California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA

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The Case for Gas Bans and Residential Building Electrification: Equity Perspectives on an Emerging Socio-Technical Energy Transition

“Natural gas bans” refer to a diversity of municipal building code changes that disallow certain uses of natural gas in new residential buildings. Gas bans vary in terms of their provisions, but all are intended, along with complementary building electrification programs, to limit the amount of fossil fuels that must be extracted, transported, and burned to meet residential energy needs, thus reducing carbon emissions from buildings, which currently account for approximately 30 percent of the US’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

ucla institute of environment and sustainability in forbes: california’s natural gas bans are drawing fire from black and latino leaders

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Stephanie Pincetl comments in Popular Science: Wildfires could hit your hometown

‘“If you suppress fire and ignite fire, guess what? You get big fires,” says Stephanie Pincetl, founding director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. And suppressing flames doesn’t just amp up the risk for humans living in fire zones—in places that have been very tightly managed like the Sequoia National Forest, the trees aren’t able to bounce back without natural, low-level fires, Pincetl says.

state of fire

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CCSC’s Research Director Eric Daniel Fournier comments in HuffPost: Cleaner ‘Bridge’ Fuels Are Killing Up To 46,000 Americans Per Year, Study Shows

“While natural gas burns more cleanly than coal does, its usage still results in significant co-product emissions and corresponding public health impacts,” said Eric Daniel Fournier, the research director at the University of California, Los Angeles’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, who was not involved in the study. “As gas comes to represent a larger fraction of the county’s primary fuel portfolio, it will naturally come to be responsible for a larger proportion of the health impacts from stationary sources, of which electricity production is a major contributor.”

what the wildfires tell us about the shortcomings of california’s electrical grid

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Stephanie Pincetl on In Our Backyard: Heat is the deadliest aspect of climate change. It’s turning some underserved LA neighborhoods red hot

But Stephanie Pincetl says, “Trees don't grow well in this region. So you must create conditions that are hospitable in the urban environment for those trees to survive.” She’s a founder of the Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, and she advocates denser zoning in some places, surrounded by trees to provide shade for parks, playgrounds and sidewalks. 

in our backyard: heat is the deadliest aspect of climate change. it’s turning some underserved la neighborhoods red hot

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Stephanie Pincetl in The Guardian: How bad will California’s fire season be? Experts on the threat – and what can be done

Stephanie Pincetl, a professor and director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, agreed and said the state needed to take more steps to adapt. “California has always burned,” she said. “But we live in a hysteria about fire because we put people in the wrong place.” Though environmental conditions exacerbate risks, a key problem lies with people, according to Pincetl. “There is nothing wild about these fires. These are human-created conditions that induce higher risk,” she said. “We need to acknowledge that these are our problems that we created, and if we are going to deal with it we have to start where the problem begins.”

state of fire