Pollution & Health
Supreme Court Grants Cert. in Interstate Pollution Case
The Supreme Court agreed this morning to review a D.C. Circuit opinion that had struck down EPA’s effort to curb interstate pollution. This is welcome news. As I wrote when the lower court ruled: Now that I’ve had a chance to read the lengthy opinion in EMR Homer City Generation v. EPA, I’m struck by …
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CONTINUE READINGIn Praise of the 9-0 Supreme Court Loss: LA Port’s Clean Trucks Program lives on
If you’re an environmental group and you find yourself in front of today’s Supreme Court, in some sense you’ve already lost. Nothwithstanding the 2007 Mass v EPA victory for climate change regulation, the Supremes tend not to look kindly, lately, on environmental interests. (Richard Lazarus has argued that the record of NEPA losses at the …
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CONTINUE READINGMemo to EPA: It’s Illegal to Respond to Letters from Senators (at least in the Eighth Circuit)
I thought about entitling this post “Lamest Judicial Opinion of the Year.” The case is called Iowa League of Cities v. EPA. This Eighth Circuit opinion says that two letters from EPA to a U.S. Senator are legally binding agency rules, The court then solemnly invalidates the letters because EPA failed to get public notice and …
CONTINUE READINGThe Emergence of Food Law
As with most holidays, Memorial Day is associated with a traditional food component — in this case, picnics. So this seems like a good occasion to talk about the emerging legal field of food law. According to the Food and Drug Law Institute, about sixty law schools have courses on Food and Drug Law, a …
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CONTINUE READINGTime May Run Out on Obama’s Most Powerful Climate Change Tool, Environmental Groups Threaten Suit
President Obama has a surprising amount of power to reduce greenhouse gases from the two largest categories of emitters, the transportation and electricity sectors, without getting Congress to act. He has already used that power to dramatically tighten fuel economy standards for passenger autos. But his ability to reduce emissions from the electricity sector — …
CONTINUE READINGIs TSCA Reform on the Way?
The Toxic Substances Control Act or TSCA (sometimes pronounced “Tosca,” like the opera) is one of the worst-written statutes of all time. It seems as if every section contains a cross-reference to another section, which in turn requires recourse to yet another sentence to be understood, making the statute completely opaque. A last-minute compromise, the …
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CONTINUE READINGSome Overdue Environmental Justice In Time for Shavuot
The Jewish festival of Shavuot, which begins at sundown this evening, commemorates the Israelites’ receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Shavuot is thus the paradigmatic lawyers’ holiday given its focus on law and justice. This connects nicely with the other two great pilgrimage holidays found in the Jewish Bible, giving us a trinity (so …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy it’s important that we know that we’re at 400 ppm of CO2
A major (and unfortunate) milestone has been crossed this past week. Measurements of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide passed 400 parts per million, the highest in millions of years. Others have commented on how worrying this milestone is for the planet. But what I want to focus on here is how important it is that …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Insurance Industry Helps Us to Adapt to Climate Change
The NY Times reports that insurance rates are rising in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy for coastal communities. As I argued back in 2010 in my Climatopolis book, such “price gouging” is good! If insurance markets are competitive, then the rates that insurance companies charge households who seek home insurance will reflect the best …
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CONTINUE READINGAlberta, Open Sewers and the Keystone Pipeline
Al Gore raised the hackles of the Canadian government this week when he criticized the country’s large scale extraction of oil from the Alberta tar sands. The tar sand oil reserves are among the world’s largest but are particularly energy intensive to extract. That means that extracting oil that will then be burned will emit significantly …
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