ELI In the News
I was raised in the segregated Deep South in Jackson, Miss., and was not yet 12 in 1963, when Bull Connor used firehoses and snarling dogs in an effort to prevent students from demonstrating outside of Birmingham’s City Hall. In June of that same year, civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, was assassinated in Jackson. Later that fall, four African-American schoolgirls, ages 11 to 14—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol McNair—were killed by a white supremacist who bombed their Birmingham church during Sunday morning services. The following summer, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found dead, buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi. . . .
Initial data indicate ride-hailing isn’t as good for the environment as many assumed, at least not in its current form. With a focused, practical bent, Joshua Skov, an instructor of management and sustainability at the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues sought to disentangle ride-hailing from other sources of carbon emissions in community-scale greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories. . . .
Since time immemorial, the Inuit were solely responsible for managing Arctic resources. A new multi-year study published last month looks at ways to once again put traditional knowledge and Indigenous people in the driver's seat of marine management decisions. "There is a very strong sense that Indigenous people have a very deep understanding of our ecosystem that western science or people do not have," said Mary Peltola, an advisory member on the project as well as the director of Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in Bethel. "This is not one person or a faction of people, this is unanimous from people.". . .
This week, thousands of people will convene (virtually) for the Global Bioeconomy Summit, a biennial event normally held in Berlin to discuss emerging opportunities and challenges of the bioeconomy. Many anticipate the biotechnology market to be worth $727.1 billion by 2025, so events like these are capturing the increased attention and active involvement of government agencies that may be key to driving growth in multiple economic sectors in the future. As public and private sector investments ramp up, what exactly can we expect in terms of new applications and products? . . .
On November 7, Joe Biden was projected to become President-elect. This news alert provides a high-level review of issues to watch and changes to expect in a Biden administration. Although the makeup of the Senate is not yet entirely clear, it seems that there will not be a change in Senate leadership and that the House will remain under Democratic control. The ultimate fate of the Senate majority will be decided on January 5, 2021 with the runoff of the two Georgia Senate Seats. For the Democrats to become the majority, they would need to prevail in both Senate races. . . .
The most deadly, destructive and widespread catastrophic-scale forest fires in Oregon’s history erupted on Labor Day this year, driven by strong east winds. Unless we change how our national and state forests are managed, these events will be just one more chapter in this age of predictable, increasing and ever-greater firestorms. I spent my career studying forest fires and forest health. In a 2018 Daily Caller interview, a few weeks before the California Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise, I said: "You take away logging, grazing and maintenance and you get firebombs." Then someone took my quote, put it on a forest fire photo and posted it from the ruins of Paradise. The resulting meme quickly went viral on Facebook. . . .
Under President Donald Trump, the federal government has rushed into a deregulation push unlike anything longtime environmental advocates say they have ever seen. The changes, including rollbacks to landmark rules on issues such as clean air and endangered species, go beyond familiar partisan seesawing between Republican and Democratic leadership. “On some level, the administration .... see(s) this as perhaps a generational opportunity to remake what the federal role in environmental protection is about,” said James McElfish, a senior attorney at the Environmental Law Institute. . . .
David Rejeski, visitor scholar at the Environmental Law Institute, describes efforts to obtain objective information about the “green” impacts of technological innovations such as blockchain, platform sharing and artificial intelligence. When the environmental community addresses advances in technology, it often does so “10 to 15 years too late,” says Rejeski. In the process, it tends to get pulled in opposite directions — viewing a particular aspect of technology as either the destruction or salvation of the planet. ELI’s recent research in this area is an attempt to find middle ground, with conclusions driven by objectivity and analytical rigor. Such an approach has been lacking when it comes to modern-day advances in tech, Rejeski says. Not enough money or effort is being spent by governments and independent research groups on assessing the true impact of technology on the environment. As a result, “The questions are really hard to answer.”
The Environmental Law Institute (ELI) has announced that on October 15, 2020, Denis Hayes, the organizer of the first Earth Day, will receive ELI’s 2020 Environmental Achievement Award in recognition of his visionary leadership and outstanding environmental stewardship over a most distinguished career. . . .
Environmental law constitutes a decent sliver of the Supreme Court's caseload, but none of the current justices seems to have much interest in environmental law, as such—or so I argue in my new article, "Which Way for the Roberts Court?", the cover story for the November/December 2020 issue of The Environmental Forum, published by the Environmental Law Institute.