Energy
Breaking News: PACE Dies in the Ninth Circuit
The West Coast PACE litigation party appears to have ended. After favorable rulings from the California Northern District Court for PACE backers, the Ninth Circuit today dismissed the case outright. As background, Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs allow municipal governments to finance residential and commercial energy improvements, with property owners repaying the governments via …
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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 York Times Says Farewell to “Green Blog” and Environment Desk
A few days ago, the New York Times cancelled its “Green Blog,” dedicated to environmental and energy news. The Times told readers to look for environmental policy news on the “Caucus blog,” dedicated to politics, and energy technology news on the “Bits blog,” dedicated to the business of technology. The demise of the Green Blog came less than two …
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CONTINUE READINGWho Is Ernest Moniz?
And why should you care? Moniz is a nuclear physics professor at MIT, the director of the MIT energy project, and at least according to a lot of reports, President Obama’s first choice to head the Energy Department. Anything not to like about that? Well, lots of environmentalists don’t seem to. The Daily Beast reports …
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CONTINUE READINGNewsflashes from the B-School
You might think that business schools would take the same views of policy as the Chamber of Commerce, but that’s not necessarily true. The Haas School here at Berkeley has a very interesting energy blog. I don’t always find their conclusions congenial but they’re always interesting. Here are some recent posts: Information and energy use. …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Ever-Growing Crisis Over the Nation’s Nuclear Waste Non-Solution
The Associated Press reports that six underground storage tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are leaking a witches’ brew of high-level nuclear wastes into the soil that threatens regional groundwater supplies. This news highlights a crisis of national proportions that has for too long gone unaddressed. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear …
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CONTINUE READINGCasting a Shadow on the Future of Shale Gas
Current projections for shale oil and gas are huge. But are they realistic? An article in the February 21 issue of Nature suggests that these projections may be too optimistic: Wells decline rapidly within a few years. Those in the top five US plays typically produced 80–95% less gas after three years. In my view, the …
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CONTINUE READINGRubio Resigns: Was CEQA “Reform” Just About Fracking?
With the news that CEQA “reform” champion and State Senator Michael Rubio resigned today to lobby for Chevron, I have to wonder if his push for CEQA reform was really just to benefit oil and gas fracking. Sure, CEQA reform proponents liked to trumpet how a weakening of the law will help businesses and infill …
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CONTINUE READINGStill More About the Keystone XL Pipeline
I am opposed to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Nonetheless, I find myself somewhat in disagreement with my blogging neighbor Jonathan Zasloff on this one, and somewhat in agreement with Joe Nocera. Yes, as Nocera argues, as long as there is demand for oil, energy producers will keep looking for new supplies to …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy is Each Sequel Worse Than the Last?
Some movie franchises last way too long: Friday the 13th, Rocky, Nightmare on Elm Street. Each new film is worse than the last, and they’re all worse than the original, which wasn’t so great itself. The GOP war on energy=efficient light bulbs has the same characteristic — you wish someone would just drive a stake through …
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