China
Looking Ahead to Durban
Unlike the Copenhagen climate conference which had enormous publicity and great expectations, the Durban conference next month is coming up very quietly. Yet, given the 2012 terminus of the Kyoto Protocol, it’s a very important event. Some degree of progress at Durban is important to keep the UNFCC process alive; otherwise, the action is likely …
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CONTINUE READINGCheap Solar Provides Some Reason for Climate Optimism
Solar energy is getting really cheap. And that fact could alter the landscape of energy production and the course of climate change in ways we can only begin to imagine today. One of the conundrums of climate change is trying to predict the future. This difficulty in prediction may be especially true with respect to …
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CONTINUE READINGApple’s China Problem
There has been an interesting confluence of stories in the press about Apple as the release of iPhone 5 approaches this week. The New York Times recently ran a story, entitled “You Love Your iPhone, Literally,” about how test subjects looking at sounds and images of the iPhone exhibited heightened activity in the parts of …
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CONTINUE READINGPanel – Environmental Law in China: Implications for Bay Area Business (September 27, 2011)
China Dialogue, Asia Society, K&L Gates, and the Business Council on Climate Change are sponsoring a panel on Environmental Law in China: Implications for Bay Area Business on September 27, 2011 in San Francisco. I will be on the panel with a terrific group of speakers who work on climate change, environmental law, and green/clean-tech …
CONTINUE READINGIs USTR Trying to Increase China’s Carbon Emissions?
Our friends Daniel Firger and Michael Gerrard at Columbia Law School’s Center for Climate Change Law have written a useful new paper analyzing two important pending WTO climate cases. Of these, the more important appears to be DS 419, in which the United States is challenging China’s wind energy subsidies. Firger and Gerrard note that …
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CONTINUE READINGGreen litigation in China today
For those interested in the state of environmental litigation in China, China Dialogue, a bilingual site on China’s environment, ran an excellent series of articles last month on the topic. I opened the series with an article entitled “Green litigation in China today.” Here is an excerpt. Environmental litigation is difficult business in China. Even …
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CONTINUE READINGChina and the Environment: Some Progress on Lead Pollution
It’s a pleasure to be joining the excellent group here at Legal Planet. My focus will largely be on issues related to China and its environmental and energy challenges. I returned to the U.S. last month after seven years working in China on environmental protection and legal reform (mostly for the Natural Resources Defense Council). …
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CONTINUE READINGWelcoming a New Blogger
We’re pleased to welcome Alex Wang to Legal Planet. He is beginning a two-year term as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Berkeley Law School. Alex comes here following six years as a Senior Attorney and Director of the China Environmental Law Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He worked on environment and energy …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Change Impacts in China
The received wisdom used to be that climate change would have relatively little impact on China. But that views seems outdated. Like the United States, China is large and geographically diverse; as such, the impacts of climate change vary across the country. For example, the Chinese government reports that the “frequency of heat waves in …
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CONTINUE READINGChina and Carbon Markets
In a surprising development, China may be planning to create an internal carbon market a/k/a cap & trade. According to Climate Wire, When professor Chen Hongbo tried to promote carbon trading in China three years ago, he found himself under fire. As developing countries like China aren’t obliged to limit the byproduct of their economic …
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