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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.
California’s landmark law on curbing greenhouse gases, which is well on its way to taking effect, has hit a legal snag in the form of a tentative judicial ruling that state environmental regulators failed to follow legally required procedures.
Judge Ernest H. Goldsmith of San Francisco Superior Court issued a tentative opinion — a rarely used procedure that gives the prospective loser in the case a chance to make new arguments or take new actions before a final decision — saying that the rules creating a cap-and-trade system were adopted without proper analysis of alternatives.
A Superior Court in San Francisco issued a tentative ruling last week in a lawsuit filed in 2009 by environmental justice (EJ) groups. The groups are asserting that the state’s Air Resources Board (CARB) failed to comply with statutory requirements of AB 32 and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) when it adopted the law’s Scoping Plan—the blueprint for cutting pollution to 1990 levels by 2020—in late 2008.
Cara published a terrific summary of a tentative California superior court decision in which the court held that the state’s Air Resources Board (CARB) violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in implementing AB 32, the state’s landmark climate change legislation. The CEQA portion of the ruling — should the judge stick with it when he finalizes his decision — is a setback for efforts to implement California’s law. But I think it’s worth emphasizing that it’s only a temporary setback and one that may not even have the effect of delaying the air board’s climate change plan.
A California superior court has issued a proposed decision, not yet final, holding that ARB failed to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in its adoption of the Scoping Plan that is guiding its implementation of AB 32, California’s landmark climate change law. The ruling proposes to set aside ARB’s CEQA documentation and to enjoin “any implementation of the Scoping Plan” until ARB corrects the CEQA violation. Among other things, such a ruling would presumably affect the roll-out of California’s first-in-the-nation carbon cap and trade program, which is slated to take effect in January 2012.
Story of how factory dairies ruined rural Kern County.
The central California community of Kettleman City sits next to one of the largest toxic landfills in the country. Some residents think landfill toxins are to blame for air, water, and health problems, including a cluster of birth defects.
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Those of us who attend the grassroots meetings, make the phone calls, and fill the officer slots often look around and realize, hey, it’s mostly women. Mostly older women.d
Party politics is like this too. Realize that, of course, I acknowledge the impressive men, the idealistic young ones and the seasoned older–and old ones–who blaze trails.
Women past child rearing years, with more or less settled careers, and not yet caring for aging parents have more time to do the things in the community they see that need doing. They’re the ones that know that Kern County government in all its forms isn’t going to provide basic services unless we pay for it, or agitate their comfortable chairs until we make them do it.
Linda Mackay in her own words: “It took me a really long time to face it, admit it to myself. I’m too shy, I’m too bashful. I’m an unassuming nobody. But finally I have to admit it I, Linda MacKay, am a community activist, and I am the President of the TriCounty Watchdogs.”
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Asthma rates are on the rise in California, but the condition disproportionately affects low-income children and adults, according to a study [PDF] from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
With 4.9 million Californians suffering from the respiratory condition, researchers felt an urgent need to better understand the contributors to the asthma disparity. So they looked at data from the 2007 California Health Interview Survey to determine whether and how differences in income were associated with asthma diagnosis and treatment. (More on Time.com: Study: The Complicated Link Between Wealth and Obesity)
Throughout the state, rates of asthma had increased 13% overall between 2001 and 2007. The highest rates of asthma were found in lower-income inland areas, such as Fresno, where 12.9% of residents reported the respiratory disorder, and where the bottom-of-the-basin location means poorer air quality. Meanwhile, in wealthy, coastal, breezy San Francisco, asthma affected only 6% of residents — the lowest rate in the state.
Tulare County officials will apply for a $1.03 million federal grant to help repair Seville’s dilapidated
water system. The county needs more than $3 million to repair the system for the long-neglected Seville Water Co., serving 74 homes and Stone Corral Elementary School in the tiny north county community of Seville. In June 2009, Tulare County took temporary receivership of the water system. It had fallen into disrepair and residents petitioned Tulare County Superior Court to take action to fix it. Cracks in underground pipes, some a century old,
allow soot into the system.