (I first posted about our research here.)  I’ve included the Executive Summary below, and the full …

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Guest Blogger Ken Alex: Working and Natural Lands, From Sources to Sinks

Post #6 in a Series on California Climate Policy by Ken Alex, Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown

[This is the sixth post in a series expressing my view of why California’s actions on climate change are so important and how they will change the world. The introductory post provides an overview and some general context.] Roughly 80% of California land is protected or agricultural.  That includes deserts, forests, wetlands, foothills, and multiple vegetative types, …

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Trump Administration to Hold California Hearing on Offshore Oil Drilling Proposal

Sacramento Hearing Likely to Be Both a Raucous and Fundamentally Flawed Affair

Legal Planet colleague Eric Biber this week has published a series of posts on the Trump Administration’s controversial–and deeply flawed–proposal to open most of the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf to offshore oil and gas development.  I won’t attempt to retread the ground Eric has ably covered, but want to highlight a major upcoming and related event …

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Guest Blogger Ken Alex: Methane, Black Carbon, and HFCs

Post #5 in a Series on California Climate Policy by Ken Alex, Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown

[This is the fifth post in a series expressing my view of why California’s actions on climate change are so important and how they will change the world. The introductory post provides an overview and some general context.] One of the most important actions we can take to combat climate change is to halt the emission of …

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The politics of Trump’s offshore leasing proposal

Widespread political opposition at the state level poses major obstacles to federal plans

This post is the second in a three-part series looking at the Trump Administration’s announcement of plans to vastly increase offshore oil and gas drilling.  The first post, here, focused on the legal context for those announcements.  In this post, I’ll discuss the political context.  In my last post, I’ll conclude with an analysis of …

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Commemorating the California Air Resources Board’s 50th Anniversary

Celebrating CARB’s Past Achievements; Charting Its Future Course

Recently, the U.C. Davis School of Law’s California Environmental Law & Policy Center hosted a major conference on the UCD campus commemorating the California Air Resources Board’s 50th anniversary.  The event, which drew nearly 400 attendees, was the result of a terrific, three-way collaboration between CELPC, UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies and CARB.  (Here’s …

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