Culture & Ethics
Redevelopment and the Future of Infill in California
As Rick blogged, the California Redevelopment Association inadvertently committed suicide at the state Supreme Court last week. Convinced by their lawyers that they would ultimately win in court, the Association’s leaders had played hardball last year at the legislature in the face of attempts to end redevelopment. But the California Supreme Court ended up immolating …
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CONTINUE READINGTwas Congressional Christmas
‘Twas Congressional Christmas, when all through the House Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The PACs were counting their money with care, In hopes that John Boehner soon would be there. Lobbyists nestled all snug in their beds, While veto-proof riders danced in their heads. Zasloff down south and I on the …
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CONTINUE READINGLiterature Imitates Law — At Least in Bombay
Aravind Adiga is one of the most brilliant forces in world literature today. His previous novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize a few years back. Now he is out with a new novel, Last Man in Tower, a work which its publisher promises is “Searing. Explosive. Lyrical. Compassionate.” And what produces this …
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CONTINUE READINGThe “21st Century Contract with America”
I’ve just been reading Gingrich’s new version of the Contract with America. It repeats Gingrich’s desire to end most federal regulations in favor of federal coaching and subsidies for businesses and state governments: We must also replace the EPA, which pursues an anti-jobs agenda the economy simply cannot sustain. A pro-growth Environmental Solutions Agency in …
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CONTINUE READINGLocal Clean Energy Policies
With cities and counties struggling to emerge from the down economy, clean energy development has been an economic and environmental bright spot. As Berkeley Law and UCLA Law discuss in the 2009 report “In Our Backyard,” California possesses numerous opportunities to deploy solar and wind energy facilities in existing urbanized areas, such as along highways …
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CONTINUE READINGAnti-Urbanism in American Life: The Case of the Passport
For Thanksgiving, I was in Montreal for a family event, which was a little funny, since Canadian Thanksgiving went by about six weeks ago. But it did give me an opportunity to see a strange tick in one part of America’s self-conception. Take a look at your US passport. In the section for visas, you …
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CONTINUE READINGPilgrims versus Vikings: A Thanksgiving Fable
Once upon a time, there were two places that people settled from a great distance. But they had very different histories. You could call them the “Tale of Thanksgiving” and the “Tale of the Un-Thanksgiving.” The first story is about religious dissenters who fled their homeland. We all know the story: they nearly starved until …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Local Role for Promoting Energy Efficient Homes and Businesses
One of the most cost-effective ways to fight climate change is to make homes and businesses more energy efficient. Yet this is also one of the most difficult goals to achieve. In UC Berkeley and UCLA Law’s 2010 report “Saving Energy,” we found the key barriers to be the highly individualized nature of retrofitting buildings …
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CONTINUE READINGFaster Than the Speed of Light
Good environmental policy requires knowledge of the latest scientific developments. Thus, from the NYT today: Two months after scientists reported that they had clocked subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, to the astonishment and vocal disbelief of most of the world’s physicists, the same group of scientists, known as …
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CONTINUE READINGJane Jacobs, Edmund Burke, and the New Urbanism
Jason Epstein’s Introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities makes this powerful intellectual connection: Death and Life … [is] about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them…Her sympathies are with the …
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