Climate Change

Proposition 26: The most important ballot initiative affecting California’s environment?

*UPDATES:  UCLA Law released a report analyzing Proposition 26’s impacts on the State’s environmental protection laws.  And co-blogger Rhead Enion has responded point by point to some of Maureen Gorsen’s arguments criticizing our analysis of the initative.* My co-bloggers have argued whether Proposition 25 or Proposition 23 is more important to California’s environmental future.  I …

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The BP Deepwater Horizon Blowout and the Social and Environmental Erosion of the Louisiana Coast

  In a lecture that I gave last week at the University of Minnesota, I discussed how the Louisiana Coast was under grave threat from erosion, rising seas, and pollution even before the explosion on the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon platform. Whole communities have vanished under the rising water, and the livelihoods and communities of …

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Another Senator paddling backwards on climate (are we up a creek yet?)

News reports yesterday have the moderate Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), at a meeting in his home state, expressing firm opposition to EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases.  Here’s a link to the short video clip on YouTube.  Up in the air is whether this means he will support any of the formal measures being considered by the Senate to strip …

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Chilly in Baltimore: Energy Efficiency and Wind Power

I heard an interesting story on NPR today about “district cooling” in which a company in Baltimore uses ice to produce chilled water, which is transported to a number of building in the city for supplemental cooling.  What really struck me as cool about this (sorry about the pun) is the fact that this system …

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Meg Whitman, Prop 23, and AB 32

Meg Whitman takes the position that Prop 23 is wrong, but she says that she’ll suspend California’s keystone climate legislation,AB 32, for a year if she’s elected.  The Berkeley White Paper on Prop 23 takes a different view than she does of the economic impact of Prop 23. Her proposal, which takes advantage of an …

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Prop 23 and PG&E: Setting the Record Straight

The California Jobs Initiative is spreading a highly misleading story about PG&E’s opposition to Prop 23, the ballot measure to suspend California’s keystone climate legislation (AB 32).  The story appears in an email that they’ve circulated widely.  To make it easy to understand, I’m leaving the truthful parts of their story in black and putting …

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Will the Future Be “Made in China”?

America used to b a place where the future happened first. Now we seem to be fight any kind of change, whether the issue is immigration, health care, the financial system, or energy.

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Prop 23 and Little Oil

Prop 23 is getting national attention, including a story in the NY Times: Charles and David Koch, the billionaires who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement, donated $1 million to the campaign to suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act enacted four years ago, and signaled that they are prepared to …

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Prop 23 and the Oil Companies

It is frequently said that “the oil companies” are financing Prop 23.  This turns out to be a bit of an overgeneralization.  According to Greenwire, While some companies are supporting Proposition 23, Shell Oil Co. opposes it, Chevron Corp. is officially neutral, Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP PLC have decided not to get involved and …

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State AGs Ready to Attack Constitutionality of California’s AB 32

An important postscript to my earlier post regarding Berkeley Law’s/CLEE’s newly-published white paper on Proposition 23. That’s the California initiative measure that, if approved by voters this November, would suspend implementation of that state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, better known as AB 32. The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that the Attorneys General of Alabama, …

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