Durban, South Africa.  Home to the Shark Tank (where Kwazulu-Natal's rugby team, the Sharks, plays), extensive beaches and South Africa's busiest port.  But not home to a new treaty to address climate change.  COP-17 gets underway on Monday and the delegates haven't even met yet; some might think we are being somewhat premature.  We think not.  There is an election here next year.  Europe is mired in a sovereign debt crisis.  China and India will not derail their economic growth just to appease the industrialized West.  Notwithstanding that there will n...

It's not Gone with the Wind or Harry Potter, but an article just published in the public health journal, Health Affairs, is worth picking up, if only to start you thinking.  In Six Climate Change–Related Events In The United States Accounted For About $14 Billion In Lost Lives And Health Costs, the authors (two senior scientists at the NRDC, two professors and a law student) grapple with the health costs of climate-change related events.   In the authors' words:  "The objective of this study was to provide a cost calculation of health effects associated with even...

Yesterday was a good day for renewable fuels enthusiasts and not because someone figured out how to make ethanol cocktails from pond scum.  In Houston American renewable fuel use literally took off on its maiden flight and in Washington the Supreme Court denied certiorari in a suit brought by the oil industry challenging the USEPA's regulations promulgating a revised renewable fuels standard. In National Petrochemical Refiners Association and the American Petroleum Institute v. EPA, the plaintiffs asserted the EPA's final rule, Regulation of Fuels and Fuel Additives: Changes to Renewable...

Subchapter 10 Climate Change, Article 5, Sections 95800 to 96023, Title 17, California Code of Regulations, to read as follows: Article 5: CALIFORNIA CAP ON GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS AND MARKET-BASED COMPLIANCE MECHANISMS Note: All text is new. "All text is new."  And so it is and so begins a new chapter in California's odyssey into the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, which began over 5 years ago with the passage of AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.  Under that law, greenhouse gas rules - including market controls - adopted by the California Air Resources B...