Climate Change

UCLA environmental law journal publishes new work on personal norms and carbon emissions, and on other interesting topics

Following in Dan’s footsteps as promoters of our respective schools’ excellent environmental law journals, I’m proud to announce that the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy Volume 27, #1 was published this summer. This journal issue features several interesting pieces.  They include a thought-provoking Comment by second-year UCLA law student Jed Ela, Law and Norms …

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More on the Chamber of Commerce’s extraordinary demand for a “Scopes trial” on climate change

UPDATE: regarding the standard of judicial review of any on-the-record hearing (discussed below), see the comments: commenter Steve Taber disagrees with my initial analysis, and he may be right (though I don’t have time to look into it further today). ORIGINAL POST: Holly has written a thoughtful post discussing the meritlessness and cynicism of the …

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Would a CO2 “monkey trial” improve scientific integrity and transparency?

As reported in the L.A. Times and Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has petitioned EPA to hold a trial-type hearing before finalizing its proposed finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. (We blogged about the proposed endangerment finding here.) The main argument in the petition is that a formal …

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An Indian Cap-and-Trade System?

Well, here’s something potentially significant: India has approved in principle new trading plans centred on energy efficiency as part of efforts to shift to a greener economy to fight climate change, opening up a potential market worth more than $15 billion by 2015. … The plan involves creating a market-based mechanism that would allow businesses …

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News of the Day

There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there.  Not as interesting as Legal Planet, maybe, but let’s give credit where credit is due.  Here’s some of the latest: What Happened to Acid Rain? How we (partially) solved a major environmental problem. China is Taking over the Solar Energy Market. Apparently somebody thinks there’s money in …

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Recent Work in Environmental Economics

What are environmental economists thinking about these days? Mostly energy and clmate change, it would seem.  Here’s a roundup of the most significant recent papers posted at SSRN’s environmental economics journal.  I’ve included links to those with free downloads: “Airline Emission Charges: Effects on Airfares, Service Quality, and Aircraft Design” JAN K. BRUECKNER and ANMING …

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Still more on climate engineering

There’s a lot of enthusiasm in some circles for “geo-engineering” as a response to anthropogenic climate change, and a lot of skepticism about it in others. The appeal is obvious — controlling greenhouse gas emissions looks difficult, since our economies and many of our daily habits (at least in the developed nations, which are providing …

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Rep. Waxman, Sen. Pavley, and Mary Nichols talk climate change

For those of you interested in the relationship between federal climate legislation and California’s landmark global warming laws, tune in tomorrow 10am-noon PDT for a public forum at UCLA.  It will be live webcast here, and yes, we are apparently even twittering it.  Rep. Henry Waxman will talk about his work in passing the American Clean Energy and …

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Specter on Board for Climate Legislation

Grist reports that Senator Specter says that he will vote for cloture and expects to support climate legislation on the merits.  This is a shift from his position last year.  That’s one step closer to sixty votes.

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Show Me The Money!

Guess what?  The oil industry is about to launch a populist campaign against climate change legislation.  (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Why would they do such a thing? The latest statistics on executive pay may tell us something about that.  It turns out, according to Reuters,  that the top bracket of employee …

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