Alejandro Lazo

Alejandro Lazo writes about the impacts of climate change and air pollution and California’s policies to tackle them. He’s written about the state’s groundbreaking electric vehicle mandate, the oil industry’s efforts at capturing carbon from fossil fuels, and how California’s climate programs have created a robust cow poop industry. Alejandro is particularly interested in how the most vulnerable in society are faring in the midst of rapid global warming.

Alejandro joined CalMatters’ environment team in 2023 after spending a year on CalMatters’ California Divide team, where he wrote about California’s economic, housing and racial disparities, and the attempts and failures by the state to address these issues.

In 2022, he contributed several stories to the California Divide team’s investigative series “Unpaid Wages: A Waiting Game,” chronicling the impacts of wage theft on California workers and the state government’s incomplete response to this pervasive problem. The series won an award for best investigative story from SPJ NorCal, a Sacramento Press Club Award and was a finalist for a regional Emmy Award.

Alejandro joined CalMatters after 16 years as a reporter at newspapers, including an eight-year stint as a California-based national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, a four-year run as the housing reporter for The Los Angeles Times and two years as a business reporter at The Washington Post.

He is a native Californian, originally from the San Joaquin Valley. His parents are South American (Argentina and Ecuador). He has lived and worked in San Francisco for the last ten years. He is an aspiring fiction writer, and was a 2023 fellow at the San Francisco Writers Grotto’s ‘Rooted & Written’ conference.