Bay Area public officials are challenging a state plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fight climate change by cleaning the air in some of California’s poorest and most polluted communities, most of which are in Southern California.
The officials say the state’s method of determining which communities are helped is flawed because it would exclude some of their region’s most at-risk residents…
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.
If you think about smog, you’re probably picturing a major city like Los Angeles, where in the 1960s and ’70s the air was so bad that smog alerts telling people to avoid outdoor activity were regular occurrences. The air has improved in L.A. and other big cities in recent years, thanks to cleaner cars and air-pollution regulation.
But the real capital of air pollution in the U.S. is a farming city that sits to the northwest of L.A.: Bakersfield…
Advocates for affordable housing and advocates for environmental justice have a lot in common, but their goals and assumptions don’t always mesh fully…
The Kern County Board of Supervisors today approved the five-fold expansion plan of Alon USA refinery’s rail terminal to receive Bakken crude oil shipments by train, paying little regard to the potentially devastating public health and safety impacts of the project…
As California continues on its path to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, and interest groups rekindle the debate over its particulars, environmental justice groups are trying to walk a fine line between defending existing climate policies and trying to reshape them…
Tomorrow, the Tulare County Board of Supervisors will review the final report from the Disadvantaged Community Water Study for the Tulare Lake Basin.
In May 2011, the County of Tulare received a two million dollar grant from the California Department of Water Resources to study the water and wastewater needs of disadvantaged communities in the Tulare Lake Basin and to develop a plan to address these communities’ needs.
The three-year study engaged hundreds of residents and interested parties from Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare Counties. The study resulted in a 250-page final report, as well as a comprehensive database of disadvantaged communities in the region…
On August 12th, CEJA partnered with Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy (CHANGE) and the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition to host a Community Day of Action for Environmental Health and Justice. We brought together 70 community leaders, organizers and advocates from across the state to engage in cross-coalition movement building, learning exchange, and most importantly, action! Together, we educated legislative offices on key environmental health and justice bills and issues, including…
Hundreds of rural San Joaquin Valley residents no longer can get drinking water from their home faucets because California’s extreme drought has dried up their individual wells, government officials and community groups said.
The situation has become so dire that the Tulare County Office of Emergency Services had 12-gallon-per person rations of bottled water delivered on Friday in East Porterville, where at least 182 of the 1,400 households have reported having no or not enough water, according to the Porterville Recorder…
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency exceeded its authority in granting a permit to build Avenal Power Center LLC, a 600 megawatt natural gas-fired power plant in Kern County, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals says in a ruling handed down Tuesday.
Federal regulators lacked “unbounded discretion” to waive new air-quality rules for a proposed natural gas-fired power plant in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the 9th Circuit ruled Tuesday.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued Avenal Power Center a Prevention of Significant Deterioration Permit in 2011 to build a 600-megawatt facility near the largely agricultural communities of Avenal, Huron and Kettleman City, Calif.