The California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) is deeplydisappointed by the Speaker of the Assembly’s removal of Diane Takvorian from the California Air Resources Board. This abrupt decision undermines the goals and intent of the EJ seats on the California Air Resources Board (CARB)…
News
This page features excerpts from news about environmental justice advocacy in the San Joaquin Valley and links to their original sources. Use the features on the right to sort by topic, news source, date, key word or author. You may also subscribe to receive the news by e-mail or through an rss reader. Please note that links to original sources may expire over time.
On March 4, California set a new record by supplying nearly half of the state’s electricity needs from renewables. That’s just the latest payoff of the state’s admirable clean energy investments, thanks to plentiful solar power and strong policies like the Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS). But California still relies on fossil fuels, via natural gas power plants, to provide 33 percent of annual electricity needs…
A study by researchers from Stanford University found that subsidence is not the only consequence of overpumping of groundwater – deadly water quality problems could also result…
Excessive pumping of groundwater in California’s San Joaquin Valley has led to elevated levels of arsenic in an aquifer, according to new research…
Various movers and shakers around California spent the last few months engineering a scheme to tax the drinking water of everyone in the state. This plan — designed to fund a cleanup of Big Ag’s groundwater pollution in the Central Valley and elsewhere — died in the legislature yesterday, when it became clear that it wasn’t going to get the two-third supermajority that it required in the legislature…
The frantic phone calls to the Community Water Center began in the summer of 2014. In the 7,000-strong unincorporated community of East Porterville, nestled against California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, homeowners’ wells were failing amid a historic drought. Folks were hauling water from their workplaces or from agricultural wells. Parents were sending their kids to shower at the local high school. Residents with still-functional wells were snaking hoses over fences to nourish their neighbors…
As anticipated years ago, a coalition of environmental and community groups this week appealed a court decision upholding Kern’s 2015 move to streamline oil and gas permitting in the county. The group asserts April’s Kern County Superior Court ruling wrongly allowed the county zoning ordinance to stand despite finding problems in the underlying environmental review…
Community and environmental groups filed an appeal today challenging a Kern County Superior Court’s decision upholding a county ordinance that fast-tracks oil and gas permitting. The ordinance — drafted by the oil industry itself — allows thousands of new oil and gas wells to be drilled every year without any site-specific environmental review or public notice for the next 25 years or more…
A proposed tax on California’s drinking water, designed to clean up contaminated water for thousands of Californians, was abandoned by Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders Friday as part of the compromise on the state budget. Lawmakers and Brown’s office scrapped the “Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Act,” which would have taxed residents 95 cents a month to raise millions for cleaning toxic wells…
The public water boards in the southern San Joaquin Valley are only nominally public. Of 565 water board seats in Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare counties, 491 — a stunning 87% — went uncontested in elections over the last four years, according to the Visalia-based Community Water Center. Candidates ran unopposed so often that three-quarters of the boards didn’t even bother to hold elections…