Environmental Policy & Law

U.S. policy makers are “showing that they really are ready to make some serious reductions at home” and that message will help bring about change in other countries, Kevin Kennedy, deputy director of the World Resources Institute’s U.S. climate initiative. It would be “a mistake” to focus just on the emissions reduction that any particular rule delivers and not the broader effect on the climate talks, he said.

Identifying Violations Affecting Neighborhoods (IVAN) is an innovative program of environmental monitoring, reporting, and enforcement in California. It is intended to improve health and conditions of well-being in disadvantaged communities where residents face high levels of environmental hazards and low levels of the economic, political, and social resources need to address them.

During his two years leading the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has washed the feet of inmates, proposed larger roles for women in the church, and famously shifted the institutional tone toward gay acceptance, saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

The call today by Pope Francis in his transformational papal encyclical on the environment, reminds us that climate change is first and foremost about people, and it’s the poorest among us that will suffer the most.

It’s raining money! Or so Gov. Jerry Brown would have us believe. The new state budget assumes $2.2 billion in new revenue from California’s pioneering cap-and-trade program designed to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.