Last week, the California Public Utilities Commission released a report evaluating the state’s GoGreen home energy financing program. Residential buildings are responsible for about 10 percent of state greenhouse gas emissions, and home decarbonization routinely ranks among the most challenging of our many emissions reduction challenges.  Our buildings and electrical distribution grid are old, retrofit projects are complex and time-consuming, and few Californians have the energy–let alone the capital–to upgrade their heating and cooling systems, appliances, windows, and more. This problem ..read more

Environmental issues such as climate change are broadly shared concerns, but for many they are low priority issues. Obviously, environmental advocates would like to raise the profile of those issues among voters. But it is also true that the environment is a priority for some people who don’t vote. Some  efforts are underway to change that.  I’ll describe three of them in this post, starting with the best-known group. League of Conservation Voters: Climate Vote 2024.  This program involves research and polling, testing climate  messaging, and hiring and training canvassers ..read more

More than a year ago, California’s Little Hoover Commission convened the first in a series of public hearings designed to interrogate the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) as well as Californians’ often tense relationship with that landmark legislation. In recent years, some pro-housing advocates have pointed to CEQA as the bogeyman driving the state’s affordable housing crisis; defenders of the law say CEQA stymies relatively few developments that would close the housing gap but does serve as a crucial public participation tool for long-burdened environmental justice communities ..read more

Guest contributor Cassandra Vo is a J.D. Candidate at UCLA Law (’25) specializing in environmental law. Hotter, deadlier, and more frequent heat waves have become one of the most surefire signs of a changing climate in our day-to-day lives. California recognized the need for action on this issue in 2022 by bringing to life AB 209, one section of which centers around creating better indoor heat safety in homes. That should include mobile home communities, which are too often left out of this discussion. Specifically, AB 209 requires the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development ..read more

Chris Hunkeler, Wikimedia Commons In the West, the benefits of electricity market regionalization appear more attractive than ever. “Regionalization” refers to efforts to expand coordination between Western states to buy and sell wholesale electricity through centralized federal power markets. Increased coordination, made possible through regional transmission organizations (RTOs – independent non-profit organizations that operate the grid and oversee the operation of centralized energy markets), has the potential to enhance grid reliability while reducing costs and emissions. Currently, altho ..read more

Is it unconstitutional for the government to build a levee that reduces the risk of urban flooding but diverts the water to nearby farmlands?  The answer could be yes, unless the government pays for flood easements on the rural lands. But if the government doesn’t build the levee, it faces no liability from the urban landowners. That’s the adaptation dilemma: preparing for climate disaster is legally disfavored. The issue is created by a 2012 Supreme Court. Although temporary flooding was not previously considered to be a taking, the Court reversed its position on that issue in Arkansas ..read more

The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to overrule the Chevron doctrine. Chevron requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute.  We should know by the end of next month whether the current conservative super-majority on the Court will overrule Chevron. In the meantime, it’s illuminating to put the current dispute in the context of the last 80 years of judicial doctrine regarding deference to agencies on issues of law. As this timeline shows, the Supreme Court’s engagement with this issue has been long and complex. 1944. Skidmore v ..read more

There are many different ways that our global society has attempted to address environmental damage and climate change. We fund climate technology startups. We elect representatives that keep the climate in mind. We start nonprofits dedicated to reestablishing our collective sustainable relationships with earth systems. And we litigate in civil and federal courts at the national level when environmental rights have been violated. Yet the climate change clock continues to tick, and we are faced with the reality of this multifaceted and increasingly alarming problem: we need many different too ..read more

The bad news is that we’re not yet on track to avoid dangerous climate change. But there’s also good news: We’ve taken important steps that will ease further progress.  We should resist the allure of easy optimism, given the scale of the challenges. Neither should we wallow in despair. There’s a good basis for hope. To begin with, there’s been major progress in U.S. climate policy. The first half of Biden’s term saw the passage of three bills that collectively devote about half a trillion dollars to emission reduction: the Infrastructure Law’s support for emission cuts in transportation ..read more

In August of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi, the combination of torrential rain and flawed infrastructure proved deadly. More than 1,800 people died and the price tag for the damage quickly rose to the tens of billions of dollars. In the chaotic disaster response that followed, several communities were disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination during recovery. Among them: LGBTQ residents. They were often overlooked in local and national relief efforts, which routinely failed to recognize households of same-sex couples as “families.” Some LGBTQ fa ..read more