California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA

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Stephanie Pincetl in CalMatters: Water shortages: Why some Californians are running out in 2021 and others aren’t

Stephanie Pincetl, director of UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, who has studied Southern California’s reliance on distant water sources, said the decisions had far-reaching, if unintended, consequences: Los Angeles’ water grab from the Owens Valley exploited distant ecosystems, and urban sprawl was fueled by the Metropolitan Water District’s imports. “It’s really the growth machine of Southern California … by providing all this water to inland places, and allowing the sense that there’s unlimited water and the sense that you can build as far as the eye can see,” Pincetl said. Still, she said, “You can point fingers a lot, but you can also be reassured that you can actually turn the tap on and have water come out of it, most of the time.”

daniel swain in the los angeles times:

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The Case for Gas Bans and Residential Building Electrification: Equity Perspectives on an Emerging Socio-Technical Energy Transition

“Natural gas bans” refer to a diversity of municipal building code changes that disallow certain uses of natural gas in new residential buildings. Gas bans vary in terms of their provisions, but all are intended, along with complementary building electrification programs, to limit the amount of fossil fuels that must be extracted, transported, and burned to meet residential energy needs, thus reducing carbon emissions from buildings, which currently account for approximately 30 percent of the US’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

ucla institute of environment and sustainability in forbes: california’s natural gas bans are drawing fire from black and latino leaders

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Stephanie Pincetl comments in Popular Science: Wildfires could hit your hometown

‘“If you suppress fire and ignite fire, guess what? You get big fires,” says Stephanie Pincetl, founding director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. And suppressing flames doesn’t just amp up the risk for humans living in fire zones—in places that have been very tightly managed like the Sequoia National Forest, the trees aren’t able to bounce back without natural, low-level fires, Pincetl says.

state of fire

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CCSC’s Research Director Eric Daniel Fournier comments in HuffPost: Cleaner ‘Bridge’ Fuels Are Killing Up To 46,000 Americans Per Year, Study Shows

“While natural gas burns more cleanly than coal does, its usage still results in significant co-product emissions and corresponding public health impacts,” said Eric Daniel Fournier, the research director at the University of California, Los Angeles’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, who was not involved in the study. “As gas comes to represent a larger fraction of the county’s primary fuel portfolio, it will naturally come to be responsible for a larger proportion of the health impacts from stationary sources, of which electricity production is a major contributor.”

what the wildfires tell us about the shortcomings of california’s electrical grid

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Stephanie Pincetl on In Our Backyard: Heat is the deadliest aspect of climate change. It’s turning some underserved LA neighborhoods red hot

But Stephanie Pincetl says, “Trees don't grow well in this region. So you must create conditions that are hospitable in the urban environment for those trees to survive.” She’s a founder of the Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, and she advocates denser zoning in some places, surrounded by trees to provide shade for parks, playgrounds and sidewalks. 

in our backyard: heat is the deadliest aspect of climate change. it’s turning some underserved la neighborhoods red hot