UCLA
How We Teach Environmental Law is Changing
UCLA Law faculty talk about how they are teaching environmental law differently in challenging times.
Environmental law is still relatively new and keeps changing all the time. After all, the field of environmental law didn’t really exist in the U.S. until pollution fears in the 1950s and ’60s spurred political activism. From 1970 to 1978, Congress passed more than a dozen of the most important environmental laws by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. …
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CONTINUE READINGWatch “Clearing the Air: The War on Smog”
LAPL
The American Experience’s “Clearing the Air: The War on Smog” tells an extraordinary story. It premieres on PBS this Tuesday.
A few years back, a colleague of mine, who I very much wanted to remain at UCLA, approached me because he was contemplating accepting an offer at a Washington, D.C. law school. He feared remaining in Los Angeles, even though he wanted to stay, because he didn’t want his young daughter exposed to the southland’s …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy Does Misinformation Follow Extreme Weather?
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
Nowadays when an extreme weather event strikes in America, what follows is a secondary emergency in the form of misinformation on social media. We’ve seen it play out after floods and heat waves, but this phenomenon really goes into overdrive after hurricanes and wildfires. A recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate looked …
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CONTINUE READINGCan Residential Electrification Support Energy Affordability?
New UCLA report illustrates potential savings across household types and energy upgrade scenarios, write guest contributors Rachel Sheinberg and Lauren Dunlap.
As the L.A. City Council considers repealing the city’s All-Electric Building Ordinance, reacting to the 2023 decision in California Restaurant Association v. Berkeley, new UCLA research suggests that electric buildings can save LA households hundreds of dollars each year on energy bills. Over the past decade, Los Angeles city leadership has put forth a suite …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat Have We Learned About Rebuilding from Fire?
Woolsey Fire survivors reflect on the rebuilding process and what might help rebuild more resiliently after the January fires.
When I first met Nicole Fisher in 2019, her property in the Santa Monica Mountains was nothing but a driveway and a pile of cement. I was interviewing the art teacher for a radio story about her family’s plans to rebuild after the 2018 Woolsey Fire that destroyed her home and hundreds of others in …
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CONTINUE READINGGas Price Politics and Desperate Moderates
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
In 18 years of working in newsrooms around Los Angeles, I talked with lots of political campaigns — but a phone call from Antonio Villaraigosa in spring of 2018 stands out. I was at my desk in the cramped newsroom of KCRW, sitting in between All Things Considered host Steve Chiotakis and producer Ben Gottlieb, …
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CONTINUE READING“What We Do Matters:” UCLA’s Charging Ahead Symposium
States and cities have a lot of tools to cut vehicle pollution. It’s time to break them out.
Trump is a bump. A nasty one, but a bump nonetheless, because the world is on the road to zero-emission fuels and vehicles no matter what. That was one takeaway from “Charging Ahead,” the UCLA Emmett Institute’s annual symposium held on April 9 — devoted this year to cutting vehicle pollution during the next four …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy Stand Up for Science? Ask Kim Stanley Robinson
The acclaimed science fiction author says at a UCLA talk that Trump’s attack on science is “a murder suicide” that won’t work because “you cannot kill the future.”
One day before thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest cuts to scientific research, Kim Stanley Robinson gave a barn burner of a defense of science in the “Optimist Room” of a UCLA conference center. The author of “The Ministry for the Future,” “The Mars Trilogy,” and other books with scientists and climate …
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CONTINUE READINGLA Fires and the Climate Connection
New UCLA research connects the dots between the climate crisis and the supercharged LA wildfires. “Hydroclimate whiplash” means worse floods, droughts, and fires.
Like millions of Angelenos, I’ve been staying indoors and off the roads, glued to the Watch Duty app, radio, and TV coverage as LA is engulfed by these historic fires. The last 48 hours of coverage has focused, understandably, on the firefight and immediate devastation. Now, it’s time to start hearing about the climate connection, …
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CONTINUE READINGFifteen Years of Legal Planet
5700 blog posts later, we’re still speaking — if not “truth to power”— then our best approximation of truth, to anyone who’ll listen.
A decade and a half ago, the law school here announced the launch of a new environmental law blog by Berkeley and UCLA. The March 11, 2009 press release began: “The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Berkeley Law) and UCLA School of Law today announced the launch of a new blog, Legal Planet, …
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