Politics

Database of Anti-Environment Votes in 112th Congress

To date, 170 anti-environmental votes have been taken in the GOP-led House of Representatives by the 112th Congress.  It’s difficult to keep track of the good, the bad, and the ugly coming out of the House.  One tool to help track the action in Washington is a new searchable database of anti-environment votes. “The House has voted …

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GOP Postmodernism Continues Apace

It’s bad enough that Republicans have declared war on science, and war on facts: now they are declaring war on math.  Newt Gingrich says that the Congressional Budget Office should be abolished, mainly it will tell him things that he doesn’t like.  As Brian Beutler of TPM notes, any attempt to repeal health care reform …

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Who Killed the Ozone Rule?

It seems that Bill Daley did: Obama’s surprise move to block an ozone regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) followed immense pressure from industry trade associations, which made numerous personal appeals to White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley.  Daley met with the heads of several business groups more than two weeks before Obama …

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Lawyerly Greenwashing from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative

A few weeks ago, I argued that only wood and paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council really should be called a sustainable product.  Much to my surprise, the post got a robo-comment from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the paper industry’s group, claiming that it, too, was a legitimate certification organization.  Given SFI’s pretty shameful …

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Whatever Happened to K Street?

Don’t be surprised if you find out that K Street, like other struggling American industries, is seeking a federal bailout!

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Lisa Jackson Speech

Following up on Holly’s post, here is video of the speech.  (And no, contrary to a rumor in the blogosphere, she didn’t call conservative critics “jack-booted thugs.”  Instead, as you’ll see, she commented that they used this term about EPA.) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcNeR6-EEGc]

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The Case for Cap-and-Trade

Dan asked for a vote, and being a good Legal Planetary citizen, I responded — voting very reluctantly for cap-and-trade. The biggest difficulty, as is the case with most polls, lies in the phrasing of the question:  “all things considered” what is “the best strategy” for controlling greenhouse gases.  The problem with this locution — perhaps unavoidable …

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More On the Republican Anti-Fact Shield

So after I posted my tantrum about George Will the other day, I felt a little guilty.  Maybe I had been too hard on The Tory Bowtie.  After all, maybe his putting “facts” in scare quotes was just a slip. Then I saw this piece on the Washington Post editorial page by Republican pollster Ed Rogers, …

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A Completely Uninteresting Story

The Wall Street Journal editorial board claims that California’s new cap-and-trade regulations will cost each consumer $3,800 a year and calls it creeping Stalinism.  As my UCLA (and UCLAW!) colleague Matt Kahn gently and genially points out, the Journal’s editors are engaging in cranial-rectal fusion. In other news, dog bites man, the sun rises in …

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Trolling for Anti-Environmental Plaintiffs

A reader sent me a an email from the Coalition of Energy Users trying to find plaintiffs for a challenge to AB 32 implementation.   CEU claims to be a grassroots group that does not have a deep-pocket funding source, and that may be true.  On the other hand, its interests are so precisely aligned with …

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