Region: California
How, Exactly, Has Trump Gone After EVs?
A close look at the Administration’s wreckage, in six steps
The second Trump Administration has brought a flood of obstacles to the national effort to transition away from petroleum-powered vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs). These challenges have come in many forms across multiple levels of government; they are in most cases completely unprecedented, and in many cases legally dubious (to put it mildly). The push …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Issues in the 2026 Governor’s Race: Wildfire
Creator: Javier Alonso Huerta
Sixth in a series of posts outlining key challenges and opportunities facing California’s next governor.
Eighteen of California’s 20 most destructive wildfires have occurred in the past 25 years, driven by decades of fire suppression, climate change, and continued development in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The 2025 Los Angeles fires alone took at least 31 lives and caused property and capital losses ranging from $95 billion to $164 billion. The …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Has a Neighborhood Decarbonization Law. How Does It Work?
New FAQ from UCLA outlines what we know (and don’t know) about the implementation of SB 1221, California’s landmark neighborhood decarbonization law.
By Sooji Yang, Lauren Dunlap, Elias van Emmerick, and Gregory Pierce The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is currently navigating a wide array of questions from stakeholders as it designs a first-of-its-kind program to transition entire blocks of buildings from natural gas to zero-emission alternatives. Guidelines for the pilot program—a central component of Senate Bill …
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CONTINUE READING‘Smog and Sunshine’: Achieving Clean Air in California
UCLA’s Ann Carlson discusses her new book and how the state can address federal efforts to undo its emissions standards.
Los Angeles is famous for both sunshine and smog. Turns out the two are related. Ozone pollution is caused by the interaction of sunlight and the chemicals that come out of vehicle tailpipes and factory smokestacks. But when Ann Carlson’s family first moved to Southern California, nobody knew what caused smog and there were no laws …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Promise of Non-Pipeline Alternatives to Gas Lines
A new UCLA Law brief evaluates the Home Energy Choice Act (AB 2313) by California Assemblymember Marc Berman.
This post was co-written by Guest Contributor Maeve Anderson (J.D. Candidate 2026, UCLA School of Law). California’s transition away from natural gas is accelerating, with new policy tools emerging to speed the shift and ease the financial burden on ratepayers. In February 2026, California Assemblymember Marc Berman introduced the Home Energy Choice Act (AB 2313), a bill that would …
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CONTINUE READINGNever Give Up! Every Ton of Carbon We Can Cut Still Matters
It’s easy to be disheartened when we miss climate targets. But climate change isn’t a yes/no thing. It’s a matter of degree.
It’s easy to lose heart about our prospects for limiting climate change. The US has pulled out of international climate negotiations. Most of the countries that joined the Paris Agreement have missed targets , targets that weren’t aggressive enough in the first place. The 1.5 °C target is already basically out of reach. Is time to give up on slowing climate change and focus on adapting to it? The answer is no. Here’s why.
Climate change is a matter of degrees. That sounds like a truism or a pun, but it’s true in a deeper sense. There is no point past which further warming becomes irrelevant. degree, and every fraction of a degree makes things that much worse.
The Path to Abundance, Part VI
Abundance reforms at the federal level may have the most political success if they are low-salience, and elite driven
This is the sixth post in a series of six posts. The first post is here. The second post is here. The third post is here. The fourth post is here. The fifth post is here. As I discussed in my last blog post, the politics of abundance reform are difficult. Reform often requires short-term …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Path to Abundance, Part V
Abundance reforms will require consensus and trust, which are in short supply in American politics
This is the fifth post in a series of six posts. The first post is here. The second post is here. The third post is here. The fourth post is here. In my last post I noted some important political challenges to abundance reforms: It is unlikely that they will produce immediate political benefits, but …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Path to Abundance, Part IV
Abundance reforms may not produce immediate political benefits, and may see significant backlash
This is the fourth post in a series of six posts. The first post is here. The second post is here. The third post is here. As I discussed in my last blog post, abundance policy reforms will necessarily require tradeoffs, which leads us to politics. Will the political context allow for making decisions about …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Path to Abundance, Part III
Abundance reforms will pose difficult tradeoffs, including with environmental goals and public participation
This is the third post in a series of six posts. The first post is here. The second post is here. The reforms that abundance advocates have proposed are varied, in part because they target a wide range of policy areas. I will begin with housing as an example of the reforms being proposed – …
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