California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA

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Dr. Pincetl in The New Yorker: Can Sustainable Suburbs Save Southern California?

One downside to the understandable focus on greenhouse-gas mitigation is that more place-specific environmental considerations, including the destruction of traditional landscapes, can get lost. “I think this approach to carbon-dioxide mitigation is a new regime of trying to justify the same kind of development,” Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at U.C.L.A. whose research focusses on land use and the environment, told me. “It’s very clever and extremely insidious because it doesn’t change anything: it doesn’t address structural racism, it doesn’t address affordability, it doesn’t address the climate, it doesn’t address resource impacts, it doesn’t address anything except on paper.”

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Most California incentive programs meant to reduce energy use have the opposite effect

UCLA’s Stephanie Pincetl, another co-author, said part of the problem may be due to the Jevons paradox, a phenomenon that occurs when a technological advance or government policy improves the efficiency of how a resource is used but leads to an increase in consumption as a direct result of that efficiency gain. “People think they can increase consumption without increasing their bills, so they use more,” said Pincetl, who is director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA.

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Dr. Pincetl on KCET: How L.A.’s Energy Transition Could Shake up the Southwest

The fuel isn’t the only thing that will change at the plant. “We know that the coal-fired power plant provides lots of jobs where it is for local residents,” says Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities and professor-in-residence at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “It also pollutes the air. It also uses water, all these issues. A transition to natural gas will continue to generate a fair amount of employment. When you move to renewables, to solar, it doesn’t have that kind of employment benefit. So part of the dilemma for the just transition is the jobs dilemma.”

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