A California superior court recently issued a tentative decision against the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for failing to comply with environmental law pursuant to the implementation of AB 32, California’s global warming law.

The tentative decision directs CARB to rewrite its documentation pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and to cease implementation of the AB 32 Scoping Plan until the violation is corrected. The decision is based on violations of process, not the scientific or economic substance of either the CEQA documentation or the scoping plan as critics of climate alarmism would have liked.

Reactions to the tentative finding have ranged from “no big deal” to “hallelujah.” But it is a big deal; CARB’s implementation of AB 32 hangs in the balance, at least for the time being.…

Can the Endangered Species Act (ESA) compel America to abandon fossil fuels?

My colleague William Yeatman alluded to this question last week after attending a symposium at the Heritage Foundation entitled, “Saving the Polar Bear or Obama’s CO2 Agenda?”

The short answer is yes and no. Yes, because once the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed the polar bear as a “threatened species” on the supposition that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are melting the bear’s Arctic habitat, the ESA logically requires that people stop engaging in CO2-emitting activities. The potential for mischief is vast. Carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil energy use, which in turn derives from economic activity. There is hardly any economic activity in the modern world that does not, directly or indirectly, produce CO2 emissions. Hence, almost any economic activity can be deemed to threaten the polar bear and, thus, violate the Act!  …

[Editor Note: This letter by Koch Industries’s CEO Charles G. Koch, addressed to Fortune Editor-in-Chief Hedley Donovan, provides a pro-free market rebuttal to ARCO’s CEO Thornton Bradshaw’s “My Case for National Planning” (Fortune, February 1977).

Koch’s scholarly effort is reproduced below as a historically important document in the energy debate. It is authored by a rarity of rarities, a principled free-market capitalist. The context and timeliness of the rebuttal was stated in the Libertarian Review at the time:

While this essay was only the latest in a series of attacks on a free market economy and defenses of National Economic Planning to appear over the past few years by intellectuals, businessmen and labor leaders alike, Bradshaw’s piece deserves special scrutiny. For it comes to us from a man who both is a leading representative of American major oil companies, and was a member of Jimmy Carter’s task force on energy during the 1976 presidential campaign.

Part I in this series reviewed the history of nuclear waste storage policy in the United States. This post reviews Project Salt Vault, an early attempt to solve the dilemma of storing spent nuclear fuel.   Part III will cover the history of Yucca Mountain.

Project Salt Vault

The primary objective of Project Salt Vault was to demonstrate the safety and feasibility of handling and storing high level nuclear waste (HLW) solids from power reactors in salt formations. The engineering and scientific objectives were to:

· Demonstrate waste-handling equipment and techniques required to handle packages containing HLW solids from the point of production to the disposal location.

· Determine the stability of salt formations under the combined effects of heat and radiation (approximately 4,000,000 curies of radioactive material, yielding up to 109 rads).…