Trump Administration

The Emperor’s New Endangerment Theory (Part I)

EPA says the electricity sector’s climate impacts aren’t significant. Really??

EPA has proposed a novel reading of the Clean Air Act (CAA) that would foreclose any regulation of CO2 emissions from power plants. EPA’s core argument is that the statute requires it to determine whether an industry’s emissions “cause or contribute significantly” to climate change and that the industry’s  carbon emissions don’t meet that standard. …

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A Path Forward for Vehicle Electrification?

It’s been a rough few months for vehicle electrification efforts in the United States. While Congress swaps proposals to eliminate federal electric vehicle purchase, manufacturing, and charging incentives in order to “pay for” massive tax cuts for the wealthy, President Trump last week signed a Congressional Review Act resolution that claims to eliminate California’s nation-leading …

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Talking to Skeptics About Clean Energy

Some people will stop listening if you talk about climate change. But there are other arguments.

The dangers of climate change provide excellent reasons to support clean energy. But that argument can be futile — or worse, counterproductive — when listeners don’t take climate change seriously or reject the idea altogether. Fortunately, there are other arguments that may better appeal to them.

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Immigration Raids are an Attack on Climate

The Drain

The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.

It’s hard to watch the Trump administration test drive authoritarianism in California. Since the inauguration, I’ve found solace in slowly rewatching The West Wing, a good bedtime story for anyone who feels nostalgia for partisan politics of yesteryear. Anyone else doing this? It’s uncanny how my rewatching has lined up with real world events. In …

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The Annihilation of Environmental Justice: A Timeline

Trump has spared no effort to ensure that the government ignores the needs of vulnerable communities.

Amid the daily onslaught of executive actions, the cumulative effect of these actions may escape notice. A case in point is environmental justice. It’s not just one or two dramatic actions: there has been a systematic war of elimination against protections for vulnerable communities. While initiated by Trump, the effort has included a ream of destructive follow-on actions.  The best way to make the point is a chronological account.

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(In?)sane With the Membrane

New developments in Deep Sea Desalination hold important promise for the freshwater crisis – and might require an amendment to Clarke’s Third Law.

The great speculative fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law reads: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This principle came to me the other day when considering this interesting Wall Street Journal piece on Deep Sea Desalination (which we can call DSD for short). Virtually alone among environmental law professors, I am a …

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The Most Important Law Most People Have Never Heard Of

Here’s how the APA bolsters the rule of law and protects the environment.

Even the title of the law — the Administrative Procedure Act or APA — is a guaranteed yawner.  Yet this law is central to the rule of law and, among other things, to environmental protection.  We are learning from the current Administration’s efforts to evade the APA just how important it is. The APA requires reasoned decisions by government. More fundamentally, the requirements of legal and procedural regularity prevent the arbitrary use of government power to reward friends and punish foes.  

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Why Do Heat Pumps Have a Bad Rap? Lies

The Drain

The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.

I just listened to dozens of people tell me that heat pumps don’t work, may cause homelessness, and can bankrupt small businesses. This was shocking news to me, in no small part because I’m currently in the process of installing a heat pump in my condo. Obviously, I don’t want to waste money, sleep on …

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Can Trump Save U.S. Coal? Not likely.

“Beautiful clean coal”, as Trump calls it, is inexorably declining.

The title of one of Trump’s executive orders is “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry.” That order says, “it is the policy of the United States that coal is essential to our national and economic security.”  But Trump’s efforts seem unlikely to make a dent in the long-term, global malaise of the coal industry, or its sharp decline in the U.S.

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Reconciliation and public lands

Most changes would be to the leasing process for oil and gas development and reflect a partisan response to ping-pong governance

As the Senate takes up the House’s version of the reconciliation bill, I wanted to briefly summarize the main provisions that relate to public lands – in part so readers can be aware of the state of play as to what might (or might not) come to pass in the Senate.  The bill as passed …

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