Politics
Why Oil Companies Might Want to Kill Renewable Energy
Dan’s post about the connections among various efforts to decrease renewable energy production raises the question of why fossil fuel interests would want to take those steps. One obvious answer is the potential for economic competition in the future – though to the extent that renewable energy continues to be more expensive than many fossil …
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CONTINUE READINGALEC’s Battle for Dirty Energy
Nobody ever calls themselves “the Committee to Increase Corporate Profits” — American Legislative Exchange Council sounds much better. These phony organizational names make it harder to identify special interests or ideological zealots. Which of course is the point.
CONTINUE READINGBelieving in Climate Change
For many years, I didn’t really believe in climate change. Not in the sense of skeptics or deniers. It’s not like I didn’t intellectually understand the science behind climate change, and didn’t understand in my head that greenhouse gases were contributing to significant alterations in global climate systems, and that those alterations have the potential …
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CONTINUE READINGOn the risks of CEQA exemptions
In the course of a very good post about the benefits of environmental review statutes such as CEQA, Jonathan ascribed to me the position that “policymakers should [not] continue to look for useful exemptions to CEQA” based on a prior post that I had written opposing recent (now enacted) legislation creating limited exemptions from CEQA …
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CONTINUE READINGOne reason for anti-EPA riders
There’s been a lot of (appropriate) outrage over the efforts in the past year and a half by House Republicans to gut environmental protections through the use of appropriations riders. Those efforts might well continue in the next appropriations cycle, especially since bashing the EPA is apparently a popular election-year activity for Republicans. One of …
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CONTINUE READINGIs EPA regulation of carbon dioxide anti-democratic?
There’s been a lot of noise from House Republicans (and others) about how EPA regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act is somehow an end-run around Congress or anti-democratic. But it is neither.
CONTINUE READINGPrimary Colors with a Green Overtone
Frederick Anderson, a leading Washington lawyer who works on energy and environment issues, has written a novel about the current primary campaign. It features a candidate who starts thinking for himself, with predictably negative political effects. Gary Hart, who knows a thing or two about how a primary campaign can go wrong, calls it a …
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CONTINUE READINGMore on “Distrust”
I posted a few days ago about declining public trust in societal institutions (including the courts, the presidency, big business, the military, the church, etc.) By coincidence, Nate Silver has a post today that touches on the same subject. He reports that Democrats tend to have more trust institutions these days than Republicans. Moreover, Republican …
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CONTINUE READINGMore on California Environmental Leader & Coastal Advocate Peter Douglas
Legal Planet colleague Jonathan Zasloff has previously written about the recently-announced retirement of long-time California Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas. I’d like to add a few additional comments about Peter, my long-time mentor, client and friend. Peter Douglas has devoted the past four decades of his incredibly rich and active life to the cause of …
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CONTINUE READINGU.S. House of Representatives v. Modern Science
Nature, one of the two leading scientific journals in the world, has a strongly worded editorial about the recent House hearings on climate change: At a subcommittee hearing on 14 March, anger and distrust were directed at scientists and respected scientific societies. Misinformation was presented as fact, truth was twisted and nobody showed any inclination …
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