Pollution & Health

When Agencies Want to Get Sued

The Friday afternoon before Labor Day announcement by the White House that it would not lower the ozone standards under the Clean Air Act has received (rightly) a whole lot of criticism.  There’s been a fair amount of speculation among environmental law observers about the legality of the decision (including Dan).  What’s interesting is that …

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Backpedaling on Air Quality

The White House decided to abandon a proposed revision of the air quality standard for ozone in order not to further burden a faltering economy.  The story is a bit complicated.  The Bush Administration tightened the standard, but not as much as EPA’s science board recommended.  Environmentalists sued, but desisted when Obama’s EPA said it …

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Two weeks of protest against Keystone XL ends Saturday

Two weeks of civil disobedience and protest against the Keystone XL pipeline ends this Saturday (Sept. 3), with a rally and final sit-in. Over 1,000 people have been arrested, including my former professor , Gus Speth. The protestors want President Obama to deny a permit to construct a pipeline to bring oil from Canadian tar …

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Is Cap and Trade Unfair?

I should probably start by putting my cards on the table.  I’m not really an advocate of cap and   trade as compared with other forms of regulation.  What I care about is getting effective carbon restrictions in place, whether they take the form of cap and trade, a carbon tax, industry-wide regulations, or something …

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Murder, Pollution, Illegal Drugs & Our Public Lands

The murder this past weekend of Fort Bragg, California City Councilman Jere Melo puts an all-too-human face on a long-festering environmental crisis. Melo was shot and killed in a remote area in Mendocino County by a squatter who was reportedly growing marijuana on forest lands there. Councilman Melo, whose day job was to manage 150,000 …

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Quest for the Best

Public Health Degree has a list of the twenty cities in the world with the cleanest air.  (I was pleased to see my prior home Minneapolis on the list — not surprisingly, my current home in the Bay Area didn’t qualify.)   That got me interested in looking for other listings of high environmental quality. There …

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UCLA Emmett Center Assessment of California’s Cap and Trade Regulations

In the wake of the financial market meltdown and liquidity crisis of 2008,  some opponents of a cap and trade program to regulate greenhouse gas emissions have argued that such a system could lead to the kind of market manipulation that led to the 2008 crash.  The UCLA School of Law Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment today released …

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Lost in the Ozone Again

Should Perry get credit for any recent downward trend ozone?The State’s reported downward trend in ozone levels began in 2006 at the earliest, whereas Perry took office in 2000 when Bush resigned.

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The Environmental Issue in the Presidential Race

With the partial exception of Mitt Romney, all of the Republican presidential candidates are negative about EPA.  According to the NY TImes, Opposition to regulation and skepticism about climate change have become tenets of Republican orthodoxy, but they are embraced with extraordinary intensity this year because of the faltering economy, high fuel prices, the Tea …

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More on California Environmental Leader & Coastal Advocate Peter Douglas

Legal Planet colleague Jonathan Zasloff has previously written about the recently-announced retirement of long-time California Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas.  I’d like to add a few additional comments about Peter, my long-time mentor, client and friend. Peter Douglas has devoted the past four decades of his incredibly rich and active life to the cause of …

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