Regulation
De-Extinction Conference
Last month, I participated in a conference on the topic of de-extinction — efforts to resurrect all or part of the genome of extinct animals. The goal would be to have something very much akin to the wooly mammoth or the passenger pigeon, perhaps released into the wild. (And no, this isn’t going to work …
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CONTINUE READINGU.C. Davis Professor Dan Sperling Awarded Blue Planet Prize
Kudos to my U.C. Davis faculty colleague, Dan Sperling, this year’s recipient of the prestigious Blue Planet Prize. The Prize, awarded by the Asahi Glass Foundation, is often referred to as the Nobel Prize for environmental science. Dan Sperling is one of the most influential transportation scholars and policymakers in America. A professor of engineering …
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CONTINUE READINGNot With a Bang, But With a Whimper…
As the current U.S. Supreme Court term winds down–the justices’ final opinions are due next week–attention begins to turn to the Court’s next session, scheduled to begin in October 2013. Until this week, the justices had one environmental law case on their docket for next year: U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council, No. 12-625. …
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CONTINUE READINGThe State Senate’s proposal for CEQA reform
The State Senate recently passed its version of CEQA reform. Having looked over the bill, it’s much better than I feared. What seems to be the most important change is a move towards adopting standard setting in CEQA – i.e., making generalized determinations about what levels of certain kinds of impacts are “significant” such that …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy the Warming Plateau Can’t Disprove Global Warming
The NY TImes has a thoughtful appraisal of the warming plateau — the fact that global temperatures rose until about fifteen years ago and have wobbled around the same level since then. I think the Times has it about right, but I’d like to point to a less obvious reason why the plateau should not …
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CONTINUE READINGCan We Replace HFCs?
What was supposed to be an informal meeting between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping has yielded something substantive: an agreement to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol, and thus an agreement by both nations to reduce their use: As some environmental analysts had hoped, President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China found room to maneuver on global warming …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Cost of Carbon Revisited
In 2010, an inter-agency task force provided a series of estimates of the “social cost of carbon” to guide government cost-benefit analyses. The estimates vary with the discount rate and the date. For instance, using a 5% discount rate, it would be worth spending hardly anything — only $4.70 — to eliminate a ton of CO2 …
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CONTINUE READINGNEPA Saves the World!
Well, not really. But in some circumstances it might have helped. Consider the civil unrest now roiling Turkey. It began over protests against the government’s plan to turn a much-beloved, historic urban park into a mosque and shopping mall. But as many news reports have indicated, the point was not simply the plan, but the high-handed …
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CONTINUE READINGNot Enough Money in the Pipeline
When regulators approve rates for a utility such as Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), they are making their best guess as to how much money the company will need to cover various kinds of activities. The utility starts out the process by offering its position on how much it will need for things like …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Curious Case of Positive Train Control
In a recent column, George Will uses positive train control as a poster child for the evils of government regulation, while also complaining about the “democracy deficit” of agency regulations. Actually, his two points contradict each other. Positive train control is really an example of democracy in action rather than bureaucratic excess — an automated …
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