Climate Change
China in the Global Environment — Q&A with Isabel Hilton, Founder and CEO of chinadialogue.net
Isabel Hilton is a leading journalist whose current work spotlights the impact of China’s growing economy on people and the environment. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, the New Yorker, and many other publications. In 2006, Hilton launched chinadialogue.net, a groundbreaking website that publishes reporting and analysis …
CONTINUE READINGNational Security, Climate Change, and Emergency Declarations
If the Supreme Court upholds Trump, it will have to uphold an emergency declaration for climate change.
Trump finally pulled the trigger today and declared a national emergency so he can build his wall. But if illegal border crossings are a national emergency, then there’s a strong case for viewing climate change in similar terms. That point has been made by observers ranging from Marco Rubio to Legal Planet’s own Jonathan Zasloff …
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CONTINUE READINGDoes the Fossil Fuel Industry Support Geoengineering?
A misleading new report from Center for International Environmental Law and the Heinrich Boell Foundation demeans the discourse
Geoengineering is controversial in the climate change community, and understandably so. Proposed interventions like negative emissions technologies (a.k.a. carbon dioxide removal) and solar geoengineering (a.k.a. solar radiation management or SRM) — which some writers group together as “geoengineering” — involve large-scale intervention in the climate system that could have adverse physical or social impacts. At …
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CONTINUE READINGI’ll Just Be Over Here In My Fallout Shelter
The Green New Deal may be ambitious, but it’s not alarmist.
It would be impossible to react to every piece of misinformation or poor reporting about climate change—let alone every misguided opinion editorial—that lives online today, but Bret Stephens’ February 15 piece in the New York Times strikes me as warranting a response. That’s not because of the clickbait title (“Is Nancy Pelosi A Climate Skeptic?” …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Carbon Emission Upanishad
Can Pseudoscience Be Used To Foster Climate Action?
The new issue of Science has a disturbing but unsurprising report on science under India’s Hindu nationalist government: The most widely discussed talk at the Indian Science Congress, a government-funded annual jamboree held in Jalandhar in January, wasn’t about space exploration or information technology, areas in which India has made rapid progress. Instead, the talk …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat I Wish The Green New Deal Hadn’t Left Out
Greening our infrastructure is part of the solution, but so’s city planning.
While there’s certainly been no shortage of criticism of last week’s Green New Deal resolution, the common line hasn’t been that the resolution doesn’t try to cover enough ground. On the contrary, it’s been called an everything-but-the-carbon-sink approach; even Trevor Noah devoted a few minutes of the Daily Show to gaping at the proposal’s efforts …
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CONTINUE READINGDonald Trump Creates the Green New Deal
Emergency Powers Can Be Very….Flexible
Mitch McConnell announced on the Senate floor today that Donald Trump will sign the new border compromise, then declare a National Emergency at the border, and use Presidential powers under the Emergency declaration to fund at least part of his border wall. Demonstrating his central philosophical principle — party over country — McConnell announced his …
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CONTINUE READINGIs the Green New Deal’s Ambition Smart Policy?
Some Lessons from Environmental History
At the the heart of the Green New Deal — which demands slashing U.S. carbon emissions by 2030 by shifting to 100 percent clean energy — is a major conundrum. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of ambitious climate policy don’t believe the goals are achievable, technologically let alone politically. Stanford Professor Marc Z. Jacobsen, for …
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CONTINUE READINGEmmett Institute Publishes Issue Brief on California’s Clean Air Act Vehicle Authority
Co-Authored by Ann Carlson, Meredith Hankins, and Julia Stein
Cross-posted to the American Constitution Society’s ACSblog As we have previously covered in past Legal Planet posts, in an outright assault on public health and the environment, the Trump Administration recently proposed rolling back national motor vehicle emission standards put in place by the Obama Administration. As part of this proposal, the Trump Administration also …
CONTINUE READINGBottoms-Up! An Emerging New Governance System (2)
Bottom-up appraches aren’t just fallbacks when top-down fails. They have their own strengths.
There are some obvious advantages to top-down climate police, whereby a uniform global climate policy is adopted at the global level and then seamlessly implemented by nations, or whereby a similar process takes place at the national level. Of course, this top-down model requires first global agreement on a uniform policy and then effective …
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