Air Quality

Climate Policy After the 2024 Election

In this UCLA Emmett Institute webinar, panelists discussed the climate implications of the 2024 election from the state, national, and international perspective.

Climate certainty. Legislative action. Whipsaw regulations. An exodus of civil servants. Chinese leadership despite being the world’s largest emitter. Those are a few of the possible outcomes of the Nov. 5 presidential election, according to our panelists.  More than in any previous election, the two major candidates’ track records on environmental policies are well-established and …

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Governor Newsom Should Veto These Four Bills

Four seemingly modest bills — AB 1122, AB 1296, AB 637 and AB 3179 — are sneaky legislative efforts to threaten California’s world-leading clean transportation investments.

This post was co-authored by Ruben Aronin, Principal of the Better World Group. With just weeks to go before November 5, all eyes are on the election, including what it means for environmental policy. And yet, one of the largest threats to California’s clean transportation leadership in recent history has materialized right under our noses …

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New Law Reaffirms Local Authority to Ban Oil Drilling

AB 3233, part of a trio of bills that the governor just signed, paves a clear path for local phase-out efforts.

This morning, Governor Newsom signed a trio of bills—AB 3233 (Addis), AB 1866 (Hart), and AB 2716 (Bryan)—that will protect communities in Los Angeles and across the state from the harms of oil and gas production, the impacts of which are disproportionately experienced in low-income communities of color across the state. He signed the package …

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California’s Electric Car Culture

The state has been pushing EVs for over thirty years, with huge progress in the past five years.

California has been a leader in clean cars — the result of a long history of regulatory efforts. Here’s how we got where we are, and what will need to happen going forward.

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Electric Shared Mobility:

Program Design Elements Can Produce More Equitable, Durable, and Successful Projects

Shared mobility—an umbrella term for any transportation mode shared among multiple passengers—has the potential to accelerate transportation electrification, air quality, and greenhouse gas reduction goals, meet the needs of underserved communities that most lack mobility access, and advance broader mobility equity goals. CLEE’s report, Electric Shared Mobility: California Lessons Learned for Equity in Program Design, …

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“Salt Lakes in Crisis: Legal Responses to Ecological Catastrophes”

Upcoming U.C. Davis Law Review Symposium To Provide Interdisciplinary Focus On Threatened Western U.S. Lakes

On Friday, September 20th, the student-run U.C. Davis Law Review will host a most timely conference examining an environmental crisis facing many of the American West’s iconic “terminal lakes.” That term refers to lakes that have no natural outlet.  For many years, protracted droughts and human diversions from freshwater rivers and streams feeding those lakes …

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California Pulls Back On Sustainable Aviation Fuels

Air Resources Board abruptly withdraws proposal to mandate low-carbon jet fuel

California regulators had an opportunity this year to be a global leader on requiring airplanes to use low-carbon jet fuel. But the Air Resources Board announced earlier this month that it will back off from its earlier proposal to require jet fuel providers to decarbonize, through the agency’s landmark low carbon fuel standard program. Why …

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Clean Air and the Turbocharged Shadow Docket

Guest Contributors Sean Donahue & Megan Herzog write that coal advocates offer troubling new grounds for the Supreme Court to stay EPA’s carbon pollution standards.

The Supreme Court is currently considering eight emergency (or “shadow docket”) requests from coal advocates (coal-mining companies, coal-burning electricity generators, and allied State attorneys general led by West Virginia) to bar implementation of new EPA rules limiting carbon pollution from coal- and gas-burning power plants while legal challenges to the rules proceed—what is known as …

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New Report: Charging and Financing Electric Trucks

CLEE/UCLA Law report & webinar offers solutions to meet California’s zero-emission trucks goal

California has groundbreaking goals to require automakers to sell, and large fleets to purchase, zero-emission trucks and buses in increasing percentages, starting this year. But these goals will only be achievable if the state has sufficient charging infrastructure to fuel the vehicles, along with available financing to help truck owners purchase or lease them. To …

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Is 2025 the Year of the Carbon Tax?

Regulating inside the fenceline

Carbon border adjustment mechanisms are increasingly the talk of Washington. UCLA Law’s Kimberly Clausing explains some of the options on the table.

There’s a big, important tax debate looming next year—one with opportunities and risks for climate policy, particularly the idea of a carbon tax. It can be hard to see this debate thanks to the daily churn of the 2024 presidential election, but it’s there on the horizon if you squint. For one thing, we’ll likely …

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