Water
New legislative effort underway to develop public access to the L.A. River
Earlier this year, California State Senator Kevin De Leon introduced SB 1201, a bill that could bolster efforts to open up the Los Angeles River for lawful recreational uses such as boating. I have a particular interest in this, since UCLA’s Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic worked with the advocacy group Friends of the Los …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Public Trust Doctrine Revisited
The U.C. Davis Law Review has just published its annual, symposium issue, this year devoted to the Public Trust Doctrine. Back in 1980, the U.C. Davis Law School sponsored a first-ever conference focusing on the public trust doctrine’s role in modern environmental law. A year later, the U.C. Davis Law Review published a symposium volume dedicated …
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CONTINUE READINGU.C. Davis Issues Nitrates in Drinking Water Study
The University of California at Davis has issued an important new study assessing the public health hazards associated with nitrates in California drinking water. The study, led by U.C. Davis Professors Thomas Harter and Jay Lund, contains some important and disturbing findings. The full study can be found here, the Executive Summary here. The new …
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CONTINUE READINGSupreme Court Grants Review in Takings/Flooding Case
The U.S. Supreme Court has granted review in what will be the first environmental case of its next (2012-13) Term: Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, No. 11-597. The ultimate question is whether the federal government is liable for millions of dollars in damages for flooding a 23,000-acre wildlife management area owned by the State …
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CONTINUE READINGHow CEQA Saved Mono Lake
Environmental lawyers and policy wonks know that the California Supreme Court’s famed decision in Nat’l Audubon Soc’y v. Superior Court, better known as the Mono Lake case, saved California’s second-largest lake from drying up. And to some extent this is true: I am working on a full-length book about the case, and so far that story seems to check out. …
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CONTINUE READINGEPA’s bad week continues — mountaintop removal veto overturned
Cross-posted at CPRBlog. Regular readers of this blog know that on January 13, 2011, EPA vetoed a Clean Water Act section 404 permit issued by the Corp of Engineers for valley fill at the Spruce No. 1 mountaintop removal mine project in West Virginia. This was only the 13th time EPA had used its veto …
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CONTINUE READINGHappy (Belated) World Water Day! There’s Good News and Bad News….
Well, that’s embarrassing. Yesterday was the United Nations’ annual World Water Day, which apparently arrives every March 22nd. I only stumbled across it by accident, since it was referenced by another website that I was reading. But the UN has put a lot of PR effort at least into the project, and developed a very …
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CONTINUE READINGGoing Beyond the “Design-Basis Event”
A conventional approach to safety is based on the concept of design events. A building code might say, for example, that a building should be able to survive a 7.0 earthquake. This approach has been basic to the regulation of nuclear reactors. As the interim report of the post-Fukushima NRC task force explains: [The regulation[ …
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CONTINUE READINGHeat Waves, Droughts, and the Energy System
According to the IPCC, it “is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves, and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.” For instance, by midcentury, the number of heat wave days in Los Angeles is expected to at least double over the late twentieth century, and quadrupling is expected by the end of …
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CONTINUE READINGCourt to Feds: “Pay Up for Katrina Damage”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has upheld a district court ruling that the federal government is liable for damage from the Katrina storm surge that went up the MRGO canal into the city. As I read the opinion, it is limited in three ways. First, it is crucial that MRGO — …
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