Climate Change

FutureGen Back on Track

The U.S. Department of Energy announced  today that it will restart FutureGen, a large-scale demonstration project to determine the feasibility of capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide generated from  coal-fired power plants.  As Dan described in an earlier post, the Bush Administration had cancelled FutureGen based on cost-overruns, overruns that turned out to be based in …

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California and clean-tech jobs

Pew is out with a study measuring clean-energy jobs, businesses, patents and venture capital investments by state, and California ranks first on all fronts.  The study also concludes that the number of jobs in America’s emerging clean energy economy grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs between 1998 and 2007. While California’s number 1 …

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Green Buildings: LEEDing to Trouble?

Green construction is all the rage among legislatures, regulators and the building industry.  Incentives and mandates abound at the federal, state and local level, but so too do risks of failure to meet the certification standards when all the dust settles after construction is complete.  The Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy Clinic recently …

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California environmental justice advocates sue Air Resources Board over climate scoping plan

UPDATES: California Air Resources Board Chair (and former UCLA colleague) Mary Nichols comments below. The Complaint in this action is available here (caption page separately available here). A coalition of California environmental justice advocates has filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the California Air Resources Board‘s scoping plan for AB 32, the landmark climate …

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Rebutting the Economic Attacks on Waxman-Markey

The first line of defense against climate regulation was that climate change didn’t exist. The next line of defense was that maybe it was real, but it wasn’t caused by humans. Now we’re up to the third line of defense: it does exist and it is caused by humans, but it’s too expensive to fix. …

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Climate Change and War: A Partial Dissent

As risky as disagreeing with Dan always is, I’m not sure I accept the comparison between war and climate change — at least not in terms of the negotiations.  I think that a better analogy is between climate change and trade. Most succinctly, I believe this because in war, the relative gains of either side …

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Acid oceans coming to a beach, and theater, near you

Global warming has gotten so much attention lately that the public has largely overlooked another, independent consequence of rising CO2 concentrations: acidic oceans.  As discussed by Dan earlier this year, for many years the oceans have been silently absorbing CO2 and thereby buffering against even higher atmospheric GHG levels, staving off more warming — but with potentially devastating consequences …

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Declaring War Against Climate Change

The NY Times describes the current negotiations in Beijing as resembling an arms control contest, with demands for verifiable reductions (but in emissions rather than missiles).  The military comparison may be apt. Dealing with climate change is going to be like fighting a major war in a number of respects: *It will involve mobilizing for …

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Luke Cole, Environmental Justice Activist, Killed in Car Crash

I’m very sorry to report the news that Luke Cole, long-time environmental justice advocate, was killed in a car accident this week in Uganda.  Luke had taken a sabbatical from the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment , which he headed, to travel the world (he was also my law school classmate and  friend).   …

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Global Hotspots and the Environment

I recently noted the role of environmental woes in North Korea’s current situation.  The Middle East also faces serious environmental problems, as a recent TNR posting discusses: Does the world really need more headaches in the Middle East? No, of course not, but rising global temperatures are likely to create a few more regardless. According …

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