General
World’s Biggest Court Opinion on Climate
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
For more than 24 hours last week, my social media feeds were a wall of jubilant reaction to the World Court’s big climate opinion. People who work on, and care about, the climate crisis needed some good news, clearly. That begs the question, is the advisory opinion really as big a deal as people wanted …
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CONTINUE READING“A Historic Day”: the World Court’s Big Climate Opinion
UN/ICJ/Jeroen Bouman
UCLA Law’s Anna Spain Bradley offers takeaways from the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change.
It’s been a long time coming but nations of the world officially have a legal obligation to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases or else pay reparations for the harms of climate change. That was the unanimous opinion handed down yesterday by the 14 judges on the International Court of Justice, sometimes called the World …
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CONTINUE READINGInvestment Models for Climate Infrastructure Implementation
Exploring avenues for implementing publicly-supported climate solutions.
This month’s federal budget and policy legislation rescinded billions of dollars in clean energy and climate-related infrastructure investments and halted the progress of many projects already underway, including major tax incentive and grant programs focused on wind and solar energy, vehicle electrification, and domestic manufacturing. A subsequent executive order further cemented the federal government’s shift …
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CONTINUE READINGGlobal Energy Trends
Trump or no Trump, the global economy is shifting toward clean energy.
Globally, fossil fuels aren’t disappearing but they’re not gaining a lot of ground, while renewables have been booming. Trump can’t do much to change this: right now China is a big player than we are.
CONTINUE READINGNewsom Proposes More Oil Drilling In CA
Photo by Delfino Barboza on Unsplash
The State Should Get Far More Benefit
Last Thursday, the Newsom Administration proposed a new law allowing extensive additional oil drilling in California, as long as the new wells are in existing oil fields and the oil company closes one well in the oil field for each one drilled and one in health a safety designated areas. The proposal appears to be …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy Did Congress Defund Public Media?
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
We just witnessed the untimely death of a 57-year-old American institution that has made life better for just about everyone. President Lyndon Johnson announced the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 to “assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting good music, in broadcasting exciting plays, and in broadcasting …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat does ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Mean in California?
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
A court fight over oil drilling off the coast of Refugio State Beach near Santa Barbara. Proposals to drill around public schools in Ojai and Los Osos. The potential for oil operations directly adjacent to popular national monuments. New risks to our ecosystems that sustain imperiled species like the California condor. This is what “Drill, …
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CONTINUE READINGShortchanging the Environment While Making NEPA More Chaotic
Trump replaced a coherent set of rules governing the executive branch with a welter of agency-specific regulations.
In one of Trump’s first executive orders, he eliminated a centralized system that Jimmy Carter initially set up to issue regulations governing environmental impact statements. Instead, he called on each agency to issue its own regulations, which seems to have caused the predictable amount of confusion. There seems to be little rhyme or reason in the variations
CONTINUE READINGJefferson, Adams, and the Environment
The Founding Fathers were more environmentally aware than we give them credit for. Woke, even.
These writings don’t prove that either Jefferson or Adams was an “environmentalist” in the modern sense. But they do show an attitude toward nature that modern environmentalists would recognize. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th Century that the Sierra Club was founded, and environmentalism didn’t become a national force until the 1960s. But we tend to overlook just how deep the roots of environmentalism go in American history.
In that sense, environmentalism is as American as the Fourth of July.
What Have We Learned About Rebuilding from Fire?
Woolsey Fire survivors reflect on the rebuilding process and what might help rebuild more resiliently after the January fires.
When I first met Nicole Fisher in 2019, her property in the Santa Monica Mountains was nothing but a driveway and a pile of cement. I was interviewing the art teacher for a radio story about her family’s plans to rebuild after the 2018 Woolsey Fire that destroyed her home and hundreds of others in …
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