Climate Change

New and Noteworthy from the Ecology Law Quarterly

The latest issue of ELQ — full content available free here — is  centered on two broad themes: 1)  learning from other states, countries and international experiences and 2) the failures of administrative law as an environmental management tool. The issue includes the following articles: * The Transformation of Modern Administrative Law: Changing Administrations and …

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Do we need a weatherman to know which way the climate goes?

A new report, Climate Change in the American Mind, was just released by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.  This report summarizes and synthesizes original polling research on our opinions, attitudes, and knowledge about climate change.  (Statistician Nate Silver has an interesting post at Fivethirtyeight.com about some of …

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California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard–& a Paean to Applied Scholarship

Jonathan Zasloff has previously written about the California Air Resources Board’s pioneering decision last week to mandate carbon-based reductions in state transportation fuels. These regulations, known as California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), are the first of their kind in the United States. More importantly, the LCFS is an integral part of CARB’s ambitious plan …

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Putting a Price on Carbon: Is It Needed? Is It Enough?

The bottom line seems to be that we need to get the price of carbon right — or as close to “right” as possible — but we need subsidies for R & D and we need direct regulation of the major categories of emitters.

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Shocking News About the Fossil Fuel Industry

Guess what? The fossil fuel industry has been deliberately lying to the public about climate change.  According to the Washington Post: “The Global Climate Coalition, a group of representatives of the oil, auto and coal industries, spent years telling the public that the link between human activity and climate change was too uncertain to justify …

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Are we too obsessed with climate change?

Slate has an interesting piece by Brendan Borrell arguing that the current laser-like focus on climate change may be getting in the way of effective conservation measures. As he tells it, being green today “is all about greenhouse gases,” to the point that people have forgotten about plain vanilla habitat destruction. That, he thinks, is …

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California Adopts Low-Carbon Fuel Standard

Good. The California Air Resources Board has adopted the nation’s first mandate to lower the carbon in fuel. As these things go, it’s pretty mild: a 10% reduction in carbon footprint by 2020. That hasn’t stopped the oil industry from complaining, of course, stating that CARB is “moving too fast.” When will it not be …

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Cars, Obama and Climate Change

There’s big news coming out of Washington and Detroit this week about the fate of U.S. automakers.  Rumors surfaced yesterday that G.M. will furlough its U.S. factories for most of the summer due to declines in auto sales.  And the Obama Treasury Department is said to be pressuring Chrysler to prepare for bankruptcy, to be filed as …

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Climate Change Legislation: Is the Train (Finally) Leaving the Station?

I posted yesterday about Rep. Boehner’s bone-headed statement about climate change.  My first thought was that this was completely idiotic, making a childish argument that even George W. Bush would have scorned.    The fact that some CO2 is normal and even necessary proves nothing about what happens when concentrations go beyond the normal level: salt …

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Flunking Climate 101

John Boehner, the House Republican leader, explains his view of climate change to George Stephanopoulos: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it’s harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, uh, well, you know when they do what they …

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