NEWSROOM
Headline
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.
Headline
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.
Headline
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.”
Headline
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.
Headline
“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.”
Headline
California regulators say the state is unlikely to experience electricity shortages this summer after securing new power sources and a wet winter that filled the state's reservoirs enough to restart hydroelectric power plants that were dormant during the drought.
