Environmental Law

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, joins the conversation about how the widening technology gap and lukewarm federal support for clean vehicles threatens the entire U.S. auto industry with obsolescence, and what California is doing about it.

Ethan Elkind, the director of the climate program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment weighs in on the Committee for Affordable Bay Area Transit’s opposition to sales tax measure Connect Bay Area Act.

“California’s boom in data centers places growing demands on stressed water resources,” writeMichael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. and environmental policy research fellow Marie Grimm. “Everyone who uses the internet benefits from data centers. Yet the impacts of data centers are felt most by the communities where these facilities are built and there is no state law controlling their spread.”

Dave Jones, director of Climate Risk Initiative at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, weighs in on California’s FAIR Plan rate hikes.

“This is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi and it’s the most densely populated part of Los Angeles,” Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, said. “Generally speaking, rail lines are successful when they serve densely populated areas.”

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.