Water
Happy (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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CONTINUE READINGThe Delta 101: Of Levees, Canals & Whiskey
Nearly four out of five Californians do not know what the Delta is, according to a January 2012 poll. That’s 78 percent of the population. And 86 percent of southern Californians have never heard of it. Yet, 25 million people and 3 million acres of farmland rely on the Delta for at least a portion …
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CONTINUE READINGPreviewing a VERY Big Week for Environmental Law in the Courts
UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that late Sunday, February 26th, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier announced a one-week postponement of the trial in the BP oil spill case that had been scheduled to begin the next day. The postponement is reportedly due to substantial progress that has been made in marathon settlement talks that …
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CONTINUE READINGSelf-Reliant Moocher Hypocrites
The Shrill One has an interesting post on “self-reliant moochers,” i.e. those states (and voters) who loudly proclaim their flinty self-reliance and then rely on government transfers. Turns out that conservative states rely much more heavily on government transfers than Blue staters supposedly addicted to the “cradle-to-grave assurance government will always be the solution.” …
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CONTINUE READINGNinth Circuit Dumps U.S. Forest Service’s Sierra Plan, Bureaucratic-Speak
The U.S. Court of Appeals recently issued a major decision invalidating the U.S. Forest Service’s 2004 Plan directing the USFS’s management of the 11 national forests (totaling 11.5 million acres) in the Sierra Nevada range. A divided Ninth Circuit panel found that the environmental impact statement accompanying the Bush Administration plan–which loosened logging and grazing …
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CONTINUE READINGSenator Santorum and the Environmental Chalice of Evil
Here is what Santorum said yesterday (from Politico): “You hear all the time, the left: ‘Oh, the conservatives are the anti-science party.’ No we’re not. We’re the truth party,” the former Pennsylvania senator said at a campaign event in Oklahoma City. “Because the left is always looking for a way to control you. They’re always …
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CONTINUE READINGPreserving U.S. Fisheries: A Bipartisan Pipe Dream?
President Obama’s call in his 2012 State of the Union address for a new spirit of bipartisanship brought to mind a recent Washington Post article on current federal efforts to preserve U.S. fisheries. In what qualifies as a rare “good news” story involving federal environmental policy, that article reports that the Obama Administration is poised to …
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