California Greenin'

How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader

David Vogel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780691196176, 9780691179551
• eBook ISBN: 9781400889594
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A political history of environmental policy and regulation in California, from the Gold Rush to the present

Over the course of its 150-year history, California has successfully protected its scenic wilderness areas, restricted coastal oil drilling, regulated automobile emissions, preserved coastal access, improved energy efficiency, and, most recently, addressed global climate change. How has this state, more than any other, enacted so many innovative and stringent environmental regulations over such a long period of time? The first comprehensive look at California's history of environmental leadership, California Greenin' shows why the Golden State has been at the forefront in setting new environmental standards, often leading the rest of the nation.

From the establishment of Yosemite, America's first protected wilderness, and the prohibition of dumping gold-mining debris in the nineteenth century to sweeping climate- change legislation in the twenty-first, David Vogel traces California's remarkable environmental policy trajectory. He explains that this pathbreaking role developed because California had more to lose from environmental deterioration and more to gain from preserving its stunning natural geography. As a result, citizens and civic groups effectively mobilized to protect and restore their state's natural beauty and, importantly, were often backed both by business interests and bystrong regulatory authorities. Business support for environmental regulation in California reveals that strict standards are not only compatible with economic growth but can also contribute to it. Vogel also examines areas where California has fallen short, particularly in water management and the state's dependence on automobile transportation.

As environmental policy debates continue to grow more heated, California Greenin' demonstrates that the Golden State's impressive record of environmental accomplishments holds lessons not just for the country but for the world.

1

Introduction

The Golden State

The name California and its nickname “The Golden State” evoke a distinctive and unusually beautiful natural environment. As Josef Chytry has noted, “No land has been more often associated with the evocative term ‘Paradise’ than California.”¹ The state’s most striking attribute may well be its weather, which is arguably the best in the United States. California’s geographic boundaries encompass North America’s only Mediterranean climate, characterized by winter rain and dry summers. Winters are relatively mild in the coastal areas where most of its population lives, while Southern California has sunshine throughout the year. Most Americans imagine that those who live in California are happier because of the state’s benign climate.² They believe, as the 1965 hit by the Mamas and Papas declared, “I’d be safe and warm / If I was in L. A. / California dreamin’ / On such a winter’s day.”

The state has an unusually long and beautiful coastline—the longest of any state in the continental United States. The northern two-thirds of this 1,100-mile border on the Pacific Ocean contain much spectacular scenery, while the southern portion features miles of sand beaches. William Reilly has called this coast the “greatest” of the state’s abundant natural treasures. “One has only to stand at the continent’s western edge, confronting the Pacific Ocean from the California coast,” he writes, “to understand the fascination so many people have for this memorable meeting place of land and water.”³

MAP 1. The Geography of California

Inland, the state’s forests along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada contain the sequoias, and those in the northern and central coastal regions are home to the redwoods. These “Big Trees,” which are only found in California, are not only the largest and oldest trees in the United States but the largest and oldest living species on the planet. To Kevin Starr, they are “among the natural wonders of the world … cathedrals of nature: cool, silent, the products of a profound historicity.”⁴

These examples do not exhaust the attractiveness of the state’s geography, which also includes San Francisco Bay; the unusual granite formations, rivers, and lakes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which form virtually the whole eastern boundary of the state; and the deserts of Southern California. California also contains both the highest (Mount Whitney) and lowest (Death Valley) elevations in the continental United States, as well as more national parks than any other state. For more than 150 years, Yosemite Valley has been one of the best-known and most widely visited scenic attractions in the United States. Not surprisingly, California’s beauty and unique geography are two of the primary draws that bring residents and tourists to the state.⁵

Besides its beauty, the “Golden State” nickname also has a second association. According to some accounts, California’s name was coined by the Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo, who derived it from a sixteenth-century Spanish chivalric novel that described the legend of Califia, queen of a “mythical and wondrous land of riches.” Upon arriving in what is now California, Cabrillo believed that he had found the physical source of this legend. The name stuck. Ever since, Gerald Nash observes, California “has been a symbol of wealth and abundance.”⁶

Throughout its history, California’s natural resources have been an important economic asset, with the state benefiting from its mountains of gold and silver, rapidly flowing rivers, thick forests, deposits of oil, and fertile agricultural lands. While its economy has since diversified, California remains the nation’s largest agricultural producer and its third-largest oil producer.⁷ It has been the nation’s most populated state since 1962 and has had the largest gross domestic product (GDP) of any state since 1971. Were California a country, its economy would now be the sixth largest in the world, with its GDP surpassed only by China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This book describes and explains the long history of California’s efforts to protect its unusually attractive but also highly fragile environment. It examines the politics and economics underlying several of the state’s most important environmental policy initiatives, beginning with the protection of Yosemite during the Civil War and continuing through the state’s ambitious efforts to address the risks of climate change. It then draws upon these policies to explain why this particular state has consistently led the United States in adopting new environmental regulations and why being “greener” has become a central part of California’s political identity. Finally, this book highlights the role that states have played and continue to play in making environmental policy in the American federal system—an important and timely subject.

A History of Environmental Policy Innovation

Other states in the United States contain many attractive natural features as well as abundant natural resources. But California is distinctive in one important respect. No other state has enacted so many innovative, comprehensive, and stringent environmental regulations over such a long period of time. Compared to all other states as well as the federal government, California has been a national leader in regulatory policymaking on issues ranging from forestry management, scenic land protection, air pollution, and coastal zone management to energy efficiency and global climate change. Its distinctive geography, high degree of citizen mobilization, business support for many environmental measures, and steadily growing administrative capacity have produced a continuous stream of environmental policy innovations in multiple areas over a long period of time. Consider the following examples, each of which are discussed and explained in the pages that follow:

• In 1864, only fourteen years after California became a state, Yosemite Valley and an adjacent grove of sequoias became the first publicly protected wilderness areas in the United States.

• In 1884, a federal court in northern California issued the nation’s first important pro-environmental judicial ruling when it banned the dumping of gold mining debris into the rivers flowing into the Sacramento Valley.

• In 1885, California became one of the first states to regulate logging and promote reforestation, acting in advance of the federal government.

• By 1890, three of the nation’s four national parks were located in California.

• In 1947, California enacted the first state air pollution control statute.

• From the 1940s through the 1960s, Los Angeles led all other cities and states as well as the federal government in its research and enforcement efforts to fight air pollution.⁸

• In 1964, California issued the nation’s (and the world’s) first emissions standards for pollutants from motor vehicles.

• In 1967, California became the only state permitted by the federal government to enact its own automotive emissions regulations.

• In 1969, California established the nation’s first coastal protection agency in order to protect the San Francisco Bay.

• In 1976, California’s Coastal Commission established the nation’s most comprehensive regulations for coastal planning and land use controls.

• In 1977, California adopted the nation’s first energy efficiency standards for appliances.

• In 1979, California adopted the first state energy-efficient building code.

• In 1982, California became the first state to introduce “decoupling,” which incentivized utilities to meet the state’s energy needs through efficiency and conservation measures rather than by building new power plants.

• In 2002, California enacted the world’s first restrictions on tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases. That same year, it adopted the nation’s most stringent and comprehensive renewable energy mandate, which has been progressively strengthened. Under current targets, utilities will be required to generate 33 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020 and 50 percent by 2030.

• In 2006, California passed the most ambitious climate change legislation ever enacted in North America. The Global Warming Solutions Act required California to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 1990 levels by 2020—a goal that the state was on target to meet in 2017. Legislation enacted in 2016 extended and strengthened this mandate, requiring GHG emissions to decline 40 percent below their 1990 levels by 2030.

Challenges and Accomplishments

All governments frequently confront the tension between economic development and population growth on one hand and the need to protect the environment on the other. The mobilization of political and regulatory responses to environmental degradation is always difficult and often occurs too late. California has faced and continues to face economic and environmental challenges in protecting its coasts, rivers, valleys, and forests; managing its limited water resources; protecting its air quality; and achieving its climate change goals. In doing so, the state has accepted certain trade-offs: its environmental regulations are an important reason why Californians pay significantly more for gasoline and have among the nation’s highest residential and commercial energy rates. Land use and other environmental controls have raised the costs of doing business in the state, increased housing costs, and reduced its share of manufacturing investment and employment.

Reasonable people can and do disagree as to whether California has struck the appropriate policy balance between protection of its environment and growth of its economy and whether in particular cases it has protected its environment too strictly or not strictly enough. Not all of the state’s environmental regulations have been either sensible or practicable. Many have been adopted after considerable delay and in some cases only after irreversible harm to the state’s natural environment has occurred. Additional regulations are undoubtedly needed. But given the substantial and continuing challenges that it has faced, California’s long-standing efforts to protect the quality of its natural environment are noteworthy. Overall, it has done a better job than most states—and certainly the United States as a whole—in balancing the ongoing challenges of integrating economic development and environmental protection. With a population of more than 39 million and a GDP of $2.46 trillion, California remains in both dimensions of beauty and wealth a “golden state.”

This book describes what is in many respects a remarkable success story. It demonstrates how a state government has been able to overcome substantial obstacles and enact a wide range of regulations that have made measurable—though admittedly uneven—progress in protecting its environment and improving the quality of life of its residents. Although California has often seemed on the verge of ecological (as well as economic) catastrophe, it has proven remarkably resilient. The state’s ability to remain the most important source of environmental policy innovation in the United States over so many decades and across such a diverse range of policy areas is a significant accomplishment. It is worth understanding why and how this particular state came to play such an important leadership role in this area, as well as the broader policy implications of such leadership.

Federalism and the “California Effect”

One key implication of California’s leadership on environmental action has to do with the environmental policy role of states in the nation. The United States is a federal system in which states play important roles in shaping policy. This is certainly so in the area of environmental policy. In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “It is one of the happiest incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”⁹ No state in the United States has exercised its discretion over environmental regulation as extensively as California. In this area, it has been the nation’s most “courageous” state and its most important and influential policy “laboratory.”

Nor has any state had as much impact on the environmental regulations of the federal government as well as on other states. This pattern of state policy leadership and diffusion has come to be labeled the “California effect.”¹⁰ Consistently at the cutting edge of most environmental policy innovations in the United States, California, in the words of Wendy Leavitt, “casts a long shadow across the U.S.”¹¹

The state’s protection of Yosemite in 1864 served as the inspiration for the creation of the nation’s first official national park, Yellowstone National Park, in 1872, as well as for the establishment of the Adirondack Forest Preserve in 1883. After other states were given the option of adopting automotive emissions standards set either by the California Air Resources Board or by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), thirteen states plus the District of Columbia, which account for one-third of all cars sold in the United States, chose California standards. Nine other states follow California’s zero-emissions vehicle mandates. The size of California’s market, when added to that of those states that have adopted its emissions standards, has given California regulators important leverage over American automobile production. As Barry Rabe has said, “As California goes, at least in air pollution, so goes the nation.”¹²

Several of California’s most innovative vehicle pollution regulations were subsequently adopted by the federal government, including the requirement that cars be equipped with two-way catalytic converters and use unleaded gasoline. Since the mid 1960s, federal standards for health-related pollutants from motor vehicles have often tracked those of California. Most recently, California’s pioneering tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions standards became the basis for rules issued by the Obama administration. According to former EPA administrator William Reilly, “Had California never introduced its groundbreaking clean-cars standards in 2002, we would never be where we are today as a nation—cruising toward 43.5 mpg and growing healthy markets for hybrid vehicles, plug-in hybrids, clean diesels, electric and other innovative technologies.”¹³ The federal government also followed California’s lead by issuing energy efficiency standards for appliances, with other states and many national appliance firms following suit. In the important policy area of global climate change, states have become the most important initiators of regulatory policy in the United States. The state that has played the most active and influential role in addressing the risks of global climate change is California.

Californians have also played national leadership roles in promoting environmental protection. From the later decades of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth, John Muir was the nation’s most prominent advocate of nature protection. Stephen Mather, Horace Albright, and William Kent were instrumental in the 1916 creation of the national park system. More recently, Democratic California congressman Henry Waxman (1975–2015) was an influential supporter of federal environmental legislation, while California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003–2009) was a prominent international advocate of using public policy to address the risks of global climate change.

Following the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, California governor Jerry Brown (2009–present) emerged as a leading defender of environmental “states’ rights” in opposition to the deregulatory initiatives of the Trump administration.¹⁴ To the extent that stringent environmental policies are now more likely to come from states rather than the federal government, states such as California represent the future of environmental policy innovation in the United States.

What happens in California also has a global impact. During the 1980s, the relative stringency of California’s vehicle emissions standards was an imp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Gold Mining: Wealth Creation and Environmental Devastation
• 3. Protecting the Land
• 4. Protecting California’s Coast
• 5. Managing Water Resources
• 6. Protecting Air Quality
• 7. Energy Efficiency and Climate Change
• 8. California’s Regulatory Leadership: Broader Implications
• Notes
• Index