Donald Trump

Something Else to Be Thankful For — Inertia!

Meet your new best friend: gridlock, litigation delays, and red tape.

Inertia isn’t something we think about very often. Still less often is it something we feel grateful for. But it’s what prevents us from being tossed around by every passing wind. At this precise moment, that’s something we should hold precious. It’s ironic that environmentalists should now be grateful for all the features that hold …

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Be Thankful for Millennials – Our Best Environmental Hope

The present belongs to Trump. The future is a lot greener.

We may not have much to be thankful right now, but I do have one bright thought for Thanksgiving. These are dark days for the cause of environmental protection, and it would be easy to give way to despair. But I continue to believe that prospects will improve.  This election was a huge and costly …

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What Will Trump Do? Maybe Not What We Expect.

If he cares about 2020, he’ll have to do some recalibrating.

To be honest, no one really knows what Trump will do. Maybe not even Trump. The obvious is often the safest best. In this post, I’m going to speculate about another, slightly less dire, possibility. He may take the most obvious path – which would mean ripping the heart out of our environmental laws. For instance, he …

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What Does a Trump Presidency Portend for California’s Environmental Policies?

Constitutional Issues Loom Large in Future, Likely Federal-California Legal Confrontations

Sensing political storm clouds ahead, California Governor Jerry Brown yesterday issued a statement on the presidential election results that concludes: “We will protect the precious rights of our people and continue to confront the existential threat of our time–devastating climate change.” Several of my Legal Planet colleagues have recently posted thoughtful commentary on what Donald Trump’s …

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Trump Embraces His Inner Denialist

Nobody loves coal, oil and gas more than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has pledged to wipe out Obama’s climate change efforts, including the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement.  His choice to head the transition team for EPA shows how little his view of climate change has evolved since he tweeted that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to …

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How to Hedge Your Portfolio Against a Possible Trump Victory

Place your financial bets on having LESS renewable energy and MORE climate change.

If you’re worried about the economic impact of a Trump victory, you should be thinking of hedging your risk. One hedging strategy is to place a bet on climate change. By undoing Obama’s climate regulations and scuttling the Paris Agreement, Trump will set back climate policy, here and around the world by years, maybe decades, He’ll …

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“We’re Not, You Know, People That Don’t Want Those Things”

Trump promises clean air, clean water, safety, and a free lunch.

Every now and then, you see a car with one bumper sticker that says “Support Our Troops” and another that says “Abolish the IRS.”  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the car’s owner that supporting our troops includes paying and equipping them, and that someone is going to have to collect the taxes to …

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Has Environmental Law Hurt Trump Supports? Could It Help Them?

A major study sheds new light on these issues.

It’s time to update our image of Trump voters.  We thought that Trump voters were less affluent, lived in areas that were losing jobs in manufacturing and in areas impacted by immigrants.  All of that turns out to be wrong, according to a massive new study from Gallup based on surveys of over eighty thousand …

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The Miracle Elixir for Economic Growth: More Pollution!

Trump claims allowing more water and air pollution will boost the economy through the stratosphere.

Is increased pollution the key to economic growth? Can we increase economic growth by dropping restrictions on air and water pollution and ramping up climate change? Donald Trump believes that the answer is yes – indeed, if that if we just get rid of those pesky environmental regulations, we can create 500,000 new jobs every year, …

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A Clash of Visions

The two parties couldn’t disagree more about energy policy.

In every election, there are people who claim that both parties are alike. That’s certainly not true about energy policy this year.The distance between the tickets can be expressed numerically: Kaine has a 91% lifetime score of from the League of Conservation Voters, while Pence’s is 4%. And the differences between the presidential candidates are equally …

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