The Climate War in California

Temperature increase 1895-2018

scale 0.0-3.0℃

I’ve been doing research into how The Climate War is being managed in my state. Tl;dr: very poorly.

The legislature has a Joint Legislative Committee on Climate Change Policy. Its last hearing was July 9, 2019: “Annual Update on Statewide Trends of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Indicators”. We’re not making any new policy, but at least we’ll know how much worse the battle is going every year…

The California Climate Change Legislation portal has been shut down, and the main URL redirects to the Climate Change Partnerships page at the California Energy Commission.

In 2018 the state published its fourth Climate Assessment.

As far as I can tell, there’s lots of information being gathered, sorted, verified, shared. The big policy push isn’t happening. If the Democrats sweep Washington DC in November, I hope there will be enough push to get the Green New Deal through. (Here’s an informative article about how much private investment was organized by the federal government under the original New Deal.)

Otherwise, California will have to get a move on for itself.