Politics
Can Universities Be The Future Home of Environmental Journalism?
Consider me somewhat skeptical of the arguments, well-presented by Jayni, that The New York Times’ killing of the Green blog will somehow enhance the paper’s environmental coverage. It reminds me a little of the attempts of law schools to teach ethics not with a specific class but with the suffusion method: it’s an easy way …
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CONTINUE READINGA Great New Appointment: Edith Ramirez as FTC Chair
President Obama has appointed Edith Ramirez to chair the Federal Trade Commission; since she already serves on the FTC, this thankfully does not require Senate confirmation. It’s a terrific appointment. I have known Edith for about 15 years now; we served together on the board of the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice, one of …
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CONTINUE READINGDoes the President Even Need the Senate to Confirm Appointees?
Damn. I suppose that it’s an occupational hazard of law professors that they kick around an idea, only to find that someone has beaten them to the punch. Well, Harvard’s Matthew Stephenson has done that to me, sort of, with an essay in the most recent volume of the Yale Law Journal entitled, Can the President Appoint Principal Executive …
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CONTINUE READINGWho Is Ernest Moniz?
And why should you care? Moniz is a nuclear physics professor at MIT, the director of the MIT energy project, and at least according to a lot of reports, President Obama’s first choice to head the Energy Department. Anything not to like about that? Well, lots of environmentalists don’t seem to. The Daily Beast reports …
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CONTINUE READINGIgnorance as Political Bliss: The Republican War on Social Science
Several recent posts on this blog have been about the political process, discussing issues like political polarization, congressional deadlock, and special interest groups. The discipline of political science is in large part the study of how collective decisions get made. It would seem to be in everyone’s interest to have a better understanding of collective …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Ever-Growing Crisis Over the Nation’s Nuclear Waste Non-Solution
The Associated Press reports that six underground storage tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are leaking a witches’ brew of high-level nuclear wastes into the soil that threatens regional groundwater supplies. This news highlights a crisis of national proportions that has for too long gone unaddressed. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear …
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CONTINUE READINGRubio Resigns: Was CEQA “Reform” Just About Fracking?
With the news that CEQA “reform” champion and State Senator Michael Rubio resigned today to lobby for Chevron, I have to wonder if his push for CEQA reform was really just to benefit oil and gas fracking. Sure, CEQA reform proponents liked to trumpet how a weakening of the law will help businesses and infill …
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CONTINUE READINGThink Tanks on the Auction Block
I’ve previously expressed some skeptical views about the so-called think tanks that play such a significant role in Beltrway policy debates. (See this post) The New Republic has an interesting story about the increasing dependence of think tanks on big money Here is the crux: Nowadays if donors don’t like the results they get, they …
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CONTINUE READINGThe future of climate politics (Pt. 2)
In my last post, I noted a recent report that called for a new political path for environmentalists and others seeking to enact carbon policy in the United States, one that focused on developing policy proposals that would help mobilize a grassroots movement to support limits on greenhouse gases. My question was, is there anything …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists Sue Over New Lake Tahoe Plan: Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good?
The Sierra Club and a local neighborhood group recently sued the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, challenging TRPA’s just-adopted Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin. That development strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive. Let me briefly explain why. The Lake Tahoe Basin, which straddles the California-Nevada border, has since 1968 been governed under a bistate Compact negotiated …
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