Pollution & Health
Exxon Cares!
At this point, we don’t know much about Exxon’s oil spill near Mayflower, Arkansas — especially because Exxon doesn’t seem to want to let many people look at what’s going on. Twitter to the rescue! There’s an account called “Exxon Cares”, telling you all that you need to know, and…what’s that you say? That’s not …
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CONTINUE READINGKing Coal’s Fading Grip
According to a new study from Duke, coal may be on the way out. as “[l]ow natural gas prices and stricter, federal emission regulations are promoting a shift away from coal power plants and toward natural gas plants as the lowest-cost means of generating electricity in the United States.” The authors estimate that “the economic …
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CONTINUE READINGBreaking News: Brown Approves California Cap-and-Trade Linkage to Quebec’s System
California Governor Jerry Brown will allow the state’s Air Resources Board to link its cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a Quebec cap-and-trade program modeled after California’s. Brown sent a letter to CARB today making four findings that he is required to decide before allowing the linkage to go forward. CARB must still …
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CONTINUE READINGFinally Cleaning Up In the Galilee
Residents of northern Israel got a welcome victory a couple of days ago: the nation’s High Court held that Eitanit Construction Products, a politically well-connected firm that polluted cities across the region with asbestos, must pay half the cost of cleaning it up. Friable asbestos contaminating whole cities might be a dim memory in the United …
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CONTINUE READINGDomestic Manufacturing Worker Chemical Exposure and OSHA
We seek more manufacturing jobs in the United States and we want these jobs to be high paying and low risk. Is this “win-win” achievable? The NY Times has a long article about long term toxic exposure risk in North Carolina manufacturing plants. “A chemical she handled — known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB — …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy I’m Boycotting Coke
Why Coke, you might wonder. Why not Pepsi? The answer is that diet coke is my soft drink of choice. It’s easy for me to boycott other soft drinks since I don’t drink them anyway. I like diet coke, so that’s the subject of my boycott. But why boycott soft drinks at all? Answer: Because …
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CONTINUE READINGNew Hope for Genetically-Engineered Food Labeling?
Many observers believed that the defeat of California’s Proposition 37 at the polls last November spelled a significant–and perhaps fatal–political setback for state and national efforts to require labeling of genetically engineered food products. But two recent articles from the New York Times suggest that the GMO labeling movement is far from dead. Last week …
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CONTINUE READINGMiddle of the First Inning: Big Cola 1, Public Health 0
The NY Times reports that a New York trial court has invalidated New York’s rule banning giant-sized sugar soft-drinks. The court’s decision can be found here. On a quick read, the decision seems to rest on two grounds: 1. The rule exceeds the powers of the public health board, despite a provision in the New …
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CONTINUE READINGOT 2012 and the Environment
This Supreme Court Term features a number of environmental cases. We’re now about two-thirds of the way through the Term, so I thought it might be helpful to post a summary of the cases. My impression is that the Court is interested in environmental law to the extent that it seems to impinge on the …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Sandwich and Urban Pollution Progress in China
The principal-agent problem is a classic issue in modern economics. Consider the case of a Chinese Mayor who must choose whether to enforce regulations on a local steel plant. Pollution would decline if this regulation is enforced but the profits of the firm might fall and this could affect the local economy if the …
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