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Daily Bruin

What powers UCLA? CCSC’s Dr. Eric Fournier talks to the Daily Bruin’s Prime magazine

UCLA cogeneration plant. “You’re basically operating a large jet engine that has been strapped to the ground,” explained Eric Fournier, research director at the California Center for Sustainable Communities within the UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability. An impressive number and diversity of pipes – a description also courtesy of Fournier – line the inside of the facility, as do support structures for seismic stability.

Featured: Eric Fournier

Los Angeles Times

Dr. Pincetl comments to LA Times: Southern California ‘cannot afford green lawns’ as drought forces unprecedented water cuts

“Lawns do well with about 30 inches of rain a year. Do we get 30 inches of rain a year? I don’t think so,” Pincetl said. Los Angeles receives about half that amount in a typical year. “So if you want to have water to drink, water to do all the stuff you do inside, bathe your children, do your laundry, using water on a lawn just seems foolish,” Pincetl said.

Featured Faculty: Stephanie Pincetl

The New Yorker

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.”

Featured Faculty: Stephanie Pincetl

PBS SoCal

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.”

Featured Faculty: Stephanie Pincetl