Ecosystems

Deciphering NEPA 2.0

Here’s everything you wanted to know about the “New NEPA” but were afraid to ask.

NEPA was long an island of legal stability, standing almost unamended for over a half century.  Then in the summer of 2023, everything changed.  As a rider on the agreement to raise the debt ceiling, Congress extensively rewrote and expanded NEPA, gifting us with a new statutory regime.  As I’ve written before — and discuss …

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Misusing Carbon Removal as a Climate Response

Carbon removal is an alluring idea. That also makes it a tempting façade for bad policies.

It seems clear that in some form, carbon removal is going to be an important component of climate policy, especially later in the century to deal with carbon levels that overshoot the targets in the Paris Climate Agreement. The problem is not with the concept but with its misuse.    One of the risks that …

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The Long Life and Sudden Demise of Federal Wetlands Protection

Here’s a timeline of events.

It’s no wonder that one EPA staffer’s reaction to the Supreme Court ruling was a single word: “Heartbroken.” In 2023, the Supreme Court ended fifty years of broad federal protection to wetlands in Sackett v. United States.  It is only when you look back at the history of federal wetland regulation that you realize just …

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Emmett Institute Symposium: Powering the Future

This is a critical moment in the energy transition for plotting the course of mineral extraction, with communities and the environment in mind.

  If you ever find yourself passing through southwest Montana, go visit the Berkeley Pit and contemplate resource extraction. You pay a couple bucks to a guy in a trailer; walk under some razor wire and through a long, disorienting white tunnel; then stand and stare out at the most beautiful turquoise sea of toxic …

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Evaluating Voluntary Agreements in the Bay-Delta Watershed

Satellite image of California, centered on the Bay-Delta watershed. The Central Valley shows up prominently, with green agricultural fields rimmed by drier brown land, surrounded by mountains.

by Nell Green Nylen, Felicia Marcus, Dave Owen, and Michael Kiparsky

Updates to flow and other regulatory requirements for California’s Bay-Delta watershed are long overdue.  For much of the last 12 years, state political leadership has prioritized efforts to develop voluntary agreements (VAs) with water users over completing updates to the watershed’s water quality standards.  Now the State Water Resources Control Board has restarted the regulatory …

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Pearl Harbor Today

82 years after the attack, what is the state of the harbor?

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack that launched the U.S. into World War II.  Those of us who don’t live in Hawaii may not think much about the harbor, but I started to wonder how things were going environmentally there. The geography is more complex than I had expected. I …

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A $1 Billion Investment in the ‘New Forest Economy’

A global group of governors just issued a call-to-action for more flexible funding for forest protection. Here’s why that’s important.

On December 5, as the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change continues full swing in Dubai, Governors, Indigenous Peoples, and other partners of the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF Task Force), launched an urgent call-to-action to finance what they are calling the “New Forest …

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Recharge net metering (ReNeM) provides win-win-win for groundwater agency, landowners, & sustainable groundwater management

Nature Water publication showcases the economics of a novel groundwater recharge incentive structure

By Molly Bruce, Luke Sherman, Ellen Bruno, Andrew T. Fisher, & Michael Kiparsky An insidious issue has been growing along the Central Coast and throughout the state of California for decades: groundwater overdraft. In response to this growing threat and 2014 legislation designed to put an end to chronic overdraft, many basins have identified managed …

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The Not-So-Good News About Carbon Offsets

Recent studies show the significant limits to some carbon offsets. What’s that mean for tropical forest jurisdictions?

In case you missed it: there’s some good news about Amazon deforestation continuing to plunge. Jason Gray and I spoke recently about why tropical deforestation is down in Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia.  That’s good news because deforestation of tropical forests is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. The World Resources Institute’s Forest Pulse report …

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After Sackett: A Multi-Prong Strategy

The Supreme Court’s wetlands opinion was terrible. Now what we do?

The Supreme Court’s opinion in the Sackett case dramatically curtails the permitting program covering wetlands.  We urgently need to find strategies for saving the wetlands the Court left unprotected.  We have a number of possible strategies and need to start work on implementing them immediately. Sackett was unquestionably a major blow, reducing federal jurisdiction over …

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