In yesterday’s NYT, Yoram Bauman and Shi-Ling Hsu explained why the U.S. would be wise to follow British Columbia’s example and impose a carbon tax and use the revenues to reduce other tax rates. On Sunday, the best climate policy in the world got even better: British Columbia’s carbon tax — a tax on the […]
Archive | Environment
The D.C. Circuit’s Greenhouse Gas Decision
Today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA is quite significant for environmental law. As John Elwood notes below, the court turned away the state and industry challenges to the EPA’s decision to begin regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The only […]
D.C. Circuit Rejects Challenges to Greenhouse Gas Regulations
The summary of the holding from the court’s opinion: [W]e conclude: 1) the Endangerment Finding and Tailpipe Rule are neither arbitrary nor capricious; 2) EPA’s interpretation of the governing CAA provisions is unambiguously correct; and 3) no petitioner has standing to challenge the Timing and Tailoring Rules. We thus dismiss for lack of jurisdiction all […]
Eminent Domain and the Public Trust
What happens when the eminent domain power is used to obtain title to lands or other properties in which there are public trust responsibilities? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confronted this question in U.S. v. California State Lands Commission (aka U.S. v. 32.42 Acres of Land. In particular, the court considered […]
Georgia-Pacific West v NEDC: a good case for certiorari
By David Kopel on June 20, 2012 12:35 pm in Administrative Law, Environment, Supreme Court, Uncategorized
Court-watchers are wondering if Thursday, June 21, will see the release of Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare or Arizona’s laws against illegal aliens. There’s another important decision that the Court almost certainly make on Thursday: whether to grant certiorari in Georgia-Pacific West v. Northwest Environment Defense Center. (All the relevant documents are here, on Scotusblog.) Jonathan […]
Is the Ninth Circuit Due for Environmental Correction?
By Jonathan H. Adler on June 20, 2012 10:05 am in Environment, Ninth Circuit Smackdown (Again), Supreme Court
Will 2012 provide a repeat of 2008? Specifically, will the Supreme Court’s October 2012 term find the Supreme Court repeatedly reversing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in environmental cases as it did in the October 2008 term? In 2008, the Supreme Court heard an unusually high number of environmental cases, six: […]
Peter Gleick’s Possible Involvement in Drafting Fake Heartland Document: Either Not Investigated or the Relevant Results Not Released
After an investigation commissioned by the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick has been reinstated as its President. The Institute released a carefully worded statement saying that the investigation supported what Gleick had said “regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute.” Gleick had eventually admitted that he had pretended to be a board member of Heartland to […]
House Republicans’ Anti-Market, Anti-Environmental Fishery Policy
There is substantial theoretical and empirical evidence that property-based management schemes, such as catch-shares, prevent fishery collapse and ensure sustainability. The creation of property rights in ecological resources is also a principled conservative alternative to centralized regulation. Yet somehow a majority of House Republicans were bamboozled into voting to bar funding for further implementation of […]
Atlantic Guest Posts on Environmental Policy
For the past ten days I’ve been one of the guest bloggers on Megan McArdle’s blog on The Atlantic‘s website. During this time I’ve written five posts on environmental policy. Here they are: – Property Rights and the Tragedy of the Commons – Property Rights and Fishery Conservation – How Property Rights Could Help Save […]
NASA’s James Hansen Is Right
NASA’s James Hansen can be a bit unhinged when he talks about climate change. Although one of the world’s more prominent climate scientists, he has a penchant for selectively presenting only the most apocalyptic global warming scenarios and adopting unduly inflammatory rhetoric, as when he compared coal-laden trains, aka “death trains,” to the railcars carrying […]
Eminent Domain and the Keystone Pipeline Project
By Ilya Somin on May 9, 2012 3:06 pm in Energy, Environment, Kelo, Post-Kelo Reform, Property Rights
The New York Times has an article describing how the TransCanada corporation is using eminent domain to forcibly acquire property to build the Keystone oil pipeline: When the TransCanada men first came, Julia Trigg Crawford said, they were polite. They offered money. Seven thousand dollars to let the Keystone XL pipeline cross her family’s 600-acre […]
Heartland’s Mad Billboard Stunt
By Jonathan H. Adler on May 9, 2012 10:40 am in Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Politicizing Science
The folks at the Heartland Institute are mad, and that seems to have driven them a little mad. For years environmental activists have compared climate skeptics and those who raise questions about the likelihood of a warming-induced apocalypse to Holocaust deniers and worse. In 1989, then-Senator Al Gore famously compared those who downplayed the climate […]
IG Inspector Claims White House Obstructed Gulf Drilling Moratorium Report
The New Orleans Times Picayune reports the White House denied the Department of Interior’s Office of Inspector General access to e-mails and communications about White House revisions to a report Interior Secretary Ken Salazar relied upon to justify a moratorium in oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The story begins: A senior federal investigator […]
A Stronger Case for Keystone
The Washington Post editorializes that the case for approving the Keystone XL pipeline was “always strong” and “has grown stronger.” A key environmentalist argument against Keystone XL has been that the project would encourage the extraction of bitumen, a particularly dirty oil-like substance, from the “oil sands” in Alberta. If activists could “shut in” Canadian […]
EPA Adopts Fracking Rules
Today the Environmental Protection Agency announced new air pollution regulations for natural gas production including emission control standards for hydraulic fracturing. The WSJ reports and Ron Bailey comments.