Climate Change
A Completely Uninteresting Story
The Wall Street Journal editorial board claims that California’s new cap-and-trade regulations will cost each consumer $3,800 a year and calls it creeping Stalinism. As my UCLA (and UCLAW!) colleague Matt Kahn gently and genially points out, the Journal’s editors are engaging in cranial-rectal fusion. In other news, dog bites man, the sun rises in …
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CONTINUE READINGTrolling for Anti-Environmental Plaintiffs
A reader sent me a an email from the Coalition of Energy Users trying to find plaintiffs for a challenge to AB 32 implementation. CEU claims to be a grassroots group that does not have a deep-pocket funding source, and that may be true. On the other hand, its interests are so precisely aligned with …
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CONTINUE READINGWhen Can We Attribute Extreme Events to Climate Change?
Moscow suffered from a severe heat wave in the summer of 2010, with temperatures reaching 101 degrees and an average temperature 14 degrees higher than normal for July. What are the odds that the heat wave was due to climate change? RealClimate presents the results of an analysis that was just published in the Proceedings …
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CONTINUE READINGUCLA Emmett Study Says Cool Roofs are Way Cool (and Bring Lots of Environmental Benefits)
UCLA Law’s Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment released a new report today called Bright Roofs, Big City: Keeping L.A. Cool Through an Aggressive Cool Roof Program. The report is the second Anthony Pritzker Environmental Law and Policy Brief issued by the Center. Cara Horowitz, the author of the report, used a dataset …
CONTINUE READINGAssessing the California Environmental Quality Act at 40
On Friday, November 4th, the U.C. Davis School of Law’s California Environmental Law & Policy Center will host an important conference: “CEQA at 40: A Look Back, and Ahead.” This year marks the 40th anniversary of California’s influential environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Modeled on and inspired by the National Environmental Policy Act …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Credibility of Climate Science
Climate denialists contend that climate science is either the result of a conspiracy of some kind or of groupthink plus institutional incentives to support alarmist predictions. The conspiracy theory makes even less sense than most conspiracy theories, because there would have to be hundreds, perhaps thousands of people involved, scattered across the world at numerous …
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CONTINUE READINGDeploying Large-Scale Solar on Marginal Agricultural Land: A New Berkeley / UCLA White Paper
With California committed to achieving 33 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, some solar and wind developers are rushing to propose large-scale installations on California farmland. These sites can be attractive because they are close to existing transmission lines and substations and have good sun exposure. However, proposed projects on farmland tend …
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Adopts Landmark Cap-and-Trade Program
Defying the trend in the rest of the country to ignore the perils of climate change, the California Air Resources Board voted today to establish the country’s first economy-wide cap-and-trade program covering greenhouse gas emissions. The vote comes five years after the state passed sweeping legislation — AB 32 — to roll California’s carbon emissions …
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CONTINUE READINGCheap Solar Provides Some Reason for Climate Optimism
Solar energy is getting really cheap. And that fact could alter the landscape of energy production and the course of climate change in ways we can only begin to imagine today. One of the conundrums of climate change is trying to predict the future. This difficulty in prediction may be especially true with respect to …
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CONTINUE READINGHit-by-Pitches and Climate Denialism
Ann’s post regarding the potential effects of climate change on the number of hit batters raises some critical issues on the national pastime. And of course, I’d be delighted to sign up for the field study. But climate deniers already have a ready answer. After all, they will ask: how do we know that the …
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