Blog Profile / Legal Planet: Environmental Law and Policy
| URL : | http://legalplanet.wordpress.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Issues & Causes / Environmentalism | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1720 | |
| Posts / Week: | 10.4 | |
| Archived Since: | April 19, 2010 | |
Blog Post Archive
Flashing Back to the Day When Rush Limbaugh Discussed my Environmental Research
The Legal Planet blog tends to focus on serious subjects. I salute this but I always try to cross the line. A few years ago, Matt Kotchen and I wrote a good paper documenting that the deep recession had chilled interest in combating climate change. Our empirical study used Google search trends by state/year/month. We […]
Will House Republicans Save Food Aid Reform?
These next 48 hours are critical for advancing reform of US international food aid, which I have blogged about previously. Short version: because current rules essentially demand that we provide aid in food grown in the US via government subsidy, our current aid regime wastes money, delays delivery of aid by weeks, lines the pockets […]
Not 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. […]
A New “Study” on Forest Certification: SFI’s Latest Attempt to Fool Consumers?
I’ve posted before on the competing systems of forest certification, in particular the fight between the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC), which is really the gold standard, and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), an industry-driven...Show More Summary
Constitutional Issues in Cap and Trade: New Light from an Unexpected Source
At the end of April, the Supreme Court decided an obscure case called McBurney v. Young about state public records law. Quite unexpectedly, the court’s opinion turns out to be good news for state environmental regulators. In particular, it clarifies how cap and trade relates to what lawyers call the dormant commerce clause — a […]
Quality of Life Dynamics in Rural Renewable Power Communities
A journal called Energy Policy will soon publish my paper titled; Local Non-Market Quality of Life Dynamics in New Wind Farm Communities. We know that renewable power generation (both solar panels and wind turbines) requires land. It wouldn’t be efficient to transform Beverly Hills into wind farms even if it was a windy place. Thus, […]
Mt Baldy getting balder? Scary projections of SoCal snow loss just released
UCLA is releasing today the first-ever detailed study of the effects of climate change on local snowfall, examining both business-as-usual and mitigation emission scenarios. Snow loss is predicted to be very significant both in the mid-term (2041-2060) and by the end of the century. The image above shows the study’s projections for reduced end-of-century […]
In Praise of the 9-0 Supreme Court Loss: LA Port’s Clean Trucks Program lives on
If you’re an environmental group and you find yourself in front of today’s Supreme Court, in some sense you’ve already lost. Nothwithstanding the 2007 Mass v EPA victory for climate change regulation, the Supremes tend not to look kindly, lately, on environmental interests. (Richard Lazarus has argued that the record of NEPA losses at the […]
Court Doesn’t Cast Much Doubt on the Constitutionality of Michigan’s Renewable Portfolio Standard
Thanks to Ann Carlson for pointing out the significant decision recently issued by 7th Circuit Court of Appeals related to allocating the cost for new electric transmission lines and for so concisely describing its complicated fact pattern. But I have to respectfully disagree with Ann’s suggestion that this decision has cast any meaningful doubt on […]
The 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 […]
Malibu Beach Access and the 99%
Is public property public property? Malibu has some wonderful beaches and these are supposed to be public property. Nearby home owners have effectively privatized these beaches by making it difficult for beach visitors to park and to know where the public paths the beach are actually located. Facing this asymmetric information problem, an “app […]
Court Strikes Down Michigan’s Renewable Portfolio Standard as Unconstitutional, Upholds Cost Sharing for Transmission Lines
In an important victory for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) — and in my view for renewable energy more generally — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has upheld a FERC order that helps finance transmission lines to carry renewable energy from rural areas to urban centers in the midwest and […]
The Optimal Amount of Nuclear Power Generation?
Is it zero? I don’t think so. I believe that it is important to keep our options open. The NY Times reports about a new nuclear plant being built in Georgia and highlights that this is a rare event. This story raises an important human capital point. Suppose you are a young engineer at […]
Why 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 […]
Memo to EPA: It’s Illegal to Respond to Letters from Senators (at least in the Eighth Circuit)
I thought about entitling this post “Lamest Judicial Opinion of the Year.” The case is called Iowa League of Cities v. EPA. This Eighth Circuit opinion says that two letters from EPA to a U.S. Senator are legally binding agency rules, The court then solemnly invalidates the letters because EPA failed to get public notice and […]
Can 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...Show More Summary
“The Past Isn’t Dead…”
“…it’s not even past.” — William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. After its excellent special issue on “Oil in American History,” the Journal of American History has done it again. Its new issue includes a State Of The Field Symposium on American Environmental History, with an interpretive essay by the University of Georgia’s Paul S. […]
The 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 […]
NEPA Saves the World!
Well, not really. But in some circumstances it might have helped. Consider the civil unrest now roiling Turkey. They 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 […]
Which City Has the Best Parks? Trust for Public Lands Releases Annual ParkScore Ranking.
The Trust for Public Land (TPL) recently released its annual ParkScore index, which ranks the park systems of the fifty largest U.S. cities. As with all scorecards, the methodology is imperfect and the metrics are somewhat crude; but seeing how U.S. cities compare across uniform parameters is a good starting point for a larger conversation […]