Environmental Policy & Law

Like many warriors, Shaye Wolf is ready to march. She says Pres. Donald Trump’s administration is carrying out a “war on science” with proposed cuts in scientific research funding and appointments of climate change deniers to top positions. So Wolf, climate science director with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, will be joining this Saturday’s March for Science in Washington, D.C. “I see this as a very wide spread grassroots movement to resist Trump’s policies that put people in danger,” Wolf says.

Fellow Shaye Wolf wrote an op-ed for The Mercury News leading up to the March for Science on why she was marching. She wrote, "Science has intensely personal consequences for our health, our families, and our world, no matter what political party we belong to. We all need it — and now we have to fight for it."

Fellow Ayana Johnson, one of the co-leaders of the March for Science in April 2017, writes in Scientific American that the anti-science stance of the current administration—silencing scientists, removing data from federal websites, proposing drastic funding cuts—hits her core.

As the dust settles on President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to critical transportation funding, Bay Area leaders are calling the plan hypocritical in light of the administration’s frequently touted but as yet unseen $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan.

While burning fossil fuels produces benefits, such as powering the electric grid and fueling cars, it also generates widespread costs to society – including damages from climate change that affect people around the world now and in the future. Public policies that reduce carbon pollution deliver benefits by avoiding these damages. Fellow Joe Aldy argues that President Trump's executive order to reverse Obama-era rules to cut carbon pollution is missing a key element of the equation.

The new Interior Secretary likes regulation, sort of, and energy production a lot. He sounds ready to break through regulatory and policy gridlock in many rural communities. The question remains, though, whether his publicized love of the outdoors and hunting makes him a fighter for the environment, writes Fellow Jessica Hall.

How did 24 diverse countries, including Russia, China, and the United States, come to agree to protect 1.55 million km2 of the Southern Ocean, more than 70% of which will be closed to commercial fishing? How did the US and Russia find common ground in the Southern Ocean, when it has been so difficult in other diplomatic arenas? Fellow Cassandra Brooks has an interesting answer.

Environmental regulations save our country money, provide jobs, and ensure the health of all animals, plants and the humans who see clean air, water and soil as an American right. The EPA needs a leader who will defend that right, write Dianne Kopec and Fellow Aram Calhoun.

The US helped forge the Paris agreement for international reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Now the election of Donald Trump is resetting the climate-diplomacy landscape, and casting a Green Climate Fund for developing nations into doubt. ... “I have nothing positive to say about the financing. Developing countries are right to worry,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, a former Obama official who helped negotiate a 2014 bilateral emissions reduction pact between the US and China.