This article outlines a timeline of environmental regulation mandated by California’s Air Resources Board into the future. It goes through a long list of all new regulation and policy change since the beginning of the year. It appears most things here are related to carbon emissions, air quality, and water.

I am in favor of most regulation similar to what California has rolled out in the last year. Things like carbon emissions and air quality are factors that we as a society need to keep a tight watch on because they’re very easy to ignore, because the impacts of these problems are just far enough in the future that people don’t seem to care.

California’s Attorney General, Xavier Beccara, issued a press release outlining how important NEPA was to our society and world overall. In this 10 comment letter, he explains how the Trump administration undermining NEPA not only impacts everyone’s health in a negative manner, but also sets dangerous precedent for the future. Beccara fights back against a number of issues here including the Trump Administration’s proposal to weaken clean water protections and carbon emissions regulations.

For this article, I am in agreement with the Attorney general. Not only to I think it is irresponsible and dangerous on many levels to undermine a federal mandate due to environmental and health impacts, but I think the president it sets is potentially more dangerous even than the above. If federal regulations are not respected by the federal administration itself, then it is ludacris to expect for them to work out at all. I also agree with Beccara on that there needs to be a better system of checks and balances before such drastic regulation change is able to take place.

The current federal administration has been consistently rolling back regulations of all sorts, including important environmental regulations. The most recent being a reduced limit on coal consumption, making it easier to pollute the environment. California, as usual, is fighting back by suing the administration for the 41st time. The Trump administration is trying to freeze cars’ require mpg rating at 37 by 2020 instead of it rising to 47 mpg by 2025 as planned.

I am not at all a fan of rolling back environmental regulations such as these. The administration cited two sources saying that it would save 1000 lives per year in making it easier and cheaper to replace old cars. The way I see it, that is not what these people’s extra money would go towards. On a much larger scale, while people are busy replacing their car parts for a few bucks cheaper, we halt our progress on restoring the environment and anyone who thought they would benefit from this regulation rollback is (I hope) likely to see that we’re all absolutely screwed.

California housing prices are constantly reaching new all time highs without and signs of slowing down. By 2050, California is supposed to have its population increase by over 10 million people which will worsen the housing crisis much more even. Because of this more houses need to be built, however, countless projects are being stifled by California’s Environmental Quality Act, making building production much slower.

While I understand the housing crisis and and problems that go along with it, I have a very hard time saying that structures not built up to CEQA code should be allowed to be built. In my opinion, there is no longer any higher priority than environmental preservation, and that trumps all including the housing crisis. Without environmental protections such as CEQA, the housing crisis is nothing to worry about it because we’ll all have to leave Earth or something. It may be true however, that CEQA needs to be modified to allow projects to go through. If it is truly as easy as the article says to file suit on nearly any structure to be built, then modifications seem inevitable and important.

California is naturally prone to having wildfires due to a myriad of environmental factors. Recently, California experienced one of the largest wildfires ever to hit the country, and people are frantically trying to figure out how to prevent something similar in the future. In this article, the reporter quotes President Trump saying that “poor environmental laws” restricting firefighters from having enough water to fight the fire.

This article exemplifies an important misconception about fire prevention which is that it’s all about the amount of water you put onto a fire to mitigate it. This is a wrong and dangerous assumption because it could allow people to be more reckless dealing with fire because they think you could just throw water on it and solve the problem. While I do not agree with Trump on the statement that California did not have enough water to solve the issue, however, it may have been due to poor environmental laws that the fire was able to spread so rapidly and to such a large area. Laws regarding defensible space, logging, and more could be at play here to explain the fire’s magnitude.