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As crises collide, can California meet its climate goals?
Environment Nov 06, 2020
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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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