Environmental Law

In The News (September 16)

By Dennis Pfaff and Kevin Livingston, Editors

• General Motors Corp. has unveiled the production version of an electric car that's designed to go 40 miles without recharging and also carries a gas tank for longer trips; it's called the Volt, from a Reuters dispatch.
• But at the same time, a scientist looking at the issue of electric cars says lead-footed drivers blasting the air conditioning could significantly cut the battery range of the vehicles -- although that's not necessarily always a bad thing, according to another Reuters report.
• The pro-business Chamber of Commerce warns that regulation of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, a prospect raised by a Supreme Court ruling last year, could produce bureaucratic gridlock; environmentalists scoff, according to, again, Reuters.
• In the Northeast, the nation's most serious effort to date to use a market system to curb greenhouse gases gets under way in a little more than a week, amid concerns that an over-estimate of emissions might hurt prices and lower the incentives for utilities to green up, The New York Times reports.
• An insurance company gets props from ... an environmental group? That's the case with Progressive Insurance, which is offering Maryland drivers an optional pay-as-you-drive policy that rewards motorists for using their cars less, from a statement by the Environmental Defense Fund.
• The planned ultra-green building to house the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is in limbo, as a result of money issues, reports the San Francisco Chronicle's architecture writer.
• Congress' ethanol mandate may be the "single most misguided agricultural program in modern American history," writes a commentator in Yale Environment 360, a publication of the university's school of forestry and environmental studies. 
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it's looking for ways to clean up greenhouse gases -- in China. The agency has committed more than $1 million toward feasibility studies on recovering and using methane from Chinese coal mines, according to an EPA statement.
• Painstaking recordkeeping by a handful of people at a 19th century resort in New York has provided valuable support for the notion that something is happening to the climate, reports The New York Times. 

Full post as published by Climate Law Update on September 16, 2008 (boomark / email).