It’s a mistake nearly every farmer has made when something breaks down on the farm. You try to patch it up as best you can. And then you do it again. And then maybe again — before you finally decide to stop throwing good money after bad and actually fix what’s wrong. It’s the same situation the Legislature is faced with as it confronts a crisis that has left 1 million Californians without access to safe drinking water. The situation is intolerable, and everybody knows it. No family should have to live in a community in which the water that comes from their taps puts their children’s health at risk….
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 Governor Gavin Newsom released his revised $213 billion budget Thursday. His administration announced California will ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide used to help grow 50 different types of crops in our state, adding the governor’s budget will allocate $5.7 million towards an alternative pesticide….
In a groundbreaking win for children in California—and across the United States—Governor Newsom’s administration started the process to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos (pronounced “klor-PEER-a-foss”). California is an agricultural powerhouse, growing fruits and vegetables sold around the world. This action protects farming communities and the food supply…
California is banning a widely used pesticide that has been linked to brain damage in children, a major victory for public health advocates who have long fought to outlaw the toxic chemical in the agricultural industry. The state ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide used on almonds, citrus, cotton, grapes, walnuts and other crops, follows years of research finding the chemical causes serious health effects in children, including impaired brain and neurological development. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had moved to ban the chemical under Barack Obama, but the Trump administration reversed that effort, rejecting the scientific conclusions of its own government experts….
Over the past several months, legislators in Washington have engaged in heated conversations about the Green New Deal, the potential plan to help the United States to cool the planet by quickly and equitably curbing greenhouse gas emissions and transitioning to cleaner energy sources. The hotly debated idea has both vocal supporters and detractors. But even for those who champion the mission, there’s still a lot to figure out about how it would be developed and implemented….
The California Public Utilities Commission released a draft decision on California’s Energy Savings Assistance (ESA) program last week, marking the beginning of a stakeholder process to set the future of the program through 2026. The guidance encourages new direction for a program that has long-struggled to produce savings and fully spend its budget. The ESA program, designed to help low-income households save money on their monthly energy bills through no-cost weatherization services while improving their health, comfort, and safety—hasn’t been saving as much energy as it could be, and hasn’t been reducing spending in quite the way envisioned: More than $580 million in funding authorized to improve efficiency in low-income households still hasn’t been spent…
On Tuesday, the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, represented by Earthjustice, filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the agency’s failure to increase protections in numerous communities that have dangerous levels of ozone smog. The communities at issue include the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas; San Diego, Nevada, and Imperial counties, CA; the greater Chicago area; Phoenix, AZ; Baltimore, MD; Sheboygan, WI; the entire state of Connecticut; and the New York City area….
“Zoning’s beginnings had a lot to do with the exclusion of low-income people from certain areas of the city, and in the intervening century, zoning has continued to be used to confine low-income people and people of color to particular areas of a city,” notes Nicole Javorsky in CityLab. Zoning has long facilitated the concentration of environmental hazards like hazardous waste facilities, fossil fuel storage and transportation sites, and other polluting facilities in communities of color and low-income communities. But now some cities are using zoning to reverse this damage…
CCEJN is now working with the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups to build a San Joaquin Valleywide coalition to fight the Trump Administration’s plan for a dramatic expansion of oil and gas lease sales around the San Joaquin Valley and the Central Coast by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM)…
Addressing, and even measuring, EJ is harder than it looks. Lots of people are talking about environmental injustice – from the Flint drinking water crisis to claims that cap-and-trade policies in California increased pollution near poor, minority neighborhoods. These are important issues, so it’s crucial to understand what’s going on and implement the right policies….