California's infamous CEQA—the California Environmental Quality Act—has been around for more than 50 years. It's a product of the late '60s, when environmental concerns over big corporate construction projects first emerged as a major issue and Californians decided they wanted to do something to rein them in.
Today it's much hated by housing advocates because it's routinely used to conduct scorched-earth resistance to practically any new housing development if even a few people oppose it. CEQA doesn't care about majorities, after all. It only takes one person with (a) money and (b) sufficient zealotry to go to court and grind things to a halt for years. Hell, even the judge hearing the case might think it's nuts, but it doesn't matter. Every single motion, deposition, and EIR has to be judged on its merits. This drives a lot of people crazy, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Law professor Chris Elmendorf explains:
As Newsom noted, CEQA has been “weaponized” by “wealthy homeowners” (among others) to block housing — often in the urban and suburban areas where people have the least environmental impact.
And housing isn’t all that’s on the line. To meet the state’s greenhouse-gas emission targets — and secure its share of federal green-energy funding — California needs to quickly approve wind and solar energy projects, electricity transmission lines, car-charging networks and mass transit. To that end, in May, the governor unveiled an 11-bill infrastructure package to “assert a different paradigm.” No longer would we “screw it up” with “paralysis and process.” Going forward, the state would commit itself to “results.”
In the end, though, nothing much happened. Why, Elmendorf wonders, do we put up with this? CEQA's problems are so well known that surely the legislature is willing to reform it? Or perhaps the governor should be willing to issue new, looser regulatory guidelines? What's the holdup?
Hardly anyone likes to mention this for some reason, but it turns out the answer is simple: CEQA has two big fans. The first, obviously, is environmental groups who want to maintain the law's full authority in order to preserve wetlands, desert habitat, shorelines, old-growth forests, native chaparral, and so forth.
CEQA's second big fan is the social justice community. One of the original motivations for the law came from Black and Hispanic leaders who were sick of having every type of appalling blight imaginable—toxic dumps, rail yards, highways, landfills, refineries, smelters, chemical runoffs, and more—rammed into their neighborhoods because no one had the power to stop them. For them, CEQA has been a godsend, a law that finally provides them with the same power to halt development that rich people have always had.
And there you have your paradox. Is CEQA terrible because it allows rich homeowners to effectively ban local development? Yes indeed. Is CEQA a boon because it provides genuine protections against rapacious exploitation in poor communities of color? Yes indeed.
Finally, then: can you somehow have one without the other? Probably not. And so CEQA lives on. The plain fact is that for many people, the good outweighs the bad. Not everyone wants to get rid of it.
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Pathetic. It almost makes one appreciate the "Eve" bot. Almost.
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Could there be something like an environmental impact court that would have power to expedite issues like intransigent property owners?
Any tool meant to stop frivolous non-sense would be seized upon by corporate interests to target poor communities.
Depends on the judges I'd think.
How do you differentiate "I don't want a chemical dump in the back of my house" intrasigent property owners from "i don't want anyone who earns less than 3x the median within a mile of my 3 acres?" intrasigent property owners?
I'm not a judge but don't courts rule on things like this all the time, deciding when a complaint is outside the obvious purpose of a law?
The people with three acres aren’t going to say anything about income. They will find some threatened or endangered plant or animal in their three acres or the acreage surrounding it and use that. Or that auto emissions will jump N% or something else. And it will likely be factually correct.
The places with few people will still have some sort of “environment” left to protect. The places with lots of people will have already largely wiped-out “environment.”
Traffic and parking regulations are a huge loophole a lot of NIMBYites use to stop development -- high-density apartment complexes, for example, require lots of parking, which expands the footprint of the building and adds X tons of pollution or whatever to the neighborhood each year and therefore they can sue using the evironmental impact law.
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OMG, even Google does a better job translating. This is just pitiful. Sad.
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Speaking of environmental issues, a bunch of legacy telecom stocks are getting hammered today b/c of a report regarding lead-sheathed copper lines and the potential cost to replace and mitigate.
Where exactly are these cables located? The in-house wiring has been the property owner’s for decades. And it seems highly unlikely Junior would be exposed to those, let alone the lines on the poles and such.
The degradation and erosion of these wires is a source of pollution around homes.
But yeah, it seems like more of an issue in how we deal with cleaning them up than any real need to replace them immediately.
They're everywhere.
“More than 2,000” doesn’t strike me as that much when I consider that the US is 3,531,905 sq. miles. I mean, I don’t know how far those 2,000 lines spread, so maybe it actually is more significant than it sounds to me, but if I imagine 2,000 lines distributed across the US, just doesn’t strike me as that big of a deal.
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Well this is a complex question: one of those situations with no straightforward answers. All possible options are trade-offs where one or another party will have legitimate objections. That much, I think, everyone can agree to.
Where it gets trickier, and where I get potentially less popular, is when I point out that the far Left isn't generally all that great at compromises. Thus it finds itself in quite a quandary at this particular moment and in regard to this particular issue. As best as I understand the issues surrounding CEQA, the Left can either continue to utilize it as a protection for various minority or otherwise powerless groups, or they can ditch it to help build the green infrastructure needed to ease Climate Change. But they can't do both. Either the minorities and the poor or, on the other hand, the climate are going to suffer. They cannot use CEQA to pursue both ends.
Governor Newsom generally strikes me as more of a Liberal than a Leftist, and my understanding is that he has made it clear he's ready to ditch CEQA. In fact, I believe CEQA is singularly responsible for putting the state of CA at risk of losing billions of dollars in federal money that would otherwise help CA rebuild its infrastructure. Ironically, the Democratic Biden administration may wind up sending a lot of that money to Red States that can more easily show that their lax regulations allow them to actually build stuff.
So, Newsom is in the unenviable position of trying to convince Leftists to compromise. And, here's where I get really cynical: it can't be done. Go ahead and crucify me, but my own personal interactions with the Leftist variety (as opposed to your average Liberal Democrat) leads me inexorably to the conclusion that they are every bit as inflexible and quite possibly as censorious as your typical MAGAnaught.
In fact, Newsom now finds himself opposed by progressive and environmental groups (such as the now infamous Sierra Club) that he has spent his entire life actively supporting. He's now asking them to compromise, and he's discovering that he might as well ask fish to start climbing trees.
I do not know how this all plays out. But there is at least one cynical scenario that I see as a genuine possibility: the far Left ascendancy in CA ultimately leads the state down too much of a self-destructive path, the state winds up falling further behind other states in several important metrics (such as housing construction, green infrastructure innovations, and other quality of life issues) and the Democrats slowly, surely, but finally lose their political dominance in the state. Ultimately, a Conservative state government steps in. What happens then? I don't know.
"Environmentalist" and "leftist" are FAR from synonymous. A horrible example of the difference was the old USSR and its satellites. When the extremely far left communist governments collapsed, the rest of the world learned about the environmental hellholes they had created. The Sierra Club are not Republicans, but they are not in any realistic sense leftist either.
Leonard, your Götterdämmerung fantasy of electoral wipe-out for Democrats in California, MIGHT come to pass. But not until the Greedy Old Party starts treating "others" as actual human beings. As long as your "Good Minority" tropes are limited to Tiger Moms and Hindu Hackers, you're Toast on the Coast.
Solution is simple: exempt housing from CEQA, or lower the bar required for housing, or replace the judicial process with a bureaucratic process for housing and other projects that present low environmental risk.
I can see why vulnerable communities like being able to block nasty things like chemical plants, but blocking housing hurts the poor by fueling California's relentless housing shortage, forcing the poor to either leave the state or become homeless. If you care about marginalized communities, you need to make it easier to build housing in California.
You left out the wealthy home owners who find the environmental laws useful for suppressing development. They are probably the biggest supporters.