News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #6
This Week on Earth this week will be This Week in My Brain™!
I thought it might be fun (?) or interesting (?) (and therefore, conceited (?)) to go on a tour of my thought process/methods as I read environmental and climate news. That’s usually what these newsletters contain, but this time, the stories here won’t necessarily all be new, but they will all be connected via my train of thought as I read them. We’ll see where it takes us, won’t we!
First stop: “California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s climate agenda highlights tensions with environmental groups” (Associated Press)
In the Washington Post’s excellent The Climate 202 email newsletter, I saw this story about the dynamics of environmentalism in California. It boils down to this: Gavin Newsom wants to speed up review, permitting, and construction of big infrastructure projects that California needs in order to achieve its goals of a clean energy economy and addressing the effects of climate change. To do so, he proposed a $300 billion state budge, which Environmental advocates and Democrats in the state legislature opposed. It was was written without their input, and they voiced opposition because it doesn’t include adequate protections for the state’s “fragile ecosystems, the threatened species that depend on them, and the low-income and tribal communities that live in them.”
Newsom then threatened to veto the budget, which brought everyone to the table and a compromised was reached, but, “the battle lines have been drawn.”
This got me thinking about two different things: 1. permitting, and 2. tradeoffs. How should permitting actually be reformed, and why should it be reformed — i.e., what needs to be permitted, how is the current process getting in the way of that, and what are the downsides of “reform”?
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