Land Use
Red Paint Would Curb Public Access to Palos Verdes Nature Preserve, One of Los Angeles County’s Most Significant Open Spaces
Rancho Palos Verdes City Council votes to restrict public street parking near Portuguese Bend Reserve
See a full set of photos illustrating parking restrictions at Portuguese Bend Reserve on the Emmett Institute Flickr page. At its Sept. 1 meeting, the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council responded to public concern about its new parking restrictions by voting unanimously to move away from a full parking prohibition and remove a limited …
CONTINUE READINGRIP Jim Mahoney, Climate Champion At Bank Of America
Financial executive helped launch UC Berkeley/UCLA Law “Climate Change and Business Initiative”
Jim Mahoney was perhaps an unlikely climate hero. A senior Bank of America and FleetBoston Financial executive for 25 years who tragically passed away this past weekend at the age of 67 (the result of complications from injuries he sustained in a bicycle accident last year), Jim’s work focused on global corporate strategy and public …
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CONTINUE READINGGuest Blogger John Graham: California Court Decision Will Affect Future Use of Carbon Offsets to Mitigate Emissions of Development
The California Court of Appeal Rules San Diego County’s Climate Action Plan Violates CEQA
The challenge to San Diego County’s Climate Action Plan (“CAP”) in Golden Door has been closely watched by many interested in the use of carbon offsets to mitigate GHG impacts in California. Simply put, carbon offsets are mechanisms that reflect off-site GHG reductions—from activities like reforestation—that can, in some cases, compensate for a project’s GHG …
CONTINUE READINGThe Danger of Climate Change Deadlines
Essential targets set by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and policymakers just passed. Now what?
Seven prominent figures in the global climate change policy discourse published an opinion essay in Nature. In “Three years to safeguard our climate,” they set a deadline for key targets to be met in order to stay on track to meet the Paris Agreement’s global warming goals. The notable thing is that the essay was …
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CONTINUE READINGOn This Date in History: Property Rights Won Big in the Supreme Court
June 29, 1992 was a great day for property rights advocates. But what came later wasn’t so good.
On this date in 1992, the property rights movement achieved its greatest victory in the form of the Supreme Court’s Lucas ruling. The campaign to protect property rights seemed to have huge momentum. But things didn’t work out that way. For property rights advocates, Lucas turned out to be a false dawn. Mr. Lucas owned …
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CONTINUE READINGSurprise! Major Land Conservation Bill Poised to Pass Congress
Republican-Led Senate Prepared to Preserve Public Lands–and Political Careers?
Over the past decade, we’ve become resigned to the sad fact of congressional gridlock: a hopelessly partisan and paralyzed Congress, seemingly unable to pass major legislation on the environmental protection, natural resource conservation or, indeed, any number of other policy fronts. So it has to come as a shock to most observers that this week …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists Can Help Address Racism Through Housing Policy
Restrictive local zoning affects both the environment and racial justice
As the United States grapples with issues of racism and police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, environmentalists need not be bystanders in the debate over solutions. As Claudia and Steve argued on this blog, environmentalism has multiple opportunities to help address institutional racism, though few issues …
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CONTINUE READING(Still More) Bad News on the Doorstep
New Reports Document Accelerating Wildlife Extinctions, Global Deforestation Trends
While public attention in recent weeks and months has understandably focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice shockwaves triggered by George Floyd’s tragic death, another disaster continues apace. This week the New York Times published two alarming stories documenting the accelerating decline of our global environment. The first, entitled “Extinctions Are Accelerating, Threatening …
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CONTINUE READINGTrees Will *Not* Solve Climate Change
The authors of a controversial, influential paper backtrack — again
Last summer, I pointed to a then-new paper in Science that concluded that planting trees could remove two-thirds of historical anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere at very low costs. At the time, I characterized the claims in it and the associated media communications as “misleading, if not false, as well as potentially dangerous.” …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat Are The Benefits Of Phasing Out California’s Oil & Gas Production?
Emissions should decrease but multiple factors complicate any predictions
It might seem obvious that phasing out oil and gas production in California would benefit the climate. But the reality is much more complicated, in terms of emissions, economics and even geopolitics. CLEE just released the report Legal Grounds with policy options to reduce in-state production, but the question of how much a phase out …
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