International Environmental Law
Thinking Globally, Acting Corporately
The corporate world hasn’t been blind to the dangers of climate change — not even the oil industry.
With the White House and Congress MIA in the war against climate change, we need to look for other options. States like California are one answer, and I recently posted about the role cities could play. But these do not exhaust the options. Major corporations are taking climate change seriously and beginning to address the issues. In …
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CONTINUE READINGA Lame Soundbite From a Flailing Administration
Pruitt’s statement yesterday exemplifies why the Trump Administration is in trouble.
Everything that’s wrong with the Trump Administration was on display yesterday, thanks to Scott Pruitt. He told “Fox and Friends” that the U.S. should get out of the Paris Agreement because China and India have no obligations until 2030. The fact that he made this comment, and made it on Fox, vividly exemplifies many of the Administration’s …
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CONTINUE READINGThis Wolf Came as Dressed as a Wolf
Trump’s views on energy & environment were clear before the election. He’s doing what he said.
In terms of energy and environmental issues, Trump has turned out to be as advertised. Last June, I did a post contrasting Clinton and Trump’s views about the environment. Below, I revisit the June post in order to compare what Trump said before Election Day and what he’s done since. In case you’ve forgotten, Clinton’s position …
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CONTINUE READINGIf Trump Guts Key Programs, Does Staying in Paris Even Matter?
Administration to Issue Executive Order to Pull the Clean Power Plan
(This post is cross-listed at takecareblog.com) Today the Trump Administration is expected – via Executive Order – to announce that it will begin the process to rescind the Clean Power Plan. The Order apparently says nothing about whether the U.S. will remain in the Paris Agreement. For months, speculation about whether the U.S. will withdraw …
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CONTINUE READINGEarth Day, 2017 Should Be The Next Massive Rally
The 47th Earth Day falls this year on April 22, a Saturday. The fortuity of a weekend date makes Earth Day the perfect opportunity to marshall the energy of the wildly successful Women’s marches around the world to demand that Congress and the Trump Administration protect our planet (hat tip to Emmett Fellow Julia Forgie …
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CONTINUE READINGGuest Blogger David Spence: Another Take on the Tillerson Nomination
Hearings on the nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be President-elect Donald Trump’s Secretary of State are scheduled to begin on January 11th. The nomination puts Tillerson and his company at the vortex of a whirlwind of public grievances about ExxonMobil’s positions on climate science and Russian influence over American politics and policy. While …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Ninth Circuit’s Top Environmental Law Decisions of 2016
Climate Change, Endangered Species Act, NEPA, Constitutional Challenges Dominate Court of Appeals’ Docket
In 2016, at least, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was the most important and influential court in the nation when it comes to environmental law. That’s true for two reasons: first, the U.S. Supreme Court only issued one significant environmental law decision last year, in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes …
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CONTINUE READING2016: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
“But except for that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” It’s an old joke, for all I know going back to 1865. That was 2016,too, in a way. Like Mrs. Lincoln’s evening at Ford’s Theater, 2016 contained a lot of good things, some bad things, and then disaster. Here’s a list of each. The …
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CONTINUE READINGTillerson and Perry – It’s Complicated
They’re not as bad as you might think. Relatively speaking.
The immediate environmentalist reaction to Rex Tillerson and Rick Perry — Trump’s choices to run the Departments of State and Energy — is that these are disastrous choices, like Trump’s selection of climate change denier Scott Pruitt to run EPA. That’s understandable. After all, Tillerson is the CEO of Exxon. As to Perry, the Washington Post headline says …
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CONTINUE READINGConflicting News about President-Elect Trump and Climate Change
Transition Team Uniformly Anti-Climate but Trump Signals Open Mind to NY Times
Today we got a sliver of hope from President-Elect Trump about remaining in the Paris Agreement. He also acknowledged a connection between human activity and climate change, something obviously at odds with his campaign rhetoric. Trump told the New York Times he would “keep an open mind” about the U.S. commitment to the Paris Agreement. He …
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