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Does More Energy Reporting = Less Climate Reporting?
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
If you are one of the many loyal readers of E&E News, big change is coming to your daily routine. POLITICO announced it is shuttering E&E, the standalone, subscription-based reporting outfit that it bought in 2020. “Beginning in September, we are modernizing how we deliver our energy and environmental policy journalism and launching a …
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CONTINUE READINGHate the Gas Tax? Get to Know the Road Usage Charge
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
We Californians glide on a network of more than 394,000 miles of roadway, which includes 51,000 miles of state highways, and 25,737 bridges. Our state highway system is one of the largest in the country and requires serious maintenance. Whether you usually travel by gas-powered car, EV, public transit, bicycle or on a sidewalk, you …
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CONTINUE READINGReducing Deforestation from California to Colombia and Beyond
There are bright spots and opportunities for more work to do on improving data, governance, and access to finance.
This week marks the 16th Annual Meeting of the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF Task Force), a unique network of states and provinces from 11 countries covering more than one-third of the world’s tropical forests. These subnational governments are convening to advance what we call the New Forest Economy – an economic transition …
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CONTINUE READINGTrump and Xi Meet in Beijing
As the U.S. and China meet, climate change is NOT on the agenda.
When Presidents Trump and Xi meet this week in Beijing, climate and environment will not be on the agenda. That absence is striking, because the U.S. and China are now moving in radically different directions on climate, energy, and environmental protection. The US is in an extraordinarily anti-environmental moment. It has exited both the Paris …
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CONTINUE READINGAn Inconvenient Truth Two Decades Later
Global X via flickr
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
Twenty years ago this month, I walked out of a movie theater, dumfounded, after seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Al Gore documentary that would go on to frame the conversation around climate change for years. I remember feeling riveted and freaked-out. I’d read enough Adbusters in college to have a decent critique of capitalism, …
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CONTINUE READINGScrap Yards, Scrapped Enforcement?
The City of Los Angeles’s regulatory tools exist to protect communities from metal recycling hazards—but they’re rarely invoked.
This post was co-written by UCLA Law student Kate Inman (J.D., 2026). Throughout California’s Senate District 20, roughly thirty scrap metal recycling facilities sit in the industrial corridors running alongside residential housing. For the working-class, majority-Latino communities living blocks away, the legal system has been slow to respond. Drive through Sun Valley or Pacoima on …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Journalism is “Breaking but Not Broken”
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
The 2026 Pulitzer Prize announcements happened this week and environmental reporting was in the mix though not central enough if you ask me. Here’s where it shined: The Breaking News Reporting category was dominated by journalism covering climate-fueled extreme weather. Finalists included staff of the Seattle Times for more than 100 stories covering catastrophic …
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CONTINUE READINGThe 2026 Election: Six Months to Go
Here’s what things look like now, but a lot could change.
Six months is a long time in politics, especially in the Trump era. What we can say at this point is that, compared with last November, the landscape has shifted toward the Democrats. They would now be favored to win the House, although that’s not a certainty. Republicans still clearly have edge in winning the Senate, but it’s a smaller edge than it was six months ago. Control of the House would allow Democrats to block further anti-environmental legislation, open investigations into Trump’s rollbacks, and potentially bargain for some pro-environmental provisions. Control of the Senate, while less likely, would also allow them to block appointments of extremist anti-environmentalist judges and officials.
CONTINUE READINGReturn to Plessy v. Ferguson?
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
DeFacto Discrimination at the Supreme Court
Time to say the quiet part out loud: Louisiana v. Callais is one of the most racist Supreme Court decisions since Plessy v. Ferguson. To borrow a concept from employment discrimination case law, Plessy is de jure discrimination, and Callais is de facto. In Plessy, the Supreme Court decided that separate schools and facilities were …
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CONTINUE READINGCan Sustainability Be Abundant, Safe, and Affordable?
Read and watch key takeaways from the UCLA Emmett Institute’s 2026 symposium on climate policy and affordability.
This month, the UCLA Emmett Institute explored the intersection of climate goals, affordability concerns, and environmental protections by hosting a symposium titled “Can Abundance Be Sustainable?” The all-day, public event at UCLA School of Law brought together academics, community advocates, policymakers, journalists, students and—not one but two—heads of utility regulatory bodies. The goal was to think deeply about the path …
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