SALTLAW

by andré douglas pond cummings

With most banks in “full-delay” mode in connection with foreclosures during 2011, California homeowners can expect a change—for the worst—in 2012 as banks look to aggressively pursue seriously delinquent mortgages this year. The foreclosure rate is expected to rise significantly, based on the second-half surge of initial default notices sent in 2011, but the rate should remain below the peak of 2010. Nonetheless, continuing foreclosures remains disconcerting.

The Federal Reserve is working to stabilize the housing market. The Fed has urged Congress to help underwater borrowers by reducing their loan principal and has requested that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rid themselves of the backlogged foreclosures in bulk sales. Whether Congress and the Government Sponsored Entities will respond to the Fed’s requests, remains to be seen.

Of course, with increased foreclosures comes decreasing property values.  According to the Los Angeles Times:  “California and other states are likely to see an enormous wave of long-delayed foreclosure action in the coming year as banks deal more aggressively with 3.5 million seriously delinquent mortgages.  And experts said that dealing with the foreclosure process, from issuing notices of default to selling repossessed homes, is likely to push housing prices lower this year before the real estate market has a chance to recover.”

Politicians have shown an astonishing willingness to provide corporate welfare to commercial banks, auto companies, and Wall Street banks, in the form of taxpayer bailouts and enormous backdoor loans from the Fed.  The question remains whether any relief will be provided to the millions of homeowners that are underwater on their homes and in serious delinquency.

Written by Hari Osofsky

Last night, President Obama delivered his annual State of the Union Address.  Like last year, he focused on the potential for unity over energy independence, transition to cleaner energy, and energy infrastructure rather than on addressing climate change. He continued to tie that transition to innovation, construction, and jobs.

However, the tone was somewhat different.  Unlike last year, where he did not mention climate change directly, he openly acknowledged partisan divisions with respect to climate change and even energy while trying to find bipartisan ground.  The President also spent time discussing the expansion of offshore drilling and natural gas as positive rather than just emphasizing the need to shift towards cleaner sources.

I liked the realism of this shift.  One of the reasons I spent time in the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill exploring the complexity of offshore drilling and oil spill regulation, and principles for moving forward and addressing environmental justice concerns, is because I believe that the desire for energy independence and security will compel us to keep drilling deep in at least the short-to-medium term.  Similarly, I think that natural gas is an important transitional energy source because we are not ready to shift dramatically to cleaner sources in the near term.

I do think it’s important, though, to think beyond our present constraints.  I live in the Midwest, with its massive wind capacity, and was particularly heartened by two experiences I had during my Climate Change and Clean Energy capstone course last semester.  First, when John Dunlop of the American Wind Energy Association visited us, he emphasized that between on-shore and off-shore wind, we have capacity to more than meet our energy needs and that intermittancy is more manageable than it is often portrated as being.  Second, when we went on a tour of the MISO, the Midwestern regional transmission organization, the operator answering our questions emphasized that they try to get as much wind online as possible.  This effort is not motivated by any type of environmental mandate, but out of their mission of reducing cost and maximizing reliability–the wind is cheaper than the more polluting sources.  I hope that we can move beyond bipartisanship to use law as a tool for the energy transformation–through a combination of conservation, efficiency, and transitioning sources–that would be a win-win for this country.

I include the most relevant portion of the State of the Union below: Read the rest of this entry »

Written by Hari Osofsky

The United Nations Framework Convention Convention on Climate Change has begun its annual conference of the parties in Durban. From the start, the news is depressing, and as Lesley McAlister noted in her blog, has a bit of a deja vu quality, and not in a good way. The Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, indicated that we’re on track for 6 degrees of warming by 2100 if we don’t change our energy use patterns. Meanwhile, Canada, which is failing to meet its Kyoto Protocol commitments, has announced it won’t sign on for another commitment period. While there are many nuanced negotiations going on regarding many important issues, which small groups of people fully understand, the progress on some of these topics since last year’s Cancun negotiations does not address the fundamental problem: we are nowhere any kind of big picture solution to this problem. This is why the soon-to-be-released casebook I’m writing with Lesley McAlister ends with major climate change and geo-engineering as it’s two primary scenarios, and asks our students to try to get us to an alternative future.

I started a talk a week ago saying that I wish I were a climate skeptic and having a good friend say that she doesn’t understand how we can keep going working on this incredibly depressing issue. It’s hard to know what to do when consensus science says that we’re creating a catastrophic problem and when there’s just not political will to act fast enough. The reason I have projects on both suburbs and geo-engineering emerges from the schizophrenia that this moment brings. I’m trying to come up with creative ways to impact the big picture as top down approaches fail (known by academics as pluralist or polycentric governance models) while trying to make sure we have legal mechanisms thought through as we begin to approach geo-engineering more seriously. And for the record, I have very grave doubts that, even with our best scientists thinking it through, geo-engineering (technological efforts to reverse warming effects or get carbon out of the system) is likely to go well. And all this is under the Obama Administration–many leading Republican candidates want to eliminate the meager progress this country has made and one of them may win if our economy doesn’t improve more soon.

Read the rest of this entry »