New Stoel Rives California Environmental Law Blog
Stoel Rives LLP is pleased to present the California Environmental Law Blog (http://www.californiaenvironmentallawblog.com), which will focus on emerging environmental and natural resource issues specific to California.
The Stoel Rives California Environmental Law Blog is written by leading environmental and natural resources attorneys, whose posts will discuss comprehensive legal and business issues involving water rights, water quality, land use and CEQA, timber and forest products, energy, agribusiness and food processing, wineries and vineyards, Proposition 65, and delta legislation.
We look forward to many lively discussions with ag interest owners, wineries, property rights owners, food processors, local governments, public entities, forest product companies, landowners, and timber companies, as well as others interested in California environmental law.
We hope you enjoy the California Environmental Law Blog!
Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force Issues Final Recommendations
On Monday, July 19, 2010, the White House Council on Environmental Quality ("CEQ") issued the Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force. The Final Recommendations are the culmination of a process that began on June 12, 2009 when President Obama formed the Task Force and tasked it with developing recommendations to enhance national stewardship of the ocean, coasts, and the Great Lakes and promote the long-term conservation of those resources.
The Final Recommendations will likely be carried over into an Executive Order to be signed by the President, which will establish a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Coasts, and Great Lakes and create a National Ocean Council to enhance ocean governance and coordination between federal and state agencies. The Final Recommendations also express the Task Force's unanimous agreement that the United States should acceed to the Convention on the Law of the Sea and ratify its 1994 Implementing Agreement.
The CEQ's press release is available here. Attorneys at Stoel Rives are reviewing the Final Recommendations and assessing their impact on, among other things, offshore renewable energy development including offshore wind and marine and hydrokinetic projects. Stay tuned for more on this important development.
Global Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Biofuels
The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels last week released Version 0.0 of its “Global Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Biofuels Production.” This diverse group includes representatives from World Wildlife Federation, BP, Bunge, the Dutch Ministry of Housing and the Environment, the Forest Stewardship Council, the University of California at Berkeley and the World Economic Forum. They have been hard at work for the past year establishing an objective framework for enabling a true cost benefit analysis of biofuels that incorporates environmental, economic and social justice criteria. They welcome input into their process and have opened the document for six months of feedback which can be provided via www.bioenergywiki.net
Hopefully, this process will yield substantial success. As an early participant in the US biodiesel industry, I can attest that the benefits of biofuels appeared quite compelling and almost self-evident as compared to conventional petroleum fuel. Those in the industry with a strong interest in environmental issues typically considered corn ethanol and soy biodiesel as transition fuels that would establish the viability of a more diverse transportation energy portfolio by leveraging the existing farm economy. After market entry with these transition fuels, the road would be paved for superior feedstocks as we are witnessing today with cellulosic material, waste feedstock material and even algae.
In retrospect, the Roundtable of Sustainable Biofuels should have been founded a decade ago rather than last year. With an earlier start, such an organization might have achieved great progress in injecting some objective criteria into the “food vs. fuel” debate and propelled the industry in a more sustainable direction. In the absence of these criteria, some of the debaters have used these crucial (and emotional) issues to advance their own agendas and the biofuels industry has lacked the framework to establish its own best practices.
