Climate Change

Kivalina and the Courts: Justice for America’s First Climate Refugees?

It’s hard not to sympathize with the Native Alaskan inhabitants of the Village of Kivalina. The 400 residents of Kivalina, a thin peninsula of land in Alaska jutting into the Chuckchi Sea north of the Arctic Circle, have the dubious distinction of being among the first climate refugees in the U.S. Their town is literally …

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Getting Set for Durban

Along with two students from our environmental law clinic, Rhead Enion and I are traveling to Durban, South Africa today as observer delegates to the annual meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dan noted in a recent post that the Durban meeting has been largely flying under the radar of public attention, …

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Gingrich & The Environment

Given Newt Gingrich’s current spurt in the polls, it’s worth taking a bit of a closer look at his environmental views.  He favors dismantling EPA, which should make him popular with the tea party.  But apparently he has problems in that quarter: The reaction from some conservative commentators was swift and harsh. “Intellectually incoherent,” said …

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Database of Anti-Environment Votes in 112th Congress

To date, 170 anti-environmental votes have been taken in the GOP-led House of Representatives by the 112th Congress.  It’s difficult to keep track of the good, the bad, and the ugly coming out of the House.  One tool to help track the action in Washington is a new searchable database of anti-environment votes. “The House has voted …

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Katrinas Yet to Come

Climate change is expected to increase hurricane damage by $40 billion per year by the end of the century.

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Climate Change in Living Color

Richard Muller’s research group has a video that shows changes in surface temperature over the past two centuries.  (He’s the physicist who took an independent look at the climate record; climate skeptics loved him until it turned out he had some inconvenient data.)  It’s pretty hard to miss what’s happening: big-time climate change.  Here’s the …

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EPA sends GHG NSPS rules to OMB

On Tuesday, Nov. 4, EPA sent its proposed GHG rule for power plants to the Office of Management and Budget.  Not a widely reported story, perhaps because the internet was too busy misquoting EPA Administrator Jackson, who was speaking at Berkeley Law at the time.  Or perhaps because we do not actually get the proposed …

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Lisa Jackson Speech

Following up on Holly’s post, here is video of the speech.  (And no, contrary to a rumor in the blogosphere, she didn’t call conservative critics “jack-booted thugs.”  Instead, as you’ll see, she commented that they used this term about EPA.) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcNeR6-EEGc]

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Defending the “green guinea pig”

Just a quick post to point out my UCLA colleague Matt Kahn’s piece, in the Christian Science Monitor, defending California’s AB 32 climate regulations from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial (sub. req’d.) that maligns the state’s approach.   Apparently the WSJ relies on a long-debunked estimate of the costs to households from California’s program, an estimate that (among …

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The Case for Cap-and-Trade

Dan asked for a vote, and being a good Legal Planetary citizen, I responded — voting very reluctantly for cap-and-trade. The biggest difficulty, as is the case with most polls, lies in the phrasing of the question:  “all things considered” what is “the best strategy” for controlling greenhouse gases.  The problem with this locution — perhaps unavoidable …

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