Welcome to State of Change
Equitable building electrification, ADUs as climate solutions, and the latest news
A Message From the Editors
Hello and welcome to the first issue of State of Change, a monthly newsletter brought to you by the Climate Equity Reporting Project, a project of the UC Berkeley Climate Journalism Lab in association with the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group, supported by a Climate Action Seed Grant from the State of California.
Many of the communities that stand to be hardest hit by the climate crisis in the coming years are also at the center of California’s work to cut greenhouse gas emissions—the root cause of the crisis. We’ll be spending the next year reporting on those communities and looking at the way local governments, nonprofit groups, and the private sector are working to address their needs. We’ll dig into questions such as: What strategies are most effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and why? Can we achieve a rapid energy transition that is also just? Who stands to benefit, and who may be left behind?
We’ll be using this forum to share links to the stories our team publishes in other outlets, present original profiles and interviews, and share the news we’re reading. We may also use this newsletter to hear from you—the people and communities who care deeply about an equitable approach to fighting climate change.
We look forward to bringing you along on the journey!
- Twilight Greenaway and Jason Spingarn-Koff
Featured Stories
Decarbonizing buildings is a priority in California, and there’s a great deal of momentum around electrifying and weatherizing buildings to better take advantage of the growing quantity of clean energy being produced here. (54% of the state’s electricity is renewable compared to 40% nationwide).
According to one recent landscape analysis from Rising Sun Opportunity Center, public funding for Bay Area residential decarbonization projects in 2025 ($234 million) will be nearly four times greater than it was in 2021 ($61 million). One-third of that funding will go to low-income residents. Here’s a short overview of the kinds of programs coming online:
California Wants Homes to Go All-Electric. But What if You Don’t Have Enough Money?
By Twilight Greenaway, The San Francisco Chronicle
We examined the new flat rate plan from the California Public Utility Commission that is designed to make all-electric homes more affordable.
Will PG&E’s New Rates Help More People Electrify Their Homes?
By Kelechukwo Ogu, KneeDeep Times
We also looked at how induction stoves can act as a kind of “gateway drug” for other home electrification, in addition to improving indoor air.
New Pilot Program Says Using Induction Stoves Can Make Home Air Healthier
By Taylor Barton, Richmondside
Climate Equity News
A Climate Bond on the Horizon?
November promises to be a high-stakes election for the climate on multiple fronts. In addition to the pivotal presidential vote, voters will also get to weigh in on Prop 4, which could approve a 10 billion dollar climate bond that would allocate a hefty sum to projects that support safe drinking water, drought, flood resilience, wildfire and forest resilience, coastal resilience, extreme heat mitigation, biodiversity and nature-based climate solutions, climate-smart, sustainable agriculture, and clean air programs.
As the Nature Conservancy pointed out recently: “Without intervention, the cost of climate change to California is estimated to reach $113 billion annually by 2050 (CNRA’s Fourth Climate Assessment). But we’re reaching that number much faster than anticipated. Last year's atmospheric rivers brought record snowfall, intense rain and severe flooding that resulted in damages for California totaling more than $4.6 billion.”
So $10 billion likely won’t be enough to address the state’s problems over the long-term, but the 180 environmental organizations that support the bond see it as a valuable next step in preparing the state for the years ahead. (And the bond’s supporters have raised $639,000 so far to promote it.) From an equity perspective, the bond would also provide 150 million to Transformative Climate Communities, a project created by The environmental justice nonprofit Greenlining Institute that gives communities of color facing ongoing disinvestment a say in how they build climate resilience.
The odds are looking good for the bond, as a survey from the Public Policy Institute of California published earlier this summer found 59 percent of California voters would likely vote “yes.”
More News from around California
Building Decarbonization
Earlier this week, the California Energy Commission approved new building code efficiency standards that will encourage the adoption of heat pumps in new construction. The new code will be less impactful than an earlier draft, which would have required all broken air conditioners to be replaced by heat pumps. But experts see it as a big step toward decarbonization in the state.
The Warehouse Indirect Source Rule, which requires warehouse owners to take steps to improve air quality (and reduce emissions) was given extra federal fire power this week thanks to EPA approval. The move will give communities the right to sue if the rule isn’t adequately enforced, and the EPA can also now sue if warehouses don’t comply. The approval also sets a precedent for other cities with growing shipping industry infrastructure—and the accompanying pollution—looking to follow suit.
And as incentives flow to building owners and landlords to help them electrify apartments, a San Francisco pilot project is working to protect tenants from displacement and rent hikes.
Climate impacts
Heat waves have become a regular summer feature for much of the nation, but not all communities are equipped to cope, making heat the most deadly form of extreme weather due to climate change (although California is seeing record spikes of drought-associated valley fever, too). Because coroners often discount heat as a factor in their death reports, new reporting shows that its impact has been dangerously underestimated—even in Southern California and the broader American Southwest, where nearly half of the nation’s heat deathsoccur.
Housing
In the end of August, Governor Newsom’s administration announced it will send $789 million in cap and trade dollars to help build around 2,500 sustainable, rent-restricted homes in 20 cities located “near jobs, schools, and other daily destinations.” This is crucial as many Californians have recently moved further and further inland, weighing extreme heat against housing affordability.
Transportation
It has been a big month for climate wins in the transportation sector: with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s latest infrastructure package, California is on its way toward 9,200 more electric vehicle charging ports, an extra 1,000 electric school buses and the world’s first hydrogen-powered ferry fleet in the San Francisco Bay. Caltrain also launched its first fully electric service between San Francisco and San Jose, and AB 2503—a bill that would make it easier to electrify more trains—has passed through the legislature and is now awaiting Newsom’s signature. Senate Bill 59, a bidirectional EV charging bill that would allow power from electric vehicles to flow from the EVs back into the grid or into a home or other building, also passed through the assembly and awaits Newsom’s approval. That two-way capability could be increasingly important as another round of PG&E rate hikes loom.
Waste
Only about 9 percent of the plastics we produce globally has been recycled and there is growing evidence that much of our plastic waste is being stockpiled. That’s why the waste world was abuzz this week with news of a plastic recycling breakthrough from a team of chemists at UC Berkeley. According to the LA Times, the scientists created a process that “breaks apart the chains of some of the more commonly used plastics—polyethylene and polypropylene—in such a way that the building blocks of those plastics can be used again."
The Energy Transition
While the power grid becomes less and less stable, California’s energy storage strategies have brought the state to an important milestone: 100 days with 100% carbon-free, renewable electricityfor at least a part of each day. But the state still hasn’t completely divorced from Big Oil and climate activists showed their support last month for multiple bills that push back against fossil fuel companies and the harmful pollution they often bring. They are also on Governor Newsom’s desk.
Meanwhile, a community in Acton, north of Los Angeles, is pushing back against the construction of a battery storage system due to concerns about how the infrastructure will behave in a wildfire (although experts point out that gas lines are likely far more dangerous). And a pilot program is converting an abandoned oil reservoir to a geothermal power plant in the San Joaquin Valley.
Q&A: Denise Pinkston Makes the Case for ADUs as a Climate Equity Solution
By Taylor Barton
Denise Pinkston began her career in the ‘80s in the Marin County planning department, where she often found herself responsible for shutting down accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, and forcing homeowners to evict their tenants.
Although the “granny flats” were technically legal, there were regulations that cities could use to effectively render them illegal on 99% of all lots, Pinkston said. If neighbors complained, the county had to do abatements, which meant pouring concrete down the toilets.
Pinkston hated this part of her job. Then, about a decade ago, she began working to remove barriers to housing development instead. In 2016, she worked with State Senator Bob Wachowski (D-Fremont) on California’s first comprehensive ADU law. Then, in 2020, she launched Casita Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for policies that make ADUs more accessible to more people across the state.
“Most of my career was characterized by communities saying ‘no’ to housing [people] creatively, which has the effect of driving middle- and working-class families farther and farther away from urban centers,” said Pinkston. This has consequences beyond those families—it also leads to more driving, and as a result, more climate-warming emissions in the atmosphere. ADUs are a form of urban infill, which has been found to be the most effective way to reduce emissions in many California cities.
“From a climate change standpoint, the [primary] building already exists on the plot, so it's already got embedded energy. It already has some level of infrastructure and service,” said Pinkston. “So adding an ADU is the least greenhouse gas-intensive way to build a new unit of housing and to live in general, because you're living in a smaller space.”
Over the last eight years, California has seen a boom in ADU construction thanks to a series of policies that have streamlined their permitting and construction. According to the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, an estimated 108,000 have been permitted since 2018, and 68,000 of these have been built. And while not all ADUs are occupied by tenants—about half of them are used as no-cost housing for friends and family or as home offices or studios—the trend is likely to continue.
Below is an excerpt from our conversation:
What do you wish the general public knew about the potential of ADUs—and other forms of upzoning—as a climate solution?
That they are a climate solution. If you build less, live with less, take advantage of existing systems, you have a much smaller carbon footprint. And that these solutions are not just housing solutions or inclusion solutions, they're not just overcoming exclusionary zoning (generations of it). They're actually the most effective way to help fight climate change by allowing people to live closer together with less.
How do they stand to make housing more equitable?
ADUs are more equitable, because different families with different incomes suddenly can buy and own a house. They can own it collectively with other family members or other people to share the burden of buying and maintaining a home.
[Policies that encourage more ADU construction] create better inclusion, more housing choice at different price points, and let families live their lives in the ways they need to in order to keep their family members, loved ones, and communities housed. Because right now, in many parts of California, existing developed communities have been dominated by single-family zoning, which forces newcomersfarther and farther away. So ADUs are kind of the perfect policy for the time, because they address the need to have more equitable access to resources and the need for neighborhoods to house everybody, not just the wealthiest people who can buy a $2 million house, but also the grocery workers and the teachers—who should be able to live in the community too.
The average cost of an ADU, depending on how you do it, is $100,000 to $400,000. And they can be built on lots that you would never allow a six-story building on. You can get one built in a year; that's the big driver. That's why 100,000 of them [have been permitted in the last seven years in California]. So not only are you democratizing housing delivery, but you're democratizing the economy of building housing by allowing small, locally-owned, minority-owned businesses [to participate]. We're seeing all kinds of contractors and builders getting into this space and it's a huge opportunity to create a unique economic development model in California, where we are creating more jobs, more small companies, more small builders by creating a market they can build into with limited capital and limited expertise.
Some of the experts we've talked to have said that ADUs are great, but they don't go far enough to create density, that developers need to make space for more units. How do you think about that?
The housing crisis in the U.S. is so severe that we need an all-of-the-above menu. No single housing form addresses 100% of the housing issues. We need more, bigger buildings, for sure, but they only work in certain locations at certain times, and they're very expensive to build. [...] So sure, we should have more high rises, but they're going to cost a million and a half to $2 million per unit, which 95% of the people can't afford. So, it’s good from a climate standpoint, but [it’s] really hard to deliver without massive government subsidies.
Which policies have made it more affordable and accessible for homeowners to build ADUs—and what is on the horizon?
The Casita Coalition has, for the last several years, been working on these issues. For example, [in 2018] the state energy commission started requiring solar panels on every new home in California, even if it was 300 square feet and didn't have a roof big enough to fit a solar panel that a solar company would install. So we went to the California Energy Commission and said, “We love solar, but don't impose it on buildings that have systems beneath this size, because the industry can't deliver them and won't and there's no room to put them, so let the small fry go.” And the energy commission agreed.
We've also worked on federally available financing for ADUs that is more attractive than what you could get in the regular financial markets. And last year, we ran a bill that would have deleted state law prohibiting selling your ADU separately as a condominium. California law said you can have an ADU, but you can't separately convey it, which effectively meant you had to own the house and the ADU in one parcel, one legal entity. [Since the bill passed in 2023] you can sell them separately under state law. And San Jose just adopted regulations[that will speed up the process.]
This year, we supported a bill that would make it easier for ADUs to meet safety requirements without coming into 100% compliance with the California Building Code—which means it doesn't have to have solar panels, new insulation in the walls, or all electric appliances. It can be what it is, because converting it to the building code would be very expensive and force you to throw out the current lower income tenants and rent it to someone you can pay more.
Electrification [is important], but maybe not when you're legalizing an unpermitted ADU that a low-income homeowner owns and rents to a low-income tenant.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
