Environmental Law

Berkeley Law Professor Holly Doremus discusses the State of Alaska’s lawsuit to reverse the National Marine Fisheries Service’s designation of critical habitat for threatened ringed and bearded seals.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses the hope and limitations of green aviation technology and how we can reduce our carbon footprint when we fly.

Michael Kiparsky, water program director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law discusses groundwater recharge projects.

Holly Doremus, a water rights expert and professor of environmental regulation at the Berkeley School Law discusses the cut backs on water imported to growers in California’s Imperial Valley from the Colorado River.

Thanks to climate change, “we have and will continue to have too much water when we don’t want it and not enough when we do, and so storage is the key,” said Michael Kiparsky, water program director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “The fact that we’ve created this massive space underground holds the key to that problem.” 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses the recent controversy over gas vs. electric cooktops.

The report’s findings could potentially help support climate litigation against Exxon, Daniel Farber, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN. “The more we learn about industry deception, the stronger the legal claims will be.” 

“Boosting public transit could also have the added environmental benefit of limiting the production of new electric vehicles,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “Cars take a lot of energy to manufacture and dispose of, and while electricity is a much cleaner fuel than petroleum, it’s far better to avoid buying a car in the first place,” he said. 

“What we found is that no one had really done a city-specific, CAP-specific analysis, so we were kind of starting from scratch,” said Ted Lamm, a senior research fellow at Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “You can set as ambitious targets as you want. But if you don’t provide them the budget and the funds and the actual implementation tools to do it, it’s going to be a plan and nothing else.”

“The governor has standing,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “And it’s confusing to the voters when you see him saying ‘vote no’ on something that otherwise seems like Democrats, who make up the majority of registered voters, would want to support.”