Climate Change

Peter Gleick and the Heartland Institute Expose

Jonathan focused last week, appropriately in my view, on the ethics of the way in which Peter Gleick got documents from the climate-denying Heartland Institute.  His conclusion is that as a scientist Gleick’s deceptions to get the documents were unethical. A new column in The Guardian comes out in the opposite place, arguing that Gleick …

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Stopping High Speed Sprawl

California Governor Jerry Brown has doubled down on his support for the state’s proposed high speed rail system, despite the uncertainty about how to pay for it and growing public opposition.  But who can blame him?  If the rail system does get built, it will be the defining infrastructure project in the state for generations …

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Exploring Policies to Promote Local Renewables

Last July, California Governor Jerry Brown held a conference, hosted by the Luskin Center at UCLA, to launch his initiative to achieve 12,000 megawatts of local renewable energy projects in California by 2020.  Local renewables, often called distributed generation, are projects no larger than 20 megawatts located close to customer demand. Berkeley Law’s Center for …

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Previewing a VERY Big Week for Environmental Law in the Courts

UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that late Sunday, February 26th, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier announced a one-week postponement of the trial in the BP oil spill case that had been scheduled to begin the next day.  The postponement is reportedly due to substantial progress that has been made in marathon settlement talks that …

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Peter Gleick, the Heartland Institute, and Scientific Ethics

  The Heartland Institute is a climate denial shop well-funded by fossil fuel interests and standard right-wing extremist foundations, which has underwritten attacks on climate scientists and has plans to disrupt authentic climate science education in K-12 classrooms.  Peter Gleick is one of the most respected scientific researchers in the world, who has done extremely …

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Legal Planet Takes Over the Yale Law Journal

Along with Dan, I also have a response to the Ewing/Kysar paper at YLJ Online.  (For those of your keeping score at home, two out of three commissioned responses were Legal Planet bloggers: we win!). It should surprise no one that while Dan’s is elegant and technical, mine is cranky and dyspeptic.  Here’s the abstract: This …

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Prods and Pleas/Stopgaps and Failsafes

In a recent article in the Yale Law Journal, Benjamin Ewing  and Douglas  Kysar discuss how other part of government can step in when Congress defaults on its responsibility to make public policy.  Their article, Prods and Pleas: Limited Government in an Era of Unlimited Harm, focuses on the tort litigation involving climate change.  Using …

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Geoengineering and Conflicts of Interest?

Is it unethical for scientists studying techniques to geoengineer the earth’s climate to advocate for additional government funding to expand the study of the science and geopolitics of the topic?  That’s the conclusion of a recent Guardian article that criticizes Harvard’s David Keith and the Carnegie Institute’s Ken Caldeira for a) receiving outside money to …

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California’s Attorney General Steps Up Environmental Enforcement Efforts

A recent development worth noting is California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ increased profile when it comes to environmental enforcement. Harris, the first woman and minority Attorney General in California history, had a busy first year in office.  Her razor-thin election win in November 2010 took over a month to be confirmed, delaying her transition from …

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What’s it like to be climate scientist Michael Mann? Think bounty (not the good kind)

Renowned climate scientist Michael Mann was at UCLA and the Emmett Center today to give a talk promoting his soon-to-be-released book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.”  Mann, who has been called “one of the most vilified men in the highly vilified field of climate science,” created the famed “hockey stick” …

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