In August of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi, the combination of torrential rain and flawed infrastructure proved deadly. More than 1,800 people died and the price tag for the damage quickly rose to the tens of billions of dollars. In the chaotic disaster response that followed, several communities were disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination during recovery. Among them: LGBTQ residents. They were often overlooked in local and national relief efforts, which routinely failed to recognize households of same-sex couples as “families.” Some LGBTQ fa ..read more

Is EPA’s new climate rule a sneaky effort to eliminate coal or a valid pollution standard?  Some new arguments made by EPA convince me that it’s pursuing a time-tested approach to  pollution control.  It’s not that EPA is trying to grind down the industry. It’s that the economics of coal-fired plants are so fragile that a mild breeze would give them pneumonia. Opponents are sure to legally challenge  EPA’s new rule to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. And they are equally certain to argue that EPA is just trying to do indirectly what the Supreme Court sa ..read more

Electricity rate design is unavoidably technical. It also has huge implications for equity, climate change, and ensuring a grid that works. Rate design can be used to promote many different goals, from efficiency to bill stability, but it always entails distributive decisions. Rate design determines how we distribute the costs not just of electricity, but of the shared system that provides that electricity.   And though electricity rate design rarely grabs headlines, it’s been in the news a lot lately, thanks to controversy over the income-graduated fixed charge. That’s a new policy (re ..read more

The Inflation Reduction Act is Biden’s signature climate initiative. Trump has already called for repealing it, and so have some Republicans in Congress.  Given the IRA’s huge cuts in carbon emissions, that would be a tragedy.  Can he do that? He would certainly face some very significant barriers.  Trump would need Republican majorities in the Senate (very likely) and the House (less likely).  When Trump was in office before, the Republicans found it difficult to pass legislation, and today’s GOP House can barely manage to function.  Although they’ve expressed vocife ..read more

In August, 2021, I blogged on Legal Planet about a piece in Science I had co-authored arguing for an end to prohibiting “nonuse” rights to bid on public land use. The article helped popularize the issue and the Bureau of Land Management today announced a final rule that, as the BLM press release describes, “recognizes conservation as an essential component of public lands management, on equal footing with other multiple uses of these lands.” By way of quick background, our public resource laws were written with an explicit bias in favor of extractive activities. When the laws were passed almo ..read more

It’s not hard to imagine the conservative super-majority pursuing its campaign against regulatory agencies like vultures picking over the bones of environmental law.  That’s certainly possible – vulture eggs do, after all, generally hatch into vultures. But it’s not by any means a done deal.  There are multiple pathways the Court could take – none of them good, but some much more destructive than others. The worst-case scenario is easy to envision based on opinions to date.  There have been some striking rulings cutting back on agency power, such as West Virginia v. EPA.  ..read more

I did a post on Thursday flagging some “unanswered questions” about RFK, Jr. and   climate change.  I had no intention of ever posting about his campaign again, let alone this soon. But by a wild coincidence, E&E News released a story the very next day about its interview with Kennedy that addressed those questions. Some of his answers may be what you expected. Others may surprise you, like his embrace of natural gas as a fuel and his reservations about regulating emissions. Climate policy Kennedy hadn’t previously said much policy approach to climate change during the camp ..read more

A key part of California’s climate policy has always been its cap and trade system.  Because the regulations aren’t very transparent, there have been a lot of misconceptions about the system. I’ve been digging into the rules, the explanatory website set up by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and secondary sources to try to figure some of these things out. Despite complexities, the basic idea behind the trading system is simple. The state sets an annual cap on emissions, distributes allowances (permits to emit a ton of carbon), and then allows the recipients to trade those allow ..read more

El Dorado County Property Owner George Sheets in Front of His Home (credit: Fox News) On April 12th, the U.S. Supreme Court revisited a constitutional doctrine near and dear to its institutional heart: when and under what circumstances does a land use permit condition violate the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause? In yet another “regulatory takings” case from California, the Supreme Court wound up not answering that precise question.  Instead, the justices unanimously ruled that the California state courts had applied the wrong constitutional standard to the case, and remanded it back to t ..read more

In a flare-up between former allies last week, Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat, asked Nicole Shanahan to think twice about continuing as RFK Jr.’s running mate.  His argument was that the campaign could ultimately send Donald Trump back to the White House, risking the destruction of U.S. climate efforts. The resulting public exchange is revealing about what motivates independent candidates like Shanahan. It also points to a conundrum for the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket: how to address concerns about the climate implications of another Trump Administration. Khanna’s point was simple:&n ..read more