Climate Change

Cap and Trade? Huh??

It turns out that hardly anyone except politicos and policy wonks knows what cap-and-trade means or that it relates to climate change.  According to Rasmussen, Given a choice of three options, just 24% of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29%) believe the …

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A New Website on Climate Economics

Real Climate Economics offers a wealth of information from a pro-regulatory perspective: The Real Climate Economics website offers a reader’s guide to the real economics of climate change, an emerging body of scholarship that is consistent with the urgency of the problem as seen from a climate science perspective. As the climate policy debate intensifies, …

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Polar bears, wolves, and Obama’s Interior Department

Environmentalists have been absolutely thrilled with the EPA under the leadership of President Obama and Administrator Lisa Jackson. The Department of Interior under Secretary Ken Salazar has drawn more mixed reviews so far. (Dan Tarlock and I wrote about the first 100 days at Interior on the Center for Progressive Reform blog.) Recent news out …

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Wildfires Cause Climate Change, Climate Change Causes Wildfires

An obvious question about the raging wildfire in Santa Barbara is whether  climate change is the cause.  While it’s impossible to blame any individual fire on increasing temperatures, we know that climate change is responsible for more frequent and more intense wildfires in the southwest.  But less obvious and at least as troubling is that …

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ESA Does Not Address Carbon Emissions

According to news reports, the Department of Interior has reaffirmed a Bush Administration rule that excludes carbon emissions from regulation under the Endangered Species Act.  The Guardian reports: The Obama administration today declined to protect polar bears from the single greatest threat to their survival – the melting of sea ice by global warming. The …

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Section 7 status quo reinstated

Last week, Interior Secretary Salazar and Commerce Secretary Locke issued a press release announcing that they were withdrawing the Bush administration’s midnight rules relaxing the ESA section 7 consultation requirements. (Background on the Bush rules is here, here, and here.) The notice formalizing that decision has now been published in the Federal Register. As Congress …

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Marketing climate change policies

Writing in the New York Times last week, John Broder reported that ecoAmerica, described as “a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington,” has been researching the best rhetoric to build political support for legislation addressing greenhouse gas emissions. I confess that this story makes me a bit queasy.   As an academic, I’m committed …

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You do need a weatherman to know which way the political winds blow

When I was in Spain in 1993, an older man there complained to me about an unusual rain storm during the normally-dry summer. “It’s the fault of you Americans and radiation from your nuclear bomb,” he told me, half-teasingly. Little did he know that he was proving the thesis of a new study by NYU …

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Sharing the Burden of New Transmission Lines to The Sun and the Wind

The sense of urgency for building new electric transmission lines to transport large quantities of solar and wind power has spurred a national debate about the proper role for the federal government and the states in siting those lines.  Although land use decisions such as these usually reside in the states, many worry that states …

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Justice Souter and the Environment

The news that Justice Souter is leaving the Supreme Court probably means little for environmental cases.  Souter has been a reliable environmental vote, joining the majority in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court’s only case on climate change.  He dissented with the liberal wing in Rapanos v. United States , the convoluted decision about the extent to …

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