Environment

Included in the president’s proposed infrastructure priority list is $250 million for the Cadiz water project in the Mojave Desert. The controversial project would pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert and deliver it via pipeline to Southern California customers. It has so far been blocked by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That might change.

California officials have discerned a chilling signal that the Trump administration may be willing to halt the state’s unique authority to impose its own vehicle emission rules—a move that could undercut its pioneering effort to battle climate change. The threat arose during the confirmation hearing for Scott Pruitt, Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection […]

California officials have discerned a chilling signal that the Trump administration may be willing to halt the state’s unique authority to impose its own vehicle emission rules—a move that could undercut its pioneering effort to battle climate change. The threat arose during the confirmation hearing for Scott Pruitt, Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

There is already a ban in place that prohibits additional federal leasing off California's coast until 2022. But Obama declined to make that permanent, even as he ruled out energy exploration in parts of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The Trump administration’s response is a big unknown.

In what is likely Barack Obama’s final environmental action before Donald Trump moves into the White House, the president has just expanded the California Coastal National Monument—adding a mix of lighthouses, rocky outcroppings, stands of redwoods and significant Native American grounds that will be knitted into the existing federal preserve on and off the coast from […]

Cap and Trade in Two and a Half Minutes Salmon—made possible by the rivers they run in and the forest canopy above them—are the lifeblood of the Yurok Tribe. The native word for salmon, Ney-puy, means “that which is eaten” and the iconic fish and its habitat sustain California’s largest tribe in ways that are […]

How did California define itself in 2016? As the state girding itself to mastermind the progressive resistance against a looming Trump administration? The state struggling to take the global lead in a daunting quest to halt global climate change? The state saddled with unfunded liabilities to pay off generous public employee pensions, and riddled with […]

As they suit up for battle against the Trump administration, Democrats who dominate California’s Legislature vow to unleash one of the superpowers of holding a supermajority: the ability to enact laws immediately.An underplayed consequence of the fact that they won two-thirds of the seats in both houses last month is that—if they stick together—California Democrats […]

RYER ISLAND—The report’s findings were unequivocal: Given the current pace of water diversions, the San Francisco Bay and the Delta network of rivers and marshes are ecological goners, with many of its native fish species now experiencing a “sixth extinction,” environmental science’s most-dire definition of ecosystem collapse. Once a vast, soaked marsh and channel fed […]

California’s high country is a delight in summer, a cool respite from the heat of the state’s lower elevations. That’s especially true in the Sierra Nevada, where a corridor of shade transports vacationers from Fresno to Yosemite National Park under a dense canopy of cedar trees, firs and pines. But after five years of drought and insect infestation, […]