Air Quality
EPA Steps Through the Looking Glass
You can’t accuse EPA of hiding the ball. It has announced its new mission: promoting fossil fuels.
You might have thought the prime mission of the Environmental Protection Agency was protecting the environment. Lee Zeldin, the Trump appointee running EPA, has a different idea: “The EPA is going to aggressively pursue an agenda powering the Great American Comeback… that’s our purpose, and it’s what will keep us up at night.”
CONTINUE READINGModernizing Air Permitting in California
Guest Contributor Craig Segall writes that SB 318 would help clean up factories and other big industrial sources by pulling permitting practices into this century.
Almost every major industrial and power facility in California needs an air permit when it’s built or renovated. That’s a huge opportunity to rapidly advance the zero and near-zero technologies that Congress invested in in the Inflation Reduction Act, and that we urgently need to meet ever-more-pressing air quality challenges, especially as attacks from the …
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CONTINUE READINGDoes Deregulation Hypercharge the Economy?
If the economics effects are that huge, you’d expect the unemployment rate reflect major regulatory or deregulatory moves. It doesn’t.
EPA’s head sats that “EPA will be reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars.” If regulation and deregulation are that big a deal economically, we should clearly see their imprint on unemployment. It turns out that even the biggest regulatory and most dramatic deregulatory actions have no discernible effect on the job market.
CONTINUE READING100 Days of Fear & Loathing in Climate World
The Drain is a weekly roundup of climate and environmental news from Legal Planet.
Are you tired of the words “100 days”? “In his first 100 days the Trump administration has slashed federal agencies, canceled national reports, and yanked funding from universities,” Grist puts it. “One hundred days of anti-environmental mayhem,” says Dan Farber at Legal Planet. My UCLA colleague Ann Carlson is quoted by the New York Times …
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CONTINUE READINGUnsheathing a Weapon for Clean Air: ISRs
New UCLA Law report focuses on how to use Indirect Source Rules to fight pollution from mega facilities.
We don’t have to tell you that air pollution remains a serious threat to communities across California, from Oakland to the Inland Empire. But what if we told you that most air regulators are fighting air pollution with one hand tied behind their back, unnecessarily? It turns out there is a powerful weapon that can …
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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 READINGHunting Methane Using Satellites
Joint UC Berkeley – UCLA Law report aims to help policymakers harness the methane data revolution.
A stream of data about methane—a potent greenhouse gas—is now constantly being beamed down from space. New methane satellites provide a powerful data capability for governments who want to demonstrate leadership in climate policy. To equip policymakers with necessary information on satellite methane data, UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE), …
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CONTINUE READINGSenate Parliamentarian Confirms that California Waivers Are Not Subject to the Congressional Review Act
Will Republicans honor her determination?
As I have previously written, the Trump Administration is attempting an end run around the administrative process it is supposed to follow if it intends to revoke the waiver California received for three important programs to cut air pollutants from cars and trucks. You can find the details about this end run around — using …
CONTINUE READINGGetting Creative on Vehicle Emissions
UCLA Law set to host a symposium on April 9 on ways to charge ahead on cutting emissions.
These are tough times for lovers of zero emission vehicles–and clean air. I probably don’t need to recite the threats to both, but here’s a sampling: the Trump Administration has pledged to roll back federal air quality standards and mobile source emissions standards; is gutting funding for EV charging networks (and is even, maddeningly, shutting …
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CONTINUE READINGRegulatory Rollbacks: What to Expect
A replay of 2017? Or maybe something more radical? You can probably guess the answer.
Repealing and replacing existing environmental regulations will have a lower priority in this iteration of the Trump presidency – it will often be easier to just ignore the existing regulations or eliminate the regulators rather than the regulations. When it does rollback regulations, the administration will probably take more extreme legal positions and will be more likely to make constitutional arguments against environmental regulation.
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