This just in: trying to stop climate change will cost the world about $50 trillion a year, but the impacts of climate change will only cost about $1 trillion a year, so the choice is clear! That's the thesis of Bjorn Lomborg's op-ed in Monday's Washington Post.

Presumably the flooding of much of Bangladesh doesn't count for much, since those lives are totally worth less than ours, etc.

Update: For more on this, see Joe Romm and Miles Grant.

The interstate water wars have gone underground. For more than a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has been the arbiter of last resort to settle fights between states over the right to use surface streams that cross state lines. But now, the high Court may be asked to settle a long-standing feud between Mississippi and Tennessee over a vast underground formation—the Memphis Sand aquifer, which underlies about 10,000 square miles of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky.

The stakes are high, and the rhetoric inflammatory. Mississippi sued the City of Memphis, seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and claiming that Memphis is stealing Mississippi’s “share” of the aquifer. The problem is that no one has ever determined the two states’ respective “shares” of the aquifer, and that Tennessee (and not merely Memphis) must be part of any lawsuit that makes such a …

The Second Circuit's ruling Monday in State of Connecticut, et al. v. American Electric Power Company Inc., et al. revived a public nuisance lawsuit against the nation’s five largest electric power companies. The case opens the door to a potential judicial remedy for the alleged harm and increases the pressure on Congress and the Executive Branch to devise a more comprehensive solution to our greenhouse gas problem.

In an ideal world, would we give the task of designing facility-specific climate controls to the courts? Of course not. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Congress is paralyzed and EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act has not yet been translated into concrete limits on greenhouse gases. The Second Circuit’s decision maintains the courts’ traditional common law powers to adjudicate claims that one party’s actions are harming another. The other two …

Cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.

In June, President Obama created an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, and directed it to make recommendations for a national ocean policy.  The Task Force got right to work.  Now, after convening two dozen expert roundtables, inviting public comment, and holding the first of six public sessions, the Task Force has issued an Interim Report recommending key elements of a national policy.

The Interim Report is very encouraging.  If the Task Force follows this blueprint in fleshing out a national policy, and if it can bring the executive and legislative branches along, the result will be a clear national policy of putting environmental sustainability first, and an effective institutional framework for putting that policy into practice. The Interim report correctly identifies the need for “a strong, clear, overarching policy mandate” and “high-level direction and policy guidance from a clearly designated and …

Imagine if the end of the world were coming and everyone was just too polite to talk about it. That’s been the eerie feeling I've gotten over the past eight months listening to the President talk about energy policy. Not wanting to be a downer, he couches his energy talk in positive spin: We’re going to invest in the new clean green economy, create jobs, sell American ingenuity and know-how around the world, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Missing is any mention of the reason we’re going to all the trouble of undertaking a vast and expensive transformation of our well-entrenched carbon economy in the first place: all those coal plants and gas guzzling cars threaten to end life as we know it on this planet (not my words – NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen’s). Just a minor detail – but one …

As first reported by Law 360 on Thursday:

In a decision reversing a ruling in favor of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a federal appeals court has chastised the agency's Office of Civil Rights for what the court said was its apparent failure to consider alleged civil rights violations in a timely manner.

“What the district court initially classified as an 'isolated instance of untimeliness' has since bloomed into a consistent pattern of delay by the EPA,” wrote Judge A. Wallace Tashima in the three-judge panel's opinion, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Here's the opinion, and more from Greenwire. Chris Winter of the Crag Law Center, the Rosemere Neighborhood Association's attorney in the case, declares in a press release: “For years, EPA’s Office of Civil Rights ignored civil rights complaints from all across …

Today’s New York Times article about excess manure in the water is a stark reminder of what can happen when an environmental problem isn’t addressed: people get really sick.

While the article is shocking -- it describes how families in Wisconsin living close to dairy farms suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach problems, and severe ear infections from parasites and bacteria that seeped into the drinking water -- it restates what a lot of people have known for a long time. We are failing to protect people from agricultural runoff because the Clean Water Act does not address it adequately, as Bill Andreen discussed just this week.

Meanwhile, in the case of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), which are covered by the Clean Water Act, EPA has looked away for years. The problem is acute enough that the Government Accountability Office took EPA to task for sticking its …

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar signed a secretarial order on Monday establishing a new department-wide strategy for gathering data and developing management options to help managers cope with the effects of climate change on resources governed by the Interior Department. The order seeks to initiate three components:

1. A “Climate Change Response Council” to coordinate and develop the Department’s strategy for responding to the effects of climate change, advancing methods for geologic and biologic carbon sequestration, and estimating and reducing the Department’s carbon footprint.
2. Eight “Regional Climate Change Response Centers” to synthesize data on climate change effects and develop tools for managers to use to manage resources in light of climate change.
3. “Landscape Conservation Cooperatives” to coordinate regional adaptation efforts across landscapes.

The secretarial order also replaces Secretarial Order No. 3226 created in January 2009 by the outgoing Bush administration and reinstates Secretarial Order No …

Cap-and-trade legislation making its way through Congress has become enormously complex, embodying a host of arcane political deals governing the distribution of the vast majority of emissions allowances being given away for free, with crucial details being left to EPA. This complexity threatens to hinder the effort to address climate disruption (see my article Capping Carbon). It would lead to long delays and weak implementation, just like other laws delegating a lot of controversial and litigable decisions to administrative agencies. Delays and weakness could prove disastrous in the climate disruption context, because greenhouse gas emissions have already warmed the planet and gases emitted while implementation flounders can create irreversible and potentially catastrophic ecological problems. Auctioning of 100% of the allowances would make the program run smoothly.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative—a cap-and-trade program that regulates utility emissions in the northeastern states— has relied on auctioning nearly …