Stephanie Pincetl, a lead author and director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, said the assessment is an exceptional example of national and international leadership, but stressed that there is much work yet to be done. “Clearly, inequities are historic and they’re deeply embedded in the city’s bones,” Pincetl said. And while the report outlines a number of strategies, “the challenge today is to figure out which ones are the most urgent, which ones are the medium term and which ones are the longer term.”
In 2021, after the LA100 analysis laid out pathways for the city of Los Angeles to produce 100% renewable electricity, the City Council and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power committed…
UCLA professor and director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities Stephanie Pincetl discusses the LA 100 Equity Strategies — a report that outlines ways to make LA's transition to 100% renewable energy equitable— for New York Times. "This transition is obviously going to be expensive. Somebody is going to have to pay for all of this.”
Stephanie Pincetl, a co-author of the report and director of the UCLA California Center for Sustainable Communities, welcomed the the initiative, which will kick off with a LADWP project to build, operate and maintain a network of electric vehicle charging stations in underserved communities.
“No other utility in the United States has made a commitment to not only 100% renewable but making sure it’s implemented equitably,” Pincetl said. “This is the power of a municipal utility, a utility owned by and for its customers.”
In the long term, the transition away from fossil fuels should reduce energy costs, many analysts say. But in the coming years, individuals, businesses and governments will have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on buying new equipment and upgrading old gear.
“This transition is obviously going to be expensive,” said Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the U.C.L.A. Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and founding director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities. “Somebody is going to have to pay for all of this.”
Over the past several centuries, Los Angeles has gone from a small farming community to one of the world’s biggest metropolises. In the early days, farming communities were able to reply on surface water from lakes and rivers. But as the population grew, that changed. We needed more water so we began to tap into groundwater resources, which at times were run dry by a lack of regulation. As we began to pave over much the natural land, these underground basins had no way to replenish from rainwater that would otherwise seep into the earth. Today, LA residents rely on a complex and highly managed system of aqueducts, wells, rivers and basins. Joining us today on AirTalk is Greg Pierce, director of UCLA’s Water Resources Group and Stephanie Pincetl, professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
Video replay: They discussed the challenge of the structural changes needed in order to make LA more sustainable, and the challenge of measuring progress accurately.
California may also have a not-so-secret weapon when the heat is on: its people.
"The folks in California who are the rate payers are doing a damn good job, and should get a lot of credit for managing electricity," said Stephanie Pincetl, director of UCLA’s Center for Sustainable Urban Systems.
It’s time now, though, we recognize that Algerian landscapes, like those of California, are colonial ones. These landscapes were transformed to fit an European idea of Mediterranean-ness. The consequences of this misunderstanding of natural ecosystems as preserved by Indigenous peoples, and of the damage inflicted in these regions are now evident in the wildfires in North Africa.
Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, told me that she also sees positives to this wetter reality.
“We thought we could overpower nature and reengineer it with no consequences. We are seeing that that is not true over time, and I think the resurgence of these lakes is another example of that. Maybe going forward, we should be a little more respectful and find ways to accommodate, to at least some degree, the coming back of these water bodies, and what they mean, not only spiritually and for subsistence for Native peoples, but that they offer extraordinarily valuable habitat and offer ways to recharge groundwater — a lot of important reasons why they should be allowed to persist.”
In the coming years, tens of millions of homes will require retrofitting to make them more energy efficient even as we redesign our yards and driveways to deal with too much or too little water. “We can’t just keep slapping on more A/C, we need buildings that keep the cool air in,” said Pincetl. This is going to require an army of carpenters and plumbers. “We’re going to need more people going into the building trades. These are jobs that don’t require a college education, they require skill and craft,” she said.
“The cost of doing community solar development in urban areas has been one of the factors that's driven the development of solar in desert areas,” said Robert Cudd, who researches community solar at UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities. “You're not just building new infrastructure. You have to find a place, a property, a location in space where you can actually put these things. That has been prohibitively expensive for private solar developers.”
