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The California Legislature has enacted and Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed into law SB 389 , an important water law reform measure authored by State Senator Ben Allen. SB 389 is part of a broader initiative by the Legislature–and public interest groups–to reform and update California’s water laws.
Here is a look at a handful of these new laws aimed at increasing health and safety for Californians. AB 347 requires the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) to enforce and ensure compliance with three existing laws that set limits for (PFAS) in food packaging, textiles, and juvenile products.
When diplomacy needs backup, countries turn to resolve their disputes at the ICJ, the United Nations’ principal judicial organ, to set the tone for international law. As an advisory body, the court provides legal opinions on international law questions. What is an advisory opinion?
It also encourages badly needed reforms inside and outside of government and will help create new political coalitions. Our study offers a lens on how four key nations are using the law to navigate net zero, highlighting their varied approaches and the potential for legal strategies to accelerate progress.
Yesterday and today the European Parliament approved of the central backbone legislation of the European Green Deal, the so called European Climate Law. This blog entry takes a look at the main points of the proposed European Climate Law, the European Parliament`s take on it and the likely prospects of the law.
Monterey County Oil Field (credit: Monterey County Weekly) For the first two decades of this century, and under the able leadership of former Chief Justices Ronald George and Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the California Supreme Court was quite active in interpreting and shaping California environmental law. Well, break’s over.
It also wants to destroy environmental regulation, especially climate law. Thus, the reasons must relate to psychology or political science, not philosophy. This research is suggestive, but my impression is that there is a lot we still don’t know about political psychology. Project 2025 favors authoritarian presidential rule.
In a recent post , I analyzed the California Legislature’s recent passage and Governor Gavin Newsom’s signing into law of two important bills–SB 9 and SB 10–designed to confront California’s well-documented housing crisis. Davis School of Law faculty colleagues Chris Elmendorf and Darien Shanske.).
First, the article very briefly glosses over the politics of carbon pricing – as the article puts it, “the political reality that taxes are a hard sell.” I think these political constraints are a key reason economists focused so long – too long – on carbon pricing. Politics is central in policy.
The California Legislature recently enacted, and Governor Gavin Newsom last week signed into law, two major housing reform measures. SB 9 and SB 10 represent California’s most transformative new housing laws in decades, and are a belated but welcome legislative response to the state’s longstanding housing crisis.
One option, a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, gets the most attention but seems politically impossible. The closest we’ve ever come to a carbon tax is a limited fee on methane emissions under the new IRA law. If a carbon tax were politically feasible, there would be a lot to be said in its favor.
A decade ago, California stood out–and not in a good way–as the only Western state without comprehensive state laws monitoring and regulating groundwater pumping and use. In the fall of 2014, the Legislature enacted and Governor Brown signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).
In June 2024, UCLA School of Law’s Promise Institute Europe hosted its first inaugural conference, The Promise of International Law in the Face of Ecological Crises , shortly after the issuance of a highly anticipated advisory opinion from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS).
As in the US, Australia’s climate policy was long a victim of a lengthy period of divided government and political upheaval. In 2022, the Labor coalition passed a law mandating that Australia cut greenhouse gas emissions 43% below 2005 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. The law built on the Safeguard Mechanisms.
UCLA Professor of Law William Boyd. William Boyd is Professor of Law and Michael J. Klein Chair in Law at UCLA Law, with a joint appointment as Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability ; Alex Wang is Professor of Law at UCLA Law. UCLA Professor of Law Alex Wang.
The partial release reveals the chaotic, developer-led process that did an end-run around the normal planning approval process and was driven by political staff in the Minister’s office. ECOJUSTICE uses the power of the law to defend nature, combat climate change, and fight for a healthy environment.
A special focus of the Commission’s deliberations will be whether and to what extent California’s most important and overarching environmental law is impeding efforts by the Legislature and Governor Newsom to address the state’s chronic and well-documented housing crisis. Enter CEQA.
We hear a lot of encouraging rhetoric from our political leaders about wanting to preserve an existing international order based on the rule of law. If our governments are currently incapable of doing this, then civil society must step into the breach and take on an essential responsibility our political leaders are neglecting.
Last week, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that an initiative measure that would have imposed severe restrictions on oil and gas development in Monterey County is preempted by state law and therefore invalid. But the good news is that this goal can still be achieved through other legal and political strategies.
As a second benefit, they claim to be engaged in political symbolism, trying to disrupt a stuck debate over effective climate responses and get people to talk about solar geoengineering – of which stratospheric aerosol injection is the most promising method being discussed. This activity cannot have any significant global climate effect.
Next Steps Once the directive is adopted by the Council and Parliament and published in the EU Official Journal, Member States will have 24 months to transpose it into national law. Latham & Watkins will continue to monitor developments in this area.
That was his way as a political leader: working tirelessly and proactively to make connections and fight to ensure everyone had the right to a safe and healthy environment. Passing the EJ for All Act would mark a major step forward in alleviating a legacy of environmental harm and systemic racism.
Their omnipresent influence on national politics and international negotiations has trapped consumers in a fossil fuel-dependent system and threatens to delay climate action even further, with the most severe consequences for those already in the most vulnerable situations. What role does science play in climate advisory opinions?
A: The Court doesn’t address this question directly, but the major questions doctrine doesn’t seem to be a rule of constitutional law. . Q: When does an issue have “major political significance”? . A: “Political significance” seems to have a narrow meaning. . And not just because end-of-life care is very expensive.
We seem to be dealing with opinions rather than statements that are provably false, so libel law shouldn’t apply in the first place. In fact, one of the useful things I teach is libel law. The industry’s lawyers might have avoided filing such a defective case if they had only taken my class as beginning law students.
The petitioners who brought this case include state-level political officials and coal companies who are single-mindedly determined to block climate action and perpetuate fossil fuel dependence to serve their narrow political or business interests.
Texas and a number of other states have passed laws banning what they call “boycotts of fossil fuel companies.” Besides being fundamentally misguided and difficult to implement, these blacklist laws are incompetently drafted and quite likely unconstitutional. Is this as opposed to a political purpose on the part of the managers?
Second, there are political and legal problems with equity weighting. The political problem is that equity weighting is progressive and therefore is likely to get a hostile reaction from conservatives (including conservative judges).
That brings us to the second argument that companies could make, that any deception claims relate to speech intended to influence the political process and that political speech is exempt from liability even if it is false. Are the lawsuits preempted by federal law? The arguments come in two forms.
Earlier this week, Greenwire (subscription required) had an interesting story about the role that EPA’s estimate of the cost to comply with the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule played in the politics and judicial review of the rule. first appeared on Law and the Environment. Unfortunately, the $9.6
After years of political wrangling, wide-ranging online rules are about to become UK law - but complying with and enforcing the regulations won't be easy
Photo credit Alexandra Gay, member of the UCLA Law delegation that year. Under international law, only countries can be parties to these instruments, not U.S. They are often left to deal with climate effects on the ground, from wildfires to sea level rise to drought, and they can provide a political bulwark of sorts even as U.S.
In the Nile River basin last week, a political power shift in Sudan could turn up the heat on a long-simmering dispute over a major dam in the region. The proposed amendment is a brief but powerful statement of principle, according to John Dernbach, a law professor at Widener University Commonwealth Law School.
A: A few laws explicitly require cost-benefit analysis or at least something along those lines. Those laws are a minority. There are a few laws that actually prohibit agencies from considering costs, but agencies do cost-benefit analysis when implementing those laws for informational purposes.
In these “carbon intensity” calculations, CARB is not allowed to count reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are already required by law. At the federal level, agricultural operations are exempt from laws intended to prevent pollution to water and to the air. To CARB, installing digesters is a win-win.
This victory sets a precedent for future climate litigation, affirming that climate action is a legal duty of states under human rights law. At the Science Hub for Climate Litigation , we stand at the nexus of science and the law. C, a threshold beyond which the dangers to humanity grow sharply.
Around the same time as Washington’s order, Jefferson served on a Virginia legislative committee that wrote a law safeguarding the ability of doctors to engage in the practice. Those anti-Enlightenment — and therefore anti-Founder — attitudes are also key to the rejection of climate science from the same political quarter.
4) Drought Is Political. The right to use water in the western states is subject to arcane laws, court decrees, and precedents, some of which date to the era of colonial settlement. A relatively recent development is the political muscle of the region’s Indian tribes. Their plan is due next month.
Whether you call it updating, modernizing, or reforming, changes to the water rights system have long been considered a political third rail —the electric kind you don’t touch. This year, one of those water rights bills, Senate Bill 389 (SB 389) made it through the gauntlet of the legislature and will become law if Governor Newsom signs it.
Food prices are hitting all-time highs, pushing hundreds of millions of people deeper into poverty and food insecurity and threatening political stability in regions around the world. Price Shocks, Political Stability, and Food Protectionism. For starters, food price shocks are a political nightmare for weak governments.
Today, climate change is the central, though by no means the only, concern in environmental law. The earliest mentions of these terms in the law review literature came in the late 1970s, and only one of the pre-1985 discussions took a comprehensive look at the problem. Third, there was so much else going on in environmental law.
On June 13, 2022, Chile published its Climate Change Framework Law (“the Climate Act”). Momentum created by this event created the perfect conditions and political will to move forward with an ambitious bill on Climate Change, submitted to Congress in January, 2020. By Robert Currie Ríos*. Conclusions.
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