Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) made the rebuilding of neighborhoods destroyed by the Los Angeles wildfires significantly easier this weekend by signing an executive order suspending enforcement of the California Environmental Quality Act and the California Coastal Act for counties affected by the fire. By doing so, he also effectively admitted that these laws are a big part of why California has the highest home and energy prices in the nation.
“California leads the nation in environmental stewardship. I’m not going to give that up,” Newsom said, signing the order even while the environment of which he is chief steward was being incinerated and the smoke over Southern California was blotting out the sun. “But one thing I won’t give into is delay,” he added. “Delay is denial for people: lives, traditions, places torn apart, torn asunder.”
To borrow Newsom’s own terminology, the governor himself is in denial. In California’s nondivine comedy, the governor presides over a state that is naturally Paradiso but has turned it into L’Inferno.
Newsom is correct that delay is denial, which is why he should be doing his utmost to repeal, not suspend, the CEQA and the California Coastal Act. For too long, California activists have abused the CEQA and its powerful citizen-suit provisions to block housing, energy, transportation, and manufacturing projects.
The University of California, Berkeley was recently forced to cut its freshman class by one-third because a group called Save Berkeley Neighborhoods used the law to prevent the construction of a new dormitory for students. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, where the activists prevailed over the university. It took a special act of the California legislature, signed into law by Newsom, exempting higher education housing projects from further CEQA review, to get the dorm built.
Most Californians are not as politically connected or deep-pocketed as the University of California. If the CEQA can delay its plans, imagine how many other useful and productive infrastructure projects it has killed over the years.
There is strong evidence that the CEQA is a large part of the reason California is so terrible at fire prevention. When Newsom launched the California Vegetation Treatment Program in 2019, it was supposed to clear 250,000 acres a year. CEQA delays mean that after two years, CalVTP hadn’t cleared a single acre.
To be fair to California, the federal government also has its own permitting problem. The National Environmental Planning Act empowers activists to do in federal court what the CEQA empowers them to do in California state court, delaying infrastructure projects that require any agency action at all. Studies show that thanks to the NEPA, brush thinning in lands controlled by the United States Forest Service takes three years to get approved, and prescribed burns take five years. Even something as simple as building a road or a bridge takes an average of 4 1/2 years and costs $4.2 million.
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What would California look like without the CEQA and the NEPA strangling its economy and preventing wildfire management? It would look a lot like Texas. Despite a decadeslong head start in wind and solar production, as the cost of renewables has dropped and it has become profitable to develop renewable energy projects, Texas has not only leapfrogged California in wind and solar production but now boasts more than twice the renewable energy that California does. It also helps that because Texas’s power grid isn’t connected to the national one, it avoids a lot of NEPA permitting delays, too.
Democrats in California and Washington, D.C., should learn from Newsom’s example. If they want to lower housing costs and encourage renewable energy, they should work with President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to pass real permitting reform that would end burdensome NEPA delays.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
