Under the Clean Water Act, a troubling regulatory gap exists wherein the federal government is unable to directly regulate diffuse sources of water pollution in interstate waters. This gap has left many of the nation’s most important watersheds flooded with nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff, contrary to the purpose of the statute.
The idea of nature as a stable and predictable counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies is at the heart of one of the most enduring environmental writing traditions, the pastoral. Moreover, a related rhetorical convention, the pastoral elegy, distinguishes the nature writing and environmental philosophy of postcolonial settler societies “marked by the death and/or dispossession of their original inhabitants.”
Patrick Michaels, a former professor at the University of Virginia, has built a second career at the libertarian Cato Institute issuing data-laden reports against mainstream climate change science. In his latest book, Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything, Michaels joins Paul Knappenberger, the assistant director for the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science, to introduce new arguments updating Michaels’ long-held thesis that man-made warming is a reality but that “[t]he atmosphere isn’t warming nearly as fast as is predicted in the forecasts . . . .”
The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (“AB 32”) set statewide goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. On November 30, 2015, the Supreme Court of California held in Center for Biological Diversity v. California Department of Fish and Wildlife that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) could use AB 32 to set the standard for GHG emissions in an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Newhall Ranch Project. However, the court held that the administrative record lacked substantial evidence to support its finding that emission would not be "significant."
