Environmental Law

According to Ethan Elkind, Climate Program Director at UC Berkeley Law, even California climate policy, reviled by the right for its supposed extremist quality, has predominately focused on promoting fossil fuel alternatives, like electric vehicles and carbon capture, rather than on confronting the fossil fuel corporations directly.

“If auto makers don’t comply with federal fuel economy standards, there’s no penalty for them. They can get away with it without any monetary damage,” said Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Law. “There’s now no incentive to comply with federal fuel economy standards and they no longer need to comply with California’s zero emission vehicle mandate.”

“Putting any industry above the law — especially one responsible for creating many of the greenhouse gas emissions that have helped fuel climate-related destruction of homes, businesses and whole communities — would be beyond dangerous,” writes Dave Jones, Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “If Big Oil gets its wish, it would be an injustice with lasting and cascading harm.”

“People have been educating us and have been incredibly warm and generous with their time and their experience, and we are trying to solve a national and a global problem of how to have affordable clean energy that gives everyone security and makes the planet more sustainable,” said Claudia Polsky, a law professor and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley.

“With all the political debate around cost-of-living, policymakers need to tell the whole story about housing costs,” writes Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

“It’s ironic that they’re doing this just at the time when people are most worried about gas prices,” said Dan Farber, faculty director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school.

BART’s struggles amount to a “post-Covid keyboard economy story,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and an expert in transit systems. “The jobs disappeared from downtown in favor of people’s home offices and wherever they could set up a laptop,” he said.

“In a state where the next outage is never far away, EVs offer something rare: cleaner air and greater resilience,” writes Ken Alex, director, Project Climate at CLEE. “California should stop treating them as a risk — and start using them as the grid solution they already are.”

“The highly polluting diesel trucks that dominate California’s roads account for 25% of the state’s on-road greenhouse gas emissions and 35% of transportation-caused nitrogen oxide emissions,” write Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program and Marie Grimm an environmental policy research fellow at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment “They also contribute to asthma and other public health harms, particularly in low-income communities near shipping centers and highways.”

UC Berkeley transportation expert Ethan Elkind said high-speed rail has long struggled to win federal backing in a country that prioritizes highway spending. “It’s an area where it becomes unfortunate for a state like California that is generating a lot of tax revenue for the United States, but it’s transportation needs are not really reflected in the federal priorities,” Elkind said.