Environmental Justice
Scrap Yards, Scrapped Enforcement?
The City of Los Angeles’s regulatory tools exist to protect communities from metal recycling hazards—but they’re rarely invoked.
This post was co-written by UCLA Law student Kate Inman (J.D., 2026). Throughout California’s Senate District 20, roughly thirty scrap metal recycling facilities sit in the industrial corridors running alongside residential housing. For the working-class, majority-Latino communities living blocks away, the legal system has been slow to respond. Drive through Sun Valley or Pacoima on …
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CONTINUE READINGNew Issue Brief: Community Engagement in Equity-Oriented EV Planning
Examining lessons from the Monterey Bay EV CAR Framework.
As federal support for the EV transition recedes, state and local planning processes are playing an increasingly central role in shaping equitable access to clean mobility infrastructure. Community engagement is a critical component of these efforts, yet relatively few case studies document how equity-oriented engagement processes work in practice. CLEE has released a new issue …
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CONTINUE READINGHow to Flip the Script for a Real Fossil Fuel Phaseout
The First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels should look to the Montreal Protocol for a model.
More than 50 governments are gathered in Colombia this week to design a roadmap to phase out oil, gas and coal. This aim, repeatedly proposed in UN climate conferences, has never seriously been pursued. Current fuel market shocks give it new urgency beyond climate change. The Santa Marta conference provides a promising platform to start …
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CONTINUE READINGOn the Bleakest Earth Day, Trust the Undercurrent of Resistance
The first Earth Day succeeded because of a decade of preparatory work. Here are the lessons for us in 2026.
The 56th Earth Day may also be the bleakest. Wave upon wave is crashing upon our system of ecological protections. But having spent years studying the full sweep of American environmental legal history, we can say with confidence: the bigger the wave, the stronger the undercurrent. First, at a time when advocates for the environment …
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CONTINUE READINGLessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of U.S. Environmental Law
UCLA’s Alejandro Camacho discusses his new book and the lessons we can learn from prior generations of environmental advocates.
This Earth Day, environmental advocates are looking backward as well as forward. With the U.S. federal government so dramatically overhauling environmental policy, history shows how American social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to preserve public lands and pass laws protecting human health. “I’ve been trying to look through the …
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CONTINUE READINGHonoring Dolores Huerta
Huerta has received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and four honorary degrees–so why is her name rarely mentioned without Chávez’s?
Content Warning: Sexual Assault. Over the next week, as we draw nearer to California’s first “Farmworkers Day,” we’re undoubtedly going to see Dolores Huerta’s name in the news a lot. But unfortunately, I fear that the focus will be more about the recent New York Times investigation revealing that César Chávez sexually abused numerous …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Scent of Spring vs the Stench of Black Rain
Why the war on Iran is an environmental justice crisis we cannot ignore
Here in the Bay Area, the air quality is pristine today. The sky is a clear, uninterrupted blue, and the sweet scent of blooming jasmine catches on the breeze. It’s a picture of absolute peace. Yet, the country I live in is currently orchestrating a devastating war on the other side of the world, a …
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CONTINUE READINGRecapping “Our Climate Future”: A California Gubernatorial Candidate Forum
How four top candidates plan to tackle affordability, environmental justice, and clean energy and continue California’s leadership
Californians will elect a new governor in November. The race presents state voters with a wider variety of potential outcomes for climate policy–from increased ambition to continuity to changed priorities–than any election since 2010. To help voters understand where the candidates stand on our most pressing environmental challenges, the Center for Law, Energy, and the …
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CONTINUE READINGIs China a Climate Hero? It’s complicated
UCLA’s Alex Wang explains China’s climate strategies and contradictions in his new book, Chinese Global Environmentalism.
Though China was once viewed as a climate villain, the country now dominates the global supply chains of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Just this month, Chinese manufacturer BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s biggest maker of EVs. It’s the latest example of how China’s focus on clean technology is setting the pace for …
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CONTINUE READINGNightmare on Penn Ave (Part 2)
After a year of Trump 2.0, here’s how things stand.
Eight years ago almost to the day, I wrote a post titled, “One Year and Counting.” I was writing at the end of Trump’s first year in office. And here we are again, one year into a second Trump Administration. Trump’s basically deregulatory strategy has remained largely unchanged. But there are some notable differences in the situations then and now. I closed my 2017 post with this: “One characteristic of the Trump Administration is a ceaseless stream of controversies and dramas. But generally speaking, the amount of actual legal change has been much more limited, because the system is designed to provide checks on administrative and legislative action.” It remains to be seen how well those checks will function this time around.
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