California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA

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Los Angeles Will Offer More Energy Incentives to Low-Income Residents

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.”

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SoCal History Monday: A Deep Dive Into The SoCal Waters Of Aqueducts, Aquifers And Underground Basins

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.

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Fall 2023 musings about pursuing a PhD from Professor Stephanie Pincetl

It has been interesting talking to prospective PhD students. Clearly motivated to engage with the issues of environment and increasingly that of environmental justice, it seems most wish to be able to measure impacts in order to better describe their effects on environmental justice communities. Few, if any, ask the why questions, questions about how these situations arise, about the structuring forces that created inequalities and profoundly unequal environmental impacts involving the poisoning of communities.

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Opinion: How wildfires in Algeria and California reveal colonial origins of the ‘Mediterranean climate’ — Stephanie Pincetl in the LA Times

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.

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