Regulation
Breathless in Bombay
…is not just the name of a terrific volume of short stories by Murzban Shroff (mandatory reading if you come here): it is a condition that most residents here deal with daily. But the government is actually beginning to do something about it, which should be highly embarrassing to their US counterparts. This is a …
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CONTINUE READINGMisfiring on fire policy
A centerpiece of the Bush administration’s national forest management policy was the claim that vegetation management projects would be targeted to places where wildfire poses high risks to human communities — the “wildland-urban interface.” According to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required) led by Tania Schoennagel at the …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia environmental justice advocates sue Air Resources Board over climate scoping plan
UPDATES: California Air Resources Board Chair (and former UCLA colleague) Mary Nichols comments below. The Complaint in this action is available here (caption page separately available here). A coalition of California environmental justice advocates has filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the California Air Resources Board‘s scoping plan for AB 32, the landmark climate …
CONTINUE READINGScientific integrity at EPA
Lisa Jackson was up on Capitol Hill yesterday, telling the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works how her EPA will protect scientific integrity. The webcast is available here. In her written testimony, Jackson said: While the laws that EPA implements leave room for policy judgments, the scientific findings on which these judgments are based …
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CONTINUE READINGCoeur Alaska–A Shifting Legal Position by the Obama Administration?
As the U.S. Supreme Court Term winds down, only one environmental case on the Court’s docket remains undecided: Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, No. 07-984. That case, which involves the relationship between the Clean Water Act’s water pollution control (NPDES) and its wetlands dredge-and-fill programs, arises in the context of a proposed gold …
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CONTINUE READINGRegulatory Fees in California: Killing Two Birds with One Stone?
The meltdown of the State of California’s budget raises a host of questions about governance, taxes and politics in the state and beyond. One of those questions implicates other concerns regarding the design and implementation of effective environmental regulation. As my father used to say, “Sometimes cheap is too expensive,” an adage that is borne …
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CONTINUE READINGNew and Noteworthy in the Eco-Blogosphere
For the environmental world at large, here are some noteworthy posts: Africa needs substantially scaled-up finance, technology and capacity-building to combat climate change 2009 Hurricane Names to Watch for, as Season Begins After a record-breaking 2008 hurricane season, the first storm has formed before the official June 1 start to the 2009 season. The hydrogen …
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CONTINUE READINGEntropy to the Max!
I’ve been learning from my ERG colleague John Harte about a statistical technique called MaxEnt. For many environmental problems — most notably climate change — we are not only unable to provide a reliable estimate of harm, but we don’t even know the shape of the probability distribution. MaxEnt is a way of constructing a …
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CONTINUE READINGIdle Chatter
WBUR’s Here and Now radio show recently covered the story of George Pakenham, the self-named “Verdant Vigilante.” Pakenham roams the streets of New York City engaging in citizen enforcement of the city’s anti-idling law. The law, which has been on the books in various forms since 1971, prohibits idling for greater than 3 minutes (1 …
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CONTINUE READINGJudge Sotomayor’s Environmental Record
Now that President Obama has nominated her for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s record as a federal court judge will be under the microscope. Political pundits, legal scholars and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum will all be scrutinizing Sotomayor’s extensive record as a federal …
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