Environment

It’s practically part of the state’s political DNA. For decades, California has stood at the vanguard of aggressive environmental protections and stringent regulations. With the departure of Gov. Jerry Brown, who famously declared climate change “an existential threat” and pioneered policies that the world is watching, the state’s new leaders have big decisions to make.

Wildfires: The largest fire in state history in Mendocino. Entire neighborhoods in Redding turned to ash. Summer campers smoked out of Yosemite Valley. It would all seem unprecedented, were it not for the devastation last year. In 2017, California experienced its largest wildfire on record—the Thomas Fire that raged from Ventura to the outskirts of Santa Barbara—just months after three of its deadliest fires, in Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties. In response, the state’s firefighting agency spent a record amount and far in excess of its suppression budget. These fires are the result of bad luck, climate change, and years of drought. But some experts say the state must change policies that have allowed forests to grow too dense and private development to encroach too far into wild land. In the meantime, lawmakers are engaged in a debate over who ought to pick up the tab for all the destruction.

Water: For roughly a century, California water policy has boiled down to this: How do we get water in the north to farms and cities in the south? Gov. Jerry Brown’s answer: a 30-mile tunnel connecting the Sacramento River to the state’s southbound aqueducts. The project would be financed by water agencies and southern water users, rather than the state, but it remains unpopular in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. While policymakers puzzle over the tunnel, voters will consider an $8.9 billion ballot measure to revamp the state’s water infrastructure.

Cap and trade: If you’re a major polluter in the state of California and you want to emit carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases that warm the planet, you have to pay a price. That price is set by the California cap-and-trade market, which has been running since 2012. Here’s how it works: the state sets a California-wide limit on greenhouse gas emissions over the course of a year (that’s the “cap”). Environmental regulators then divvy up that amount and assign different polluters emission permits—some are auctioned off, others are handed out directly. Polluters can trade these “right to pollute” allowances if they go green, a financial incentive to reduce emissions. And each year, the cap drops lower. For many conservatives—especially those who don’t think California should be doing anything to reduce carbon emissions in the first place—the added cost on industry and consumers isn’t worth it. Some progressives are lukewarm too, arguing that the state should do more to cut back on local pollution and not just emissions in the aggregate.

Rising seas: Best estimates say melting ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic could raise the sea level along the California coastline by as much as 10 feet over the next 70 years. What would that mean for the state? Most projections include floods in the Bay Area, salt intrusion up the Sacramento Delta, and hundreds of feet of lost beachfront property in southern California. What should the state do to prepare—build seawalls, extend wetlands, ban new coastal development? Or pack up and head for the hills?