Politics
Evaluating Prop 37
Rick Frank posted about a UC Davis white paper on Prop 37, which provides detailed background on the ballot measure. For those who want something that just lays out the issues concisely, I’d recommend Ezra Klein’s post on the subject. It’s brief and fair-minded to a fault — I’m sure partisans on the issue would …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s Proposition 30 and the Environment
With so much attention paid to the presidential race, it’s easy to overlook the fact that California’s fiscal future is on the ballot tomorrow, with consequences for the environment. Proposition 30 represents Governor Jerry Brown’s attempt to stave off harsh cuts to the state budget, a situation brought on by declining tax revenues in the …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat Would Romney Do? How Reelection Strategy Could Shape a Romney Presidency
If Romney is elected president tomorrow, the sun will still rise in the east and sea will still be salty. Beyond that, predictions about a Romney presidency become more difficult, given his exceptionally inconsistent history on the issues. As I showed in an earlier post, Romney’s views about environmental and energy issues flipped 180° between …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Denial and the Republicans: The Poor Man’s Anticommunism
Why is the Republican Party so wedded to climate denial? As Dan has noted, not a single Republican candidate in the 2010 Senate elections could acknowledge the reality of climate change. Shortly after taking the majority in the House, the House Energy and Commerce Committee declared climate change to be a hoax. But this seems …
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CONTINUE READING“United We Stand”: National Unity in the Face of Disaster
During the Republican primaries, Governor Romney proposed curtailing or even eliminating the federal role in disaster response, leaving the response efforts to the states or the private sector. Why does this seem viscerally wrong to so many people today (enough so that Romney first refused to answer any questions about it and then abandoned it …
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CONTINUE READINGWhatever Happened to Environmental Politics?
Mayor Bloomberg’s endorsement of President Obama on climate-change grounds is depressing because it is so surprising. It tells us something quite bleak that 1) someone had to make clear the relevance of climate to Hurricane Sandy; and 2) someone doing so came as a shock to people. Indeed, through the campaign, climate has been essentially …
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CONTINUE READINGWill Hurricane Sandy Affect Post-Election Actions?
Eric just noted that Bloomberg’s endorsement of President Obama marks the first significant moment in the campaign where climate change is front and center. He also suggests that climate change and its relationship to Hurricane Sandy could now actually affect the presidential race. A related and perhaps even more important question is whether the hurricane and its …
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CONTINUE READINGHow Climate Change Might (Finally) Affect the Presidential Race
There’s been a lot of debates over whether Hurricane Sandy and the damage that it caused in the Northeast was in part the result of climate change. But Sandy appears to have had at least something of an impact on the role that climate change has had in the Presidential race. Up till now, climate …
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CONTINUE READINGSuper PACs, the Presidential Election, and the Public Good
This is going to be a very close election — close enough that, if Romney wins, a key factor will be Citizens United and related judicial rulings that have helped create the Super PACs. Figures collected by the LA Times show that since April 15, Super PACs have spent over $216 million to defeat Obama …
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CONTINUE READINGDraining Hetch Hetchy — Some History for San Francisco’s “Measure F”
San Franciscans will be voting next week on Measure F to study the draining of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. Hetch Hetchy, for those who don’t know, is a spectacular, glacier-formed valley of equal proportion to its neighbor Yosemite Valley. Congress authorized a dam in 1913 to provide public hydroelectric power and a …
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