Climate Change
Let’s Talk Coordinated Governance
Chinese policymakers learn from California’s pioneering work on air and climate regulation.
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new report on Coordinated Governance of Air and Climate Pollutants: Lessons from the California Experience – authored by me, David Pettit at NRDC, and Siyi Shen. The report is an effort to introduce California’s experience in air and climate regulation to Chinese regulators and researchers. In …
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CONTINUE READINGWe’re Going to Need a Much Bigger FEMA
FEMA is built to handle one disaster at a time. That’s not going to work in the future.
“When troubles come, they comes not as single spies but as battalions.” That wisdom goes back to Shakespeare. Yet our disaster response system is keyed to handling single disasters, not clusters of major disasters. That needs to change. This week is a good illustration. We have fires in California that may set records. We have …
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CONTINUE READINGPandemic Lessons in Governance
What have we learned about dealing with mega-risks?
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has driven home some lessons about governance. Those lessons have broader application — for instance, to climate governance. We can’t afford for the federal government to flunk Crisis Management 101 again. Here are five key lessons: 1. Effective leadership from the top is indispensable. Major problems require action by …
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CONTINUE READINGUCLA Law Faculty Weigh In on Solar Geoengineering Experiment at Harvard
How to engage the public when everyone on Earth is a stakeholder?
It’s been a surprisingly busy year for solar geoengineering research. In late December, Congress appropriated $4 million to NOAA to study the influence of atmospheric aerosols on climate, with an eye on assessing “solar climate interventions.” In March, Australian scientists ran a trial of a cloud-seeding technology on the Great Barrier Reef that may …
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CONTINUE READINGNext Steps in U.S.-China Environmental Cooperation
Pressing Both Countries Toward Carbon Neutrality.
U.S.-China relations are perhaps at their lowest point in decades and there is no end in sight at the moment. Each week brings a barrage of new U.S. federal policy measures aimed at China. Against this backdrop, ChinaFile recently asked a group of China experts to opine on the prospects for U.S.-China relations in coming …
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CONTINUE READINGHot Spots
Climate change isn’t uniform. Some parts of the U.S. are seeing conditions that won’t hit elsewhere for decades.
Friday’s Washington Post had a fascinating article about climate change hotspots within the United States. The largest one was on the Western Slope of the Rockies, which has already seen 2 °C of warming. The story is a reminder that the impacts of climate change will be global and yet also very much local. Before …
CONTINUE READINGClimate Litigation 2020
Here’s the state of play and some thoughts about the future.
Trump Administration has been a fertile source of litigation. With the election only about three months away, this seems like a good time to see how things stand in climate-related case. In a nutshell, climate litigation has been a growth industry under Trump, and the Administration has done poorly in court. The Current State of …
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CONTINUE READINGWasting Away in Methaneville
Another Trump rollback gets slapped down in court.
A week ago, a federal district court overturned yet another ill-conceived rollback by the Trump Administration. The case, California v. Bernhardt, involved releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The legal flaws in the rollback by the Bureau of Land Management, are all too typical of the Administration’s work product. The Administration has repeatedly lost …
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CONTINUE READINGPlanet Earth as Desert Island: “Lord of the Flies” or “Gilligan’s Island”?
Or in more technical terms, the Tragedy of the Commons? Or its inverse?
Lord of the Flies is a memorable novel about a group of English schoolboys who are marooned on a desert island. They quickly descend into savagery and violence. The book can be seen as a parable of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s view that human life in a state of nature is short, nasty, and brutish. But …
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CONTINUE READINGChina’s Distinctive Approach to Emissions Trading
It’s getting harder for the U.S. to use Chinese inaction as an excuse.
China’s emissions trading program is slowly forward toward implementation. It’s by no means a perfect program, but it should result in significant emissions reductions. The Chinese program has some features that make it less cost-effective. Nonetheless, researchers at RFF concluded that the climate benefits will be three times the cost of emission reductions. They didn’t …
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