Environmental Justice

Federal plans for oil drilling along a million acres in California would change healthful, wild spaces into sources of pollution and illness.

A hurried law this year that expands oil drilling demonstrated how industry dollars and misleading information can convince California lawmakers to reverse climate progress.

Lawmakers just enabled fast-tracking of new oil drilling permits in Kern County. Gas prices are mainly moved by other economic forces.

As climate change makes for more 100-degree days, California legislators are considering a bill to set a maximum indoor temperature standard for homes.

With 7 of its most ambitious rules for cars, trucks and trains repealed, California officials now must find new ways to clean up the nation’s worst air pollution. But officials face growing pushback about affordability and costs.

California regulators haven't updated landfill pollution standards since 2010, and appear to be only doing the minimum in the latest effort to revisit them, argues an L.A. County activist impacted by the Chiquita Canyon Landfill.

Local and state leaders in California are breaking with decades of inertia and reining in warehouse development. A recent decision in Riverside cemented the shift and elated activists who spent years opposing a major project.

Five facilities near schools and houses in LA County fumigate produce shipped from overseas with methyl bromide. But the air agency doesn’t plan to monitor the air or take any immediate steps to protect people from the gas, which can damage lungs and cause neurological effects.

An effort to formally recognize the Salton Sea as an economic region was vetoed last year, but that has not stopped underinvested and underrepresented communities there from fighting for key infrastructure as lithium mining expands.

Long Beach residents near companies that use methyl bromide are angry that air quality officials didn’t notify them for years and haven’t assessed their health risks. Now officials say more facilities are operating in San Pedro and Compton.