Welcome to issue # 14 of State of Change, a project of the Climate Equity Reporting Project at Berkeley Journalism.
The project is wrapping up this week after a great two years. This newsletter is going to pause for the moment, but we’re hoping it comes back under new ownership in the near future. Thanks so much for reading!
Featured story
As Food Banks Struggle to Meet Demand, ‘Wasted’ Food is Filling the Gap — for Now
by Nicoles Caruth, Bay City News
California Climate News
State Policy
State regulators are moving fast to establish a five-foot buffer zone between homes and vegetation in fire-prone areas. But some scientists are hoping to slow the process down, as they worry removing nearly all vegetation in the areas referred to as “zone zero” could unnecessarily reduce important tree cover in the state and reduce wildlife habitat. “There is emerging evidence that trees and shrubs, if properly maintained and watered, may actually provide more ember protection,” Bryan Vejar, associate director at the LA-based nonprofit TreePeople told Inside Climate News.
Exxon has launched a high-profile lawsuit against the state, claiming that a pair of laws requiring companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions violate the company’s freedom of speech. The rules are set to take effect in 2026 and will require thousands of companies to inventory and report their global emissions footprint, including the gasoline used by Exxon customers. The company is asking the court to block the enforcement of the laws.
Thousands of students across more than 50 California high schools, in cities including Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Oakland walked out of school this week to advocate for the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act (SB 684/AB 1243). It’s unclear whether the actions will influence state legislators, who put the bill on hold after it sputtered out in June, but it could serve as a catalyst for more student climate activism. “We often feel so sad and depressed and worried, but this right here, this is hope, this is the future,” said Ethan Maday, a San-Diego student who organized one of the walk-out told the local Fox News affiliate.
The Energy Transition
Despite a federal shift away from funding hydrogen projects, California is moving forward with the rollout of several large hydrogen projects, including a plan to transition the Scattergood Generating Station in Los Angeles from natural gas to hydrogen. The challenge is that the vast majority of hydrogen comes from natural gas, “a carbon-intensive process that undercuts its climate appeal,” writes Alejandro Lazo in CalMatters. And yet the state is holding out hope that if they build the infrastructure now, the industry will eventually transition to “green” hydrogen made by splitting water with renewable power.
According to the LA Times, battery storage for solar energy in California has grown more than 3,000% since 2020. As a result, the state appears to have left rolling summer black outs behind.
The oil company California Resources Corporation broke ground on its Carbon Terra Vault project — the state’s first carbon capture project. The company plans to capture carbon dioxide from its existing methane gas processing plant and power plant, essentially extending the life of its oil extraction efforts. It also plans to build 11 miles of new pipelines and inject the CO2 underground using multiple high-pressure injection wells. Critics say the project will put local communities in danger.
Transportation
California saw record-high sales numbers of EVs in recent months as people rushed to take advantage of federal incentives before they ended. Now, LA Times reporter Tony Briscoe says the EV industry is at an inflection point, and many auto makers are walking back their most ambitious plans. Brisco reported that Ford, GM, Ram, and others have all discontinued models or announced plans to pivot away from EV technology for U.S. consumers in some way. But the global market for electric vehicles is still growing, so it remains to be seen how deep the chill will run here.
Climate Impacts
In an interview leading up to next month’s COP30 conference, UN secretary general António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement—1.5 degrees of warming — with “devastating consequences” for the world.
In the agriculture regions of Southern California, a group of researchers from UC San Diego is studying the extreme heat endured by farmworkers. The researchers have collected year-round data from some 300 farmworkers, and hope the data they’ve collected can influence policymakers to start enforcing existing rules related to shade and mandatory breaks. “We realized that farmworkers are not getting enough rest breaks, and also there are no clear policy guidelines in terms of heat-related rest breaks,” one told the Associated Press.
A growing number of Black Americans are losing out on retirement due to climate disasters, writes Adam Mahoney in Capital B. He chronicled the experience of one recent retiree who lost her home to wildfire in Altadena and doesn’t have enough savings to cover the gaps left by paltry federal aid and insurance payoffs.
He writes: “In Altadena, a series of public and private failures left Black households most likely to face the complete loss of a home — a racial line seen nationwide, regardless of the type of disaster, due to discriminatory housing policies that have left people of color in disaster zones. At the same time, Black households are less likely to receive federal support and less likely to have savings.
Q&A: These Researchers are Calculating and Mapping Emissions so California Cities Don’t Have To
by Twilight Greenaway
Chris Jones and Miya Kitahara are thinking deeply about how to mitigate climate change in California.
The pair have been working together to build a set of tools designed to help communities and local governments in the state take concrete and effective steps to reduce their climate-warming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. (The state grant that supports their work has also supported State of Change)
Jones is the Director of the CoolClimate Network, a university-government-industry partnership at the UC Berkeley and a faculty lecturer in the Haas School of Business. Kitahara is the manager of the Built Environment Program at StopWaste, a public agency in Alameda County working on energy and material efficiency. Their project — set to launch at ClimatePlans.org in the coming weeks — was initially an effort to simplify and centralize the greenhouse gas inventories and climate action plans that many local governments were spending an inordinate amount of time creating on their own. So much time, in fact, that they often didn’t have time or resources to execute the plans.
We spoke with Jones and Kitahara about the lessons they’ve learned, misconceptions about how to effectively cut GHG emissions, and their hopes for what lies ahead.
What’s the big take-away message from the data so far?
Chris Jones: Cities are, for the most part, reducing emissions. They are also, for the most part, not on pace to meet the state’s aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets, which call for 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.
What isn’t working about the way cities have been gathering data on greenhouse gases and how will the tool address the problem?
Jones: Previously, cities would put out these climate action plans with laundry lists of solutions, and they would do greenhouse gas inventories, but then they’d have to wait five or 10 years to find out how well they were doing at meeting their goals. And in many cases, emissions would go up instead of down, and they wouldn’t really be able to track and understand why that was happening.
What we’re trying to do is move away from those long planning cycles to annual — and in some cases live — management of emissions. Communities are filled with lots of people, and they all have their own ideas about what’s going on. But if [the same GHG emissions] data is available to everybody, they will have a shared framework from which to start conversations about cutting emissions most effectively.
Miya Kitahara: The cities are all taking data from similar sources, so there’s a lot of redundancy. And building GHG inventories is complicated enough that they end up spending tons of money and time on it. Whenever there’s turnover, they have to start over again, and the institutional knowledge is lost, so it’s just a hassle. And all the actionable data is buried. When you only track the metric tons of CO2, you can’t see why that number might be going up or down.
What are some of the misconceptions policymakers and city planners have when they’re not looking at good data. What are some actions that people have put a lot of stock in that the data doesn’t support?
Jones: One is public transit. It is very important for communities to have transit that’s available for accessibility purposes, but post-pandemic the usage has gone down, not up, despite a great deal of effort. At this point, it just isn’t one of the solutions that is driving down emissions on aggregate.
There’s also been a lot of research on parking prices. If you raise them, you get fewer people driving to that location, but where are they going instead? Parking pricing only really works when you have alternatives available. When there’s no alternative, no good transit, biking, or walking options, people are just going to go elsewhere. So, we really need to start thinking in terms of systems and setting specific targets.
There’s a tendency to assume solutions that work well for big cities work everywhere. Urban infill — filling more housing into downtown areas where the residents get access to services and access to retail, restaurants, etc.— leads to cuts in emissions in existing cities. But only about 25% of Californians live in those urban core areas. More than 50% live in the suburbs. And there’s a lot of rural people as well and we need to design solutions that work for those places too.
Kitahara: Reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) — or getting people to drive less — is so hard. And the data shows that the pandemic was not as big of a hit as we expected. But if [public transit isn’t an effective way to cut emissions] it’d be easy to assume the answer is just about EVs. However, it’s important to balance the fastest way to get emissions down with quality of life, equity, and community experience. Planners should have data points that help them understand all those things so they can have nuanced conversations.
Are there other effective climate actions that cities should consider including in their climate action work?
Jones: One that comes to mind is micromobility — e-bikes, electric scooters, etc. We found that a reasonable fraction of the trips people take using micromobility would otherwise have been traveled in large motor vehicles. So while it’s not going to put a huge dent in a city’s VMT, it’s a lot easier than some other solutions.
Kitahara: If we’re just electrifying short trips, then the amount of VMT being electrified is not that big. But if micromobility caused people to stay more local and it was paired with community-based economic development in neighborhoods without amenities, that could be effective. We need to create the ability for people to meet their needs without going so far and that would require big systemic changes. But building our society’s capacity to take on systemic change is a foundational thing that needs to happen. It won’t yield direct GHG impacts immediately, but it is necessary for us to even be able to consider getting to zero.
Two years ago, when this project started, we were in a very different political landscape. For one there was federal funding and a climate-friendly EPA. How has your thinking about the project shifted?
Kitahara: Two years ago, the EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants were new, and we were expecting a lot of implementation funds for climate-related projects. If we’d gone the other direction politically, we could have expected more funding and we could have just continued slowly down that path. But it wouldn’t have been enough funding to fully decarbonize everything. On the other hand, not having any federal funding for that work forces us to reckon with the reality of what we’re up against. People are more starkly seeing that climate change is part of a polycrisis, and we can only solve it in conjunction with all the other problems we’re facing as a result of our extractive economic systems: inequitable concentration of wealth and power, concentration of pharmaceuticals, food and agriculture, housing — all the things that are now designed for extractive profit. That’s why climate action planning as an isolated activity is not that useful anymore. It needs to be integrated with solving the polycrisis.
Where does your optimism lie at this moment?
Kitahara: I find it hopeful that more people are getting outside of the personal carbon footprint mentality and into collective action. They’re saying: “Let’s do this together, and let’s build community through [climate action].” And the fact that more people are realizing that we’re in a polycrisis also gives me hope. Because if we can solve the polycrisis, we haven’t just greened the extractive economy, we’ve healed so many other wounds in our society.
Jones: COVID got people working from home and spending more time in their communities. That’s one bright point, and it has persisted. Some [communities] were able to keep their emissions down. With the policy tool that we’re launching, we’re hoping to build a space where communities can see, visualize, comment, and respond to different policy solutions. We need people to start thinking and acting as communities and to create more local spaces and local events that connect people. Individually, we can’t solve climate change or even make a big difference, but collectively we can build low-carbon communities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
