Culture & Ethics
The Emergence of Food Law
As with most holidays, Memorial Day is associated with a traditional food component — in this case, picnics. So this seems like a good occasion to talk about the emerging legal field of food law. According to the Food and Drug Law Institute, about sixty law schools have courses on Food and Drug Law, a …
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CONTINUE READINGWaiter, What’s This Fly Doing In My Soup?
This is the sort of thing that gives environmentalism a bad name: The UN has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Justice, Metrics & California’s San Joaquin Valley
This week the California Environmental Protection Agency issued a disturbing but worthwhile report on environmental justice issues in California. That report confirms what many environmental justice advocates and state residents already assumed: that the San Joaquin Valley is–far and away–the most environmentally-challenged region of the state. According to the CalEPA press release accompanying the report, …
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CONTINUE READINGA Funny Way to Celebrate Earth Day
My home institution of UCLA has decided to commemorate Earth Day in a clear and bold manner: it has banned tobacco on campus, starting on — well, today. The Westwood campus is the first UC to implement the ban, following a call from President Mark Yudof to go smoke-free across the 10-campus system by 2014. …
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CONTINUE READINGAn Energy No-Brainer
There are a lot of things to disagree about in terms of energy policy. One thing that ought to be common ground, as discussed in a Washington Post column, is increased research in energy R&D. As this chart shows, federal support for energy R&D is smaller than it was under Ronald Reagan: The economic argument …
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CONTINUE READINGWe Forgot The Horse!
It’s been a while since we discussed Great Environmental Songs. But we missed an important one. In 1972, when I was seven, if your radio was not playing Don McLean’s “American Pie,” it was playing “Horse With No Name” by a new band called “America” — a somewhat ironic name since the band was in …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate engineering: new proposals for governance of research
In a paper published Friday as a Science Policy Forum in Science magazine, David Keith and I put forward some proposals to advance the debate over governance of climate engineering (aka geoengineering) research. Climate engineering means actively intervening in the climate to offset some of the global heating and climate disruption caused by elevated CO2 …
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CONTINUE READINGCity of Los Angeles will promote widespread adoption of “cool roof” technology, citing benefits documented in Emmett Center report
One of the core goals of our environmental law programs at UCLA Law is to influence and inform public policy with our research. I’m proud to say that our Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment is doing exactly that. The City of Los Angeles, influenced by the Emmett Center’s work, is moving forward …
CONTINUE READINGNew Hope for Genetically-Engineered Food Labeling?
Many observers believed that the defeat of California’s Proposition 37 at the polls last November spelled a significant–and perhaps fatal–political setback for state and national efforts to require labeling of genetically engineered food products. But two recent articles from the New York Times suggest that the GMO labeling movement is far from dead. Last week …
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CONTINUE READINGDavid Brooks, Tree-Hugger
David Brooks’ column a few days ago makes an interesting case for radical environmentalism — even if Brooks doesn’t see the implications of his argument. Brooks thinks he is writing a paean to Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn: Those of us in secular America live in a culture that takes the supremacy of individual autonomy as …
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