Culture & Ethics
10 Wasted Years of Subway Service to the San Fernando Valley
The Source, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s in-house blog, proudly links to an article on the ten-year anniversary of the opening of Red Line subway service to the San Fernando Valley from Hollywood. Blogger Fred Camino notes that ridership on the route is well below initial projections (153,000 daily boardings compared to a hoped …
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CONTINUE READINGNot Working on the Railroad
Thies, where I was staying on my American Jewish World Service delegation trip to Senegal, is about 36 miles from the Senegalese capital, Dakar. That might not seem like a lot, but with typical Global South infrastructure, it is: often it can take more than 2 hours to get from one place to another. Plodding …
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CONTINUE READINGCara Won’t Be Blogging for a While, With Good Reason
I am happy to report that Cara Horowitz, the Executive Director of the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law, and her husband Stefan Grunspan are the proud parents of Molly Claire Grunspan. Molly joined the world on June 10. So if you miss Cara’s blogging for the next several months …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat’s Really Wrong With TSCA?
As Dan Farber discussed in his recent post, David Markell ‘s recent paper on TSCA provides some really interesting history. John Applegate has some fascinating pieces on the history and future of TSCA as well–well worth the read also. I thought it was curious that Dan focused on cost-benefit barriers imposed by the courts as being the obstacle to effective risk regulation, …
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CONTINUE READING“Facing Catastrophe”: A Roadmap to a Safer Future
Rob Verchick’s new book, “Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World,” might help avoid future disasters like the Deepsea Horizon blowout. Verchick views wetlands, lakes, forests, and rivers as a kind of infrastructure, providing ecosystem services that are just as important as the services provided by other infrastructure such as roads and dams. For …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat’s in Your Juice?
NPR reported yesterday about a study by Environmental Law Foundation (ELF) of lead (that’s right, lead) in juices and packaged fruits marketed for kids. The group purchased single serving packages of juice and fruits and sent them to an EPA-certified laboratory for testing. According to NPR, the group discovered that “[m]any individual servings of apple juice, grape juice, …
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CONTINUE READINGTime to resuscitate the Office of Technology Assessment?
Ninety organizations, including many with an environmental protection focus, have called on Congress to revive its Office of Technology Assessment. OTA was established in 1972 by the Technology Assessment Act to provide Congress with “competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects” of changing and expanding technology. It was defunded in …
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CONTINUE READINGEngineering Life Itself
I was interested to learn that Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, up the hill from where I work, has the world’s first department of synthetic biology. Berkeley’s bioengineering department also has a program focusing on systems and synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is genetic engineering but on a more ambitious scale, explains a very useful NY Times …
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CONTINUE READINGUVA Defends Academic Freedom
The Virgnia Attorney General, taking a little time off from his frivolous litigation against healthcare reform, is engaged in a fishing expedition against the University of Virginia. He has issued a sweeping civil investigative demand (CID) for university records relating to climate researcher Michael Mann, for no evident legitimate purpose. After some equivocation, the University …
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CONTINUE READING“Why can’t we just make it legal?”
No, not that. The developer in the video below asks the question about building communities that feature walkable spaces, a mix of uses, and more compact development near transit. Most local government land use laws now make them illegal, but they are critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from driving, preserving open space, and giving …
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