As crises collide, can California meet its climate goals?

GreenBiz photocollage Climate. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Blackouts. Pandemic. Recession. Unemployment. Social unrest. Climate, again. The tangle of troubles California is struggling with has no precedent.

Against a backdrop of rising environmental anxiety, with wildfires lasting longer, spreading further and damaging more acreage and communities than ever before, the pandemic triggered a sharp recession and spike in unemployment.

With COVID-19 and joblessness hitting low-income and minority communities especially hard, police killings sparked months of protests against systemic racism and economic inequity. And just as the need for public safety-net programs couldn’t be higher, California faces a crippling collapse in tax revenue.

For Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board — the state’s key architect of climate and environmental policy — these near-term problems may be worse than we’ve seen, but they are not new, and the fix will come from commitment:

We’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for a long time that we were headed in this direction, although we hoped we wouldn’t get here quite so quickly, or quite so drastically. I have seen that people can think their way out of amazingly difficult traps if they decide to. We have the human capital and intelligence, if […]

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